Reviews
aleks.sierz
One of the quiet joys of contemporary British theatre is the small play. You know the kind of thing: a boy-meets-girl story, told with sharp dialogue and quirky humour. Usually with a cast of two, this type of play is fast-moving, full of small incident, but with larger themes thrown up like shadows on the wall behind the action. Staged in small studio theatres, they are usually short adventures in new writing, with a bittersweet twist. At first, it looks like Andrew Muir’s The Session fits this bill like a woolly sock on a cold foot.After an unnecessarily coy start, which plays with the idea Read more ...
theartsdesk
Fallout 4 ★★★★★Take one part Mad Max, mix with two parts Borderlands 2, add an extra mature story that spans 200 years, sprinkle generously with interesting characters, side quests and more collectible items than you could jiggle a digital cocktail shaker at, pour over a gigantic post apocalyptic landscape and serve. Raise a toast to Fallout 4, the perfect tonic for long winter nights.We’re in the world of free roaming adventure, nuclear aftermath, item crafting, character development, visceral combat, resource management and, erm, pets. The Commonwealth world is vast, the story worthy of big Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Do scandals have a sell-by date? When it comes to sex and politicians, the answer is no. The tabloids, and the news-hungry public, still seem to relish a good story about a powerful man who is caught with his trousers around his ankles. So Harley Granville Barker’s Waste – first put on in 1907 and then rewritten some 20 years later – is ostensibly a highly relevant drama of a personal tragedy in which our characteristic national mix of prurience and puritanism gets a longwinded airing. Certainly, the plot is instantly recognisable.At its centre is a maverick independent politician, Henry Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This "mockumentary" concerning the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was incredibly well-intentioned and unintentionally baffling. It operated on so many levels at once that the viewer could all too easily keep falling through the cracks. Was it about the wonderfully successful play and its productions, the novel that inspired it, or, in the real world, children and adults on the autistic spectrum, and their interaction with society?The conceit is that the programme was itself a documentary made by Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old hero, about the play in which he was Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Sean Baker is an adept at exploring different Los Angeles worlds that we don’t often see portrayed in standard Hollywood fare. His much-acclaimed Starlet, from 2012, took us into the city’s porn industry (in an entirely non-judgmental way), ticking most of the boxes usually associated with “independent” cinema.Tangerine goes further out on a limb, and proves an energy-driven piece that seems to breathe the life of the seedy streets of the less salubrious end of Santa Monica Boulevard around which it’s set. Baker developed his story of two transgender prostitutes by working Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The curse of Tamerlano strikes again. The last time London saw Handel’s darkest and most sober opera was in 2010. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera House lost its unlikely star Placido Domingo before it even opened in London, ran interminably long and lost any emotional impetus somewhere in the course of its three-and-a-half hours. To say, then, that last night’s concert performance from Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro made an even poorer job of the piece is not to dismiss it lightly.The Barbican have fine form where baroque opera is concerned. We’ve become used to concert Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Verdi’s dark tale gets even darker in this new staging from Calixto Bieito. He updates the story to the Spanish Civil War, a setting with plenty of opportunity for his trademark violence but also offering illuminating parallels on the story itself. ENO has assembled a fine cast for the occasion, and the musical direction, from Mark Wigglesworth, is dynamic and dramatically engaged. The result is a staging that gives rare focus to this sprawling score, and to its grim implications of tragedy and fate.Bieito explains that the civil war setting offers a parallel to the central family drama of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Sculpture that moves with the gentlest current of air! Sculpture that makes you want to do a little tap dance of joy! Or maybe the Charleston – swing a leg to those sizzling Jazz Age colours and shapes and rhythms. Look, that’s the queen of the Charleston right there – the “Black Pearl” of the Revue Nègre, Josephine Baker. She’s a freestyle 3D doodle in space, fashioned out of wire: spiral cones for pert breasts, that sinuous waist described by a single serpentine line. What a callipygous shimmy. And who’s that with the Chaplin moustache? Why, it’s the head of Fernand Léger (pictured below Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Penned by Tom Rob Smith, the author of Soviet-era thriller Child 44, London Spy imparts unexpected spin to the espionage genre. Among other things, apart from the title it was by no means clear that it had anything to do with spies for virtually all of the first episode, although the camera did linger suspiciously over the MI6 building on the South Bank at one point. And once, the protagonists spotted a dubious-looking car in their rear-view mirror.However, just before the final credits rolled, we suddenly knew we'd been plunged neck-deep into something exceedingly sinister. Danny (Ben Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There were no shouts of “You’re a genius!” from the Hammersmith crowd last night, as there have been earlier in Newsom’s tour. But there were the shrill gasps of astonishment and adulation you would usually find at a One Direction gig, or during a tense rally at Wimbledon, not from a mature, West London audience attending a recital of harp and song. Live, her voice is fresh, and the accompaniments clearer than on record, which allows the incredible range and ambition of her compositions to stand out.Newsom played mostly from the new album Divers, but there was enough from earlier releases to Read more ...
Marianka Swain
What exactly is the level of Kenneth Branagh’s self-awareness? He’s certainly conscious of inviting comparison with Olivier once again by presenting a year-long season of plays at the refurbished Garrick under the auspices of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company – and by taking on Olivier’s famous title role in The Entertainer. But what should we make of his choice of Rattigan’s backstage company Harlequinade, which blithely skewers an egotistical actor/manager and his rep company’s luvvie excesses?One might read it as Branagh and co-director Rob Ashford’s canny attempt to ward off Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They said there'd never be an audience for a period drama about an aristocratic Edwardian family. Six series later, we're bidding adieu to a national (and indeed global) institution, as Julian Fellowes's motley band of ridiculous, ahistorical and frequently exasperating characters potter off into the fading TV sunset. There's still the Christmas special, but – though we might not admit it – we'll miss them.It was the casting wot dunnit. Some will undoubtedly argue that you can find more plausible characterisations in CBeebies or the new-look Thunderbirds, but despite the non-sequiturs and Read more ...