Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground first played before an audience on 11 December 1965. A year earlier, their two founder members Lou Reed and John Cale were beginning a period of schlepping around New York and New Jersey as supposed members of an equally dubious band called The Primitives. The job was to promote a single titled “The Ostrich,” just issued under that name.There wasn’t really a band called The Primitives. “The Ostrich” was a studio creation, fashioned by Reed and his fellow employees of the budget Pickwick label. But it was decided that the Reed-penned and sung single might have legs, so Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.In one scene, for instance, West Bank teenager Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), burning with anger and grief – his house has been bulldozed and his brother shot dead by a Jewish settler – sits down in front of the evening news: “Bombs continued to pound Gaza today,” announces the unseen newsreader Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini elevated the operatic tearjerker to tragic status in three masterpieces: La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Suor Angelica, rivalling the other two in intensity despite its brevity. Its special atmosphere works best as the central part of a trilogy (Il Trittico) between a dark melodrama and a pacy comedy. The jury’s still out on whether it works on its own, so disappointingly undernourished is Annilese Miskimmon’s production.For a start, Puccini’s delicate evocation of a cloister towards sunset in springtime, with crepuscular birdsong, doesn’t tally with the grim picture of pregnant girls Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Before Joe Rogan gained fame for his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, he has been, variously, a comic, presenter of goofball television shows and an analyst of UTC bouts. Now with his Netflix Special he’s returning to his first occupation, as a stand-up. It was recorded at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio, Texas.Rogan, as his fans will know, is not short of opinions (with his politics on the right of the spectrum in the United States) and can turn a smart phrase. But in Burn the Boats he muses on the quotidian rather than the weighty political subjects often discussed in his Read more ...
Robert Beale
In an autumn season of three revivals, Opera North begin by inviting James Brining, artistic director of Leeds Playhouse, to oversee his own production from five years ago of Mozart and Emanual Schikaneder’s extraordinary musical play. It’s the mainstay of the season, returning in 2025 (with some cast changes) as well as dominating the next two months.The fifth version of The Magic Flute I’ve seen from the company, and one of the best, it’s performed in English, with side-titles in use to ensure that no one misses the progress of the story.Technology has changed, and a creation that Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This autumn, the Philharmonia’s “Nordic Soundscapes” season promises music suffused with the epic vistas, and weather, of high latitudes, along with reflections on the climate crisis as it threatens the traditional bonds between nature and culture. So far, so piously programmatic. But what difference can such a high-minded schema make to the music made by the orchestra’s outdoorsy Finnish maestro, Santtu-Mathias Rouvali, and his colleagues? On last night’s evidence from the Royal Festival Hall, enough to refresh and reframe the works they play. In particular, Sir Stephen Hough’s bracing Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. Liptrot’s screenplay, cowritten with Daisy Lewis and director Nora Fingscheidt, turns her into a young woman called Rona, played by Ronan, but gives her an alternative CV as a research microbiologist by training. Actual Liptrot scraped a living cleaning oil-rig workers’ toilets at home on Orkney, Read more ...
Robert Beale
If audience reaction is anything to go by, Kahchun Wong’s season-opening first concert officially in post as principal conductor of the Hallé was an outstanding success.And the reception was deserved. Still young enough, with a mop of hair cascading over his forehead, to look like a Wunderkind, he has considerable experience behind him, with a career on both sides of the world – in south-east Asia and in Europe and America.That particular characteristic was symbolized in this programme. He has an interest in Britten’s music, and already he and the Hallé have recorded the complete score of The Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The National’s new production of Coriolanus has to be one of the most handsome to appear on the Olivier stage. But it has arrived minus a key item: a hero whose end is tragic.Maybe director Lyndsey Turner wasn’t aiming for that. Her protagonist, pugnaciously played by David Oyelowo, is more a fully functioning part of Shakespeare’s steel-trap of a play than a hero to understand and pity. In this fast-paced piece, Coriolanus rises, then falls, but there are no pit stops, no subplots, along the way. He has a family, but there’s virtually no family time to reveal a gentler side to this super- Read more ...
David Nice
Emotional truth is elusive in Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes” after Pushkin’s verse-novel. Overstress every feeling, as conductor Henrik Nánási did last night, and you leave some of us in the audience feeling manipulated. Play it cool, which is what we mostly get in Ted Huffman’s new production, and the heart is similarly untouched.There shouldn’t be a problem with modern dress – mostly stylish and colour-co-ordinated from costume designer Astrid Klein – even if here it doesn’t give us a sense of place (Hyemi Shin's grey stage leaves room only for a few props). That wouldn’t matter if the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The clue is in the title – not Then in America or Over There in America or even a more apposite, if more misleading, Now in America, but an urgent, pin you to the wall and stick a finger in your face, Here in America.Pre-Trump 2.0, David Edgar’s new play tells us (at least twice, Edgar not shy of driving home a point) that we can learn from past trauma in order to guide current behaviour. So, 300 million+ Americans are to draw on Stanislavski's Method in the polling booths come November?The memories Edgar conjures are from the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee went Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
If Angela Hewitt’s recital last night at the Wigmore Hall was a meal, it would have been two light, fresh – but nourishing – courses, followed by a big suetty pudding, splendidly cooked but sitting slightly heavy on the stomach. The delightful openers were a sequence of Scarlatti sonatas and a Bach partita, the afters a large portion of Brahms that, for me, sits in the “admire rather than love” category.I do, though, love the Scarlatti sonatas, and one of the beauties of them is that you can be familiar with loads – but know there are always still more to discover. He wrote 555 of them, which Read more ...