Reviews
mark.kidel
Tom Morris has a strong feel for drama that explores the personal implications of fanaticism: his production of John Adams’s powerful opera The Death of Klinghoffer for New York's Met and the ENO, used a language of great simplicity that allowed the work’s most disturbing complexities to come through with formidable power. Once again with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, an equally rich text, there is a stripped-down quality to his overall vision, supported by a generally superlative cast and finely tuned pacing. This works wonders with a play that explores the dark ways in which human frailties Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The justification for playing Brahms with a chamber orchestra is well rehearsed. In fact, I have on my desk a Telarc boxed set of the four symphonies “in the style of the original Meiningen performances”, recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the visionary Sir Charles Mackerras in 1997. Then, as now, the idea was to lighten the texture and give greater prominence to the woodwind. By drawing back the dense curtain of string sound, the light could shine through and Brahms’ contrapuntal delicacy be revealed.That was 18 years ago: a long time in the history of an orchestra only just Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe transplanted to present-day Atlanta, Georgia: it sounds like an inspired idea. The hypocritical religious devotee becomes a charlatan preacher fleecing his flock, offering salvation in exchange for hard cash and a distinctly unpriestly grope. But Marcus Gardley’s attempt to put a contemporary spin on a once incendiary play comes with a trying side order of cartoonish caricatures and creaky sex farce.The tone is set by the opening sequence, in which randy Apostle Toof (Lucian Msamati) lays his healing hands upon a half-dressed ditzy blonde congregant (Michelle Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back when this was the plain old Brixton Academy, before Britpop, before New Labour, before the world wide web had weaved its way into our homes, before the war on terror, before the nebulous notion of ‘content’ had yet to ruin everything and devalue everyone, I saw Ride play a gig here. It was ace.Tonight, it seemed as though everyone who had been there that night was back: older, wider and balder perhaps (the ratio of men to women was roughly that of a pre-suffragette parliamentary cabinet), but with the anticipation of a child on Christmas Eve. It’s a heritage gig of course – let’s not Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It’s huge, it’s just huge, said Benedict Cumberbatch, struggling to express the scale of the challenge that playing Hamlet presents. As Lord Bragg reminded us, Cumberbatch is the lead in the middle of the fastest-selling theatrical event since records began, thanks to his charisma and his worldwide fanbase. It is, Bragg told us, the largest role in Shakespeare: 1,500 lines. There was a clip of Orson Welles, declaiming that it is the only play by a genius about a genius.In this 40-minute discussion set out on the stage of the Barbican theatre, the glittering candle-lit Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Israeli director Mor Loushy's documentary Censored Voices grapples with the weight of history. It draws on interviews taken by the future writer Amos Oz with Israeli soldiers immediately after the end of the Six Day War in 1967 which were heavily censored at the time by the Israeli army, with only around 30% of the resulting material subsequently published in a book by Oz’s colleague Avraham Shapira, The Seventh Day.Censored Voices appears at first a deceptively simple work. Both Oz (main picture, with the original tape-recorder with which the two worked) and Shapira appear at the beginning Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Where do they find them? The candidates for each new series of The Apprentice, that is. It's not as if they don't know the score by now - humiliation, first in the boardroom by Lord Sugar and his clunking putdowns, and then on nationwide television. But it makes good telly, so hoorah for series 11, with 18 more numpties vying for Sugar's £250,000 investment in their business plan.After the last series ended, the inestimable Nick Hewer retired from being (alongside the newly ennobled Karren, now Dame Brady) Sugar's “eyes and ears”, and the producers have surpassed themselves in bringing in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Swan Lakes are not created equal. In fact they are not even created the same: ballet is the art form with the evanescent repertoire, in which First Folios – or any folios – are singularly scarce. Even with a classic as beloved as Swan Lake, there is no stable text apart from Ivanov's lakeside choreography for Act II and Tchaikovsky's score (though not even all of that). If a production shines in any other respects as well as these, the credit is due to the creative team and the company – so let's bring the house down for Birmingham Royal Ballet and the utterly splendid Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crime drama is a bit like the wheel. There’s only so much scope for reinvention. People try to come up with novelties all the time, then you turn on the telly and realise everyone else has had the same idea. Rumpled cops in macs, ex-cops haunted by the past, cops with overbearing bosses descended from Jane Tennison – they’re all out there, all the time. Even the casting department is running on empty. It’s been precisely five days since Unforgotten unveiled a chirpy detective played by Nicola Walker. Now here comes River, featuring a chirpy detective played by Nicola Walker.River is written Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past quarter century the reputation of toff playwright Terence Rattigan has been restored, mainly by strong stagings of his classic dramas, such as Deep Blue Sea. But his first smash hit, French Without Tears, has been the unicorn of his output – often talked about, often mentioned, often remembered, but never actually seen. Now Paul Miller, the ever-enterprising artistic director of the Orange Tree, has brought this unicorn into public view, allowing audiences to enjoy a joyful sighting of a rare beast.Originally put on in 1936 in the West End, where it ran for more than 1,000 Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Yves Klein staged a photo of himself, in November 1960, swallow-diving into the air from a first floor window, arms outstretched like a bird. Leap into the Void was faked – the friends waiting with a tarpaulin on the pavement below were montaged out of the final picture – but such was the appetite for heroism that the image soon became emblematic of the superhero risking all for his art. Why this fascination with artists who take risks in and for their art? In his book Man’s Rage for Chaos Morse Peckham argues that art provides an arena in which to experience risk at arm's length. The Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Rents are going up, local businesses priced out, and the rich folk and hipsters are invading. That’s in Washington Heights, New York’s largely Dominican-American quarter, but it could as easily describe King’s Cross, one of multiple London areas undergoing gentrification. This Tony Award-winning musical from pioneering composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (currently ruling Broadway with Hamilton), which features an irresistible hip-hop, rap, pop and Latin fusion score, is propulsive entertainment with a resonant social conscience.Our guide to the Heights is Usnavi (Sam Mackay), whose bodega – Read more ...