Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
When was the last time you saw a classical soloist wearing a suit and tie on stage? It was the only formal thing about Yo-Yo Ma’s solo Prom last night – a delicious visual anachronism, at odds with the American’s laid-back performance style that is to cello playing what Western horse riding is to the stiffly upright English version. Relaxed and comfortable as none of the other solo Bach performers this season have yet seemed, Ma took his sell-out crowd by the hand and led them through nearly three hours of music – a one-man band, by turns dancing, singing and playing percussion, all with just Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: The London American Label Year by Year – 1966The arguments for 1966 as the year popular music irrevocably changed are sound. Rock began emerging from pop as its serious offspring. Earnest expression, as opposed to fluffiness or accessibility, would become the objective for many. With the 1967 release of Sgt Pepper’s, the album was set in stone as a different medium to the single. The foundations were laid when The Beatles began recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” in November 1966.A chaotic, kaleidoscopic 1966 single like The Yarbirds’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
After the broad, lyrical Shostakovich Tenth Symphony Andris Nelsons presented at the Proms last week, Vladimir Jurowski’s austere and unrelenting Eighth came as a shock. The two performances were equally fine, but at opposite ends of the Shostakovich spectrum. And the effect was intensified last night by a particularly terse programme, delivered with unrelenting intensity. No easy listening here, but plenty of raw emotion, and everything delivered with utter conviction and to the highest musical standards.Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture set the tone. Here, and throughout the evening, the string Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“My brother died.” That’s the reality New York-based banker Willem struggles to inhabit when he returns to his estranged family in Amsterdam. There is no sense in Pauli’s loss – a sudden heart attack at 20, cradled by a stranger in the street – nor finality. Willem’s response is to continue the conversation through an elegiac series of letters, countering the abandonment and searching for meaning in both a life interrupted and his own isolated existence.Protean Simon Stephens, in his first original play for the Young Vic, delivers a penetrating 75-minute monologue. Its stark potency is Read more ...
Simon Munk
A unicorn, on fire; the wet slap of flesh on hospital linoleum; homoerotic manhugs from wounded soldiers. The latest and greatest in the legendary Metal Gear Solid series starts odd. But brilliantly odd.Waking in a hospital bed, covered in bandages is Big Boss. Or Ahab, as what appears to be a face-covered Kiefer Sutherland in a hospital gown insists on calling you. Before you know it Kiefer's helping you make a madcap escape from some distinctly superhuman entities that feel torn straight from the pages of a Manga comic, in a hospital covered in blood, on fire.Then Kiefer's gone and a bloke Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What was a stunningly good Alice Coote recital doing trapped inside an A-level Theatre Studies project? I’m not sure that Being Both – the semi-staged sequence of Handel arias originally commissioned by the Brighton Festival – ever came close to answering, but by about ten minutes in the singing was just so damn good that I stopped worrying and learned, if not precisely to love, then to tolerate the foolishness going on around the music.In case the title wasn’t clue enough, Being Both is the kind of earnest, self-referential exploration of gendered experience (so delicately inverted and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Any romcom that begins with a woman saying the line “I was born with a penis” is OK by me. And that's how Boy Meets Girl, a superb new comedy created by Elliott Kerrigan, begins a six-part series.Kerrigan and co-writer Simon Carlyle have neatly made broad comedy without causing offence, and thankfully the tone, in what is the first UK television show starring a transgender actress, is never preachy or worthy. Rather the trans storyline – which has been in shows such as Orange Is the New Black on Netflix and Channel 4's Cucumber/Banana – is part of a much broader story about two people, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
William Dalrymple has discovered a fascinating true romance from history in this story of the relationship of Indian-born British diplomat James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Muslim princess Khair-un-Nissa in Hyderabad at the turn of the 19th century. His remarkable programme not only captivated in itself but threw a fascinating light on layers of cultural differences, adaptations and understanding. Individual tolerance and even delight in varying views was threatened then, as now, by societal pressures and fear of the unfamiliar.Dalrymple uncovered the profound involvement of Europeans with Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Turning autobiography into comedy gold is an alchemy that has often been tried. Among them Caitlin Moran’s Raised by Wolves, Kathy Burke’s superb Walking and Talking, and the mooted but, as yet uncommissioned story of Jeremy Clarkson’s childhood, provisionally titled For Whom the Bellend Trolls.When dealing with real-life reminisces, the balance between believability and comedy is a very difficult thing to get right. Slight situations can provide big laughs in a living, breathing reality, and the temptation is to supersize them for telly to make sure that everyone is in on the joke. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Any consideration of Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain will inevitably be through the prism of how it was made, and the director’s current position in his native country. It’s his second work, after This Is Not a Film from 2011, to be made despite the 2010 prohibition from the Iranian authorities that (along with a range of other curtailments of his freedom) the director should not engage in cinema for a period of 20 years.It’s rather more ambitious – though not in terms of its setting, the interiors of a single house on the shore of the Caspian – than the relatively simple Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We all know what the word “addict” means, but what does it feel like to be one? Thirtysomething Emma – a minor actress played with immense conviction and quirky charm by Denise Gough – knows exactly. At one point in Duncan Macmillan’s engrossing new play, she says, “People who aren’t addicted to anything are really missing out, you know?” For the addict lives a life of glory: they feel complete, and loved and satisfied. Yes, that’s it. They love their addiction – and their addiction loves them back. Well, Emma should know: she has bottles stashed all around her flat, and a Read more ...