Reviews
Hugh Barnes
The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations.In his 2015 docufiction Taxi Tehran, the outlawed director Jafar Panahi pretended to be a cab driver, taking inspiration from the late great Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 (2002), in which Mania Akbari, who may have actually been the film’s true begetter, seems to be a taxi driver even if she’s not.Both movies focussed on the atomised lives of Iranians under Read more ...
David Nice
A happy, lucid and bright pianist, a forbidding Everest among piano sonatas: would Boris Giltburg follow a bewitching, ceaselessly engaging first half by rising to the challenge of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” - a title he suggests, in his series of first-rate online essays about the sonatas, might be replaced more appropriately with “Titanic”?Absolutely; the focus and stamina were such that a sinking would have been impossible. Any difficulties rest with us, and I confess I have a problem with the biggest movements. Like much in late Beethoven, the material sometimes seems to elude easy grasp Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.Barney Norris’s 2024 play comes to London and finds the right venue in the Arcola’s intimate studio space freighting just the right quantum of claustrophobia into a production that often suggests our eavesdropping on three real people who have hired the room to rehearse. You wonder if it would all just go on whether we were there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Dagenham’s Sean Buckley & The Breadcrumbs are less than a footnote in the story of beat boom-era Britain, appearances on archive releases have prevented their name from vanishing.In 1986 “Everybody Knows,” the B-side of their lone single, resurfaced for the first time on the pivotal Searching In The Wilderness compilation album, alongside top-drawer Dutch Sixties bands Golden Earrings, The Outsiders and Q-65, as well as crunching Swedes Namelosers. Originally issued in 1965, “Everybody Knows” stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of these hard-edged Euro nuggets.Built around a Read more ...
Justine Elias
The setting is the lively 1930s London theatre world, but any sense that The Critic will be a lighthearted thriller should soon be dispelled by a soundtrack featuring “Midnight and the Stars and You,” the song that Stanley Kubrick used to ominous effect in The Shining.Here, the lover on his way to a midnight rendezvous is poison-pen drama critic Jimmy Erskine, who worships the theatre but saves his secret passion for nighttime prowls for rough trade. As played by Ian McKellen, Erskine is a magnificent bastard, gifted, witty, and treading a fine line with his conservative employer. His Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers includes many of his best known pictures and, amazingly, it is the first exhibition the National Gallery has devoted to this much loved artist. Focusing mainly on paintings and drawings made in the two years he lived in Provence (1888-1890), it charts the emotional highs and lows of his stay in the Yellow House in Arles, and the times he spent in hospital after numerous breakdowns.From the incredibly touching and lucid Self-Portrait of 1889 (pictured right), you wouldn’t know he’d just left the psychiatric hospital in St Rémy after recovering from two major Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Platonic love should be simple – basically you’re best mates. And without the complications of sex, what could go wrong? Waleed Akhtar, whose big hit The P Word was also performed here at the Bush, takes this idea and complicates it – by making it about a gay boy and a straight girl.The playwright then adds further complications: family, ethnicity, religion, life chances and career choices. The result, which stars It’s a Sin’s Nathaniel Curtis as well as Mariam Haque, is a fascinating account of mixed emotions and a sad story about the gradual decay of youthful idealism. As such, it Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.Cho followed three pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs with the second book, “Italie”, of Liszt’s rhapsodic musical scrapbook of his travels of the 1840s, Années de Pèlerinage. The first revelation Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hauntings, memories, echoes: Antonio Pappano has started his official tenure as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra by looking back in time. Wednesday’s season opener gave us a MacMillan premiere “haunted by earlier musical spirits and memories”. Last night’s follow-up picked up the thread with the Elgar Violin Concerto – a work alive with stirrings and rustlings just out of sight, recollections that drift in and out of view, a human soul “enshrined” in its strange, otherworldly musings. Before you can launch a new era, after all, you need to put the ghosts of the musical past to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral turpitude. The tale is an Americanised version of the good old country house mystery, and behind the superficial veneer of fabulous homes and expensive boats lurks a hinterland of avarice and cruel intentions.At the core of the action is best-selling novelist and matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury, played by an imperious Nicole Kidman with maximum Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make a great biopic.Unfortunately, it’s precisely because those photographs have become so familiar that Lee was destined to be a frustrating film. We know what Miller looked like from the pictures taken of her by the likes of Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and David Scherman. It’s hard not to have those images in mind when watching the also familiar Kate Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest Greatest Hit to land at the Lyric is Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 award-winning play about a performance of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by British convicts in a New South Wales penal colony. It’s a piece about a true incident in the late 18th century that pulsates with contemporary resonances, a promising choice by the Lyric’s director, Rachel O’Riordan, who has been responsible for so many outstanding productions there. But for once her steady directing hand wobbles. What was impressive about the play originally, its bold mix of satire, social commentary, pathos and Read more ...