Reviews
Veronica Lee
Kieran Hodgson, Voodoo Rooms ★★★★When Kieran Hodgson was growing up in West Yorkshire in the early years of the century, he was obsessed with two things – cycling and Lance Armstrong, then the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.In 2003, where the engaging and very funny Lance begins, 15-year-old Kieran is preparing for a cycling challenge organised by the scout troop he and his best mates Simon and Matthew belong to, run by Rob.As he tells the tale, Hodgson, wearing a yellow cycling jersey, hops on and off a static bike, and moves seamlessly among a large cast of vividly realised Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back where it all began – not at the Fringe but the Edinburgh International Festival, with their acclaimed Komische Oper production of The Magic Flute.If you’ve seen any of 1927’s recent theatre work – The Animals and Children Took to the Streets or Golem – you’ll be familiar with an aesthetic that blends live action and animation to create dystopian worlds Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hugi Guðmundsson: Calm of the Deep The Hamrahlíd Choir/Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, Nordic Affect/Guðni Franzson (Smekkleysa)Calm of the Deep introduces us to contemporary Icelandic composer Hugi Guðmundsson. Who sees his music as “a dialogue between old and new, past and present”. There are many magical things on this disc. Like To This My Thoughts Turn All My Days, based on an anonymous melody first notated in 1742. Guðmundsson's brilliant recasting treats the tune with utter respect. The harmonies are often disarmingly simple, though the best moments have the melody confidently floating above Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I can hardly be cross with something that happened before we existed.” Andrew Haigh is a two-hand specialist intrigued by the space between lovers. His much praised debut Weekend told of two young homosexuals getting to know each other on a Saturday and a Sunday. In 45 Years, based on a story by David Constantine, he has shuffled the deck. The question of retrospective jealousy is the spark for a quietly devastating portrait of two old heterosexuals getting to unknow each other between a Monday and a Friday.Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play Kate and Geoff Mercer, in whose apparently Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense. Since McGregor's frequent collaborator, contemporary composer Max Richter, was also being given his EIF debut this year, the chance to stage the UK première of one of their joint offerings, Kairos (2014) set to Richter's "Recomposed Vivaldi - Four Seasons", was obviously irresistible.That Kairos had Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Two dramas of sex, sleaze and death in the postwar London underworld: to outsiders, this double bill of chamber operas by Charlotte Bray and Thomas Hyde might look like an unlikely opening night for the annual Presteigne Festival. That would be to overlook the artistic direction of George Vass, whose commitment to new music has made this short, spirited festival just a couple of valleys over from Hay-on-Wye a chamber-sized successor-in-spirit to Cheltenham. This year’s programme features a residency by Matthew Taylor, premieres by David Matthews and Peteris Vasks and music by Piers Hellawell Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joseph Morpurgo, Pleasance Courtyard ***** In Soothing Sounds For Baby, Joseph Morpurgo uses found objects - vinyl LPs with content so esoteric you would swear he had invented them - and the framework of Radio 4's Desert Island Discs to fashion an ingenious and wonderful show. Morpurgo is supposedly Kirsty Young's guest on the radio show - although in his painstaking cut and paste clips of the programme, Young's questioning becomes increasingly fractious so we know something is up. Each of his song choices leads into a tableau using a soundscape, visual gags, music, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Well, here’s an oddity. You Won’t Succeed... is too fragmented for musical theatre, too bombastic for cabaret, and about as profound as a first-draft Wikipedia page. Channelling the self-referential levity of the Monty Python show from which it takes its name would certainly help, but it’s mainly played straight. And what insight into the indelible Jewish contribution to musical theatre does two and a half hours’ investment get you? Those guys…they wrote some great songs. Oy vey.The weakest aspect is the low-rent video clips – with basic animation and soporific voiceover – guiding this Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The political wheel has turned full-circle. When Our Country’s Good was premiered in 1988, it was a barely-veiled protest against Thatcher’s slash-and-burn approach to the arts in general and arts funding in particular. It couldn’t have returned at a more apt moment. Once again the arts are being forced to make a commercial case for their existence, to claw and squabble over scraps of government money, while the newspapers are filled with photos from Syria, of the apparent destruction of Palmyra. If the arts really are “an expression of civilisation” then we’ve rarely been in more trouble.A Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The only reasonable explanation for the all too belated arrival at the Proms of the SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Orchestra is that the festival’s house band, the BBC Symphony, is the one other ensemble reasonably entitled to claim the title of best orchestra for new music in the world. They came with a programme of Boulez, Ligeti and Bartók, 20th century classics all, and well-tailored to their talents. Too little, too late, as it turned out, but what an evening they gave us.…explosante-fixe… is one of those works, following Sachs’s wise words about Walther’s Prize Song, in which the form is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
En Équilibre addresses the impact of disabling and irreparable injury, thwarted ambitions, the questionable practices of insurers, and the connection between two dissimilar, yet both frustrated, characters. Despite its different strands, the film adeptly draws them together into a coherent and unexpectedly enthralling whole.The director of En Équilibre (In Harmony) is Denis Dercourt. His benchmark film The Page Turner (2006) echoes through En Équilibre. Both feature a female would-be concert pianist who has ended up in a job which frustrates (at a solicitors rather than, in En Équilibre, an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nish Kumar, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★There's been so little out-and-out political comedy at this year's Fringe that it's a real joy to find a stand-up so engaged with politics as Nish Kumar.Kumar lays out his stall early on. The issue of diversity in the arts is, he says, "a subject very close to my face". He goes on to discuss why men still dominate everything, and the reasons why Jeremy Corbyn is popular. Full marks for being bang up to date.Although he also talks engagingly about seemingly trite subjects including the board game Monopoly and the American Pie and James Bond franchises, Read more ...