Reviews
mark.kidel
Complicite have, for several decades, been Britain’s most consistently adventurous theatre company. The term "physical theatre" sells them short, for the intelligence of their shows, from The Street of Crocodiles to The Elephant Vanishes, The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol to Mnemonic goes far beyond a spectacular use of the human body and the endlessly inventive use of props and space.The Encounter, a wholly extraordinary one-man show by the company’s co-founder Simon McBurney, is all of these things, but a good deal more. This is a show that re-invents theatre with a brilliance and sense Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The “femmepersonators” of Harvey Fierstein’s 1962-set drama would be flabbergasted by today’s level of trans visibility, from Grayson Perry and Caitlyn Jenner to Transparent and Eddie Redmayne’s new film The Danish Girl. Yet it’s the still pertinent issue of private experience versus public profile that sparks a schism in this idyllic community of closeted cross-dressers, along with thorny questions of how gender fluidity might correlate with a more flexible approach to identity and sexuality.Open-minded Rita (Tamsin Carroll, pictured below with Matthew Rixon) runs an escapist Catskills Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Faces: You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything… 1970–1975Faces were always about more than just the music. From the moment they were formed by ex-members of The Jeff Beck Group and Small Faces in June 1969, tension was integral. Their front man and singer Rod Stewart ran a parallel solo career throughout the band’s life and the public image as boozy, cheeky lads was useful for papering over any cracks. The story is worth telling, but it is not one told by this collection of their studio albums and singles – more on that in a few paragraphs.Sometimes, the tension surfaced. Talking to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Welcome back Martin McDonagh. It’s been more than 10 years since you’ve had a play on in London, and I was beginning to think that we had lost you to Broadway, and Hollywood, for ever. As you know, I loved it when your Leenane Trilogy burst onto our stages in the late 1990s, and although I wasn’t that keen on some of the follow-ups, your The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) and The Pillowman (2003) are among my favourite plays. I wasn’t madly impressed by your films, no, not even the highly hyped In Bruges, but your return to the stage has raised my expectations. Especially with Reece Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster. Made by Russian duo Komar and Melamid in response to the state-sanctioned destruction of their 1974 self-portraits as Stalin and Lenin, this unaccountably shocking image is one of a series of paintings Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a pleasing serendipity that while Martin McDonagh’s clamorously anticipated Hangmen opened at the Royal Court last night, just a little further west T.S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party should also be having its opening night. Back in 1956 another Royal Court premiere – John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger – called time on Eliot and his dramatic ilk, ushering him into a neglect from which he has never really recovered. But now, sitting once again alongside a younger, more daring breed of theatre, Eliot’s drama proves that – given a chance – it can hold its own.Prescribed by its author as a comedy Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: Symphony No. 3 'Kaddish' Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop (Naxos)Technically this disc is superb. Claire Bloom's narration is beautifully assimilated into the sound picture. The orchestral playing is razor-sharp, the chorus outstanding. Naxos's recording has the requisite depth and range. The issue is the piece itself; Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony is an unwieldy mess of a work. Occasionally brilliant, but frequently baffling and downright irritating. Superb recent recordings of West Side Story and On The Town serve to confirm where Bernstein's strengths lay. Bloom does her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kevin Bridges, although only 28, has been performing comedy for 10 years. Strange to relate then, that he still gets rattled by hecklers (even friendly ones telling him he's awesome – “Relax, it's not a One Direction concert”) and that this otherwise excellent gig descended into acrimony with Bridges leaving the stage at the end clearly irritated.It really wasn't that bad – and Bridges' annoyance was far greater than that of the audience, so let's begin with the many positives. In A Whole Different Story the Glaswegian relates what a year it has been – for him personally and in the broader Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this co-production finally arrives at the National Theatre, it has slimmed still further – shedding one hour and one night to become a (comparatively) brisk Hamlet-length evening of physically and sensorily-charged theatre.Time was when books stayed on the bedside table, stories to come home to after a night in the theatre. Now, post-David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC, the NT’s own His Dark Materials, and Read more ...
David Nice
Whose Don Juan – progenitor Tirso de Molina’s, Molière’s or Pushkin’s? None of the above. Unless you have some knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won’t have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka in 1871 to a proudly nationalist (if half-Byelorusian) father and a mother whose pioneering work in women’s rights she continued.Her Don Juan of 1912, written a year before her untimely death from tuberculosis, was the seminal play which director Konstantin Khoklov staged in 1938 to bring true Ukrainian drama to the leading Kiev theatre. Its name changed as a result, from Kiev Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The New York Times recently wrote that, “For the music business over all, vinyl is still a niche product, if an increasingly substantial one.” How substantial is slowly becoming clear with dramatic rises in vinyl consumption over the last year. The biggest pressing plant in Europe, in the Czech village of Lodenice, last year produced 14.5 million records, while across the US during the same period 13 million were sold, with around 50% of the buyers under 35. It is, of course, a drop in the ocean compared to vinyl’s glory days but, with predictions of a rise in consumption of up to 50% over Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Courtney Pine’s Caribbean-flavoured album House of Legends was released three years ago, and it says a lot that he’s still touring it. This riotously melodic collection of ska, soca and calypso, embellished with some scorching solo work, has certainly proved popular, as the latest sell-out run at Ronnie’s testifies. Pine cheerfully apologised for a lack of CD’s to sell at the gig: they’ve all been sold.However, a critic more prone to stroke his chin than shake his (or her) booty (chin-stroking being generally a male pastime) would probably suggest that this reflects a certain lack of urgency Read more ...