Reviews
Jasper Rees
The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and make them live as a skivs and drudges in some specifically benighted era before the invention of such new-fangled concepts as electricity or the flush mechanism or gender equality. But that was then. Reality in the jungle has turned us all into schadenfreude addicts, so now we get the same idea but with famous faces. Besmirched famous faces.24 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What Nashville did for country music, Empire may very well be about to do for the lurid world of hip hop. If not more so. Created by Lee Daniels (director of Precious) and written by Danny Hunger Games Strong, it's about ailing music mogul Lucious Lyon and how he must decide which of his three sons to hand over his Empire Entertainment conglomerate to.It's a potentially powerful setup, even if it is basically King Lear with beats and sons instead of daughters. In the lead role of Lucious, a worried-looking Terrence Howard effectively conveys an aura of disillusion and world-weariness, as he Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
From the great, gasp-inducing rush of colour when the curtain opens on American Buffalo to the embrace that closes it, this revival of David Mamet’s career-making rummage through the junkyard of the American Dream has you in a vice-like grip. It’s been eagerly anticipated, and doesn’t disappoint.Most great plays have an air of having just been written. American Buffalo is now 40 years old, yet speaks loudly and painfully about the state we’re in today. While a number of our bankers and businessmen are crooks, Mamet’s crooks regard themselves as businessmen. And business, declares junk store Read more ...
David Nice
Judge Judy meets The Only Way Is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on TV. Which in a make-believe sense it does: we’re the audience in the studio where Court on Camera is about to air. A warm-up chappie who turns out to be the Usher (Wagnerian bass-baritone in training Martin Lamb) – on other Sundays it will be a lady – gauges our capacity to applaud and boo, and we’re off on a case of breach of promise of marriage as you never saw it before.The pleasure is doubled because in Charles Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There’s a lot to be said for concert performances of Wagner. Not only are you spared the post-prandial lucubrations of aspirant directors – the moonmen and the fighter pilots, the jackboots and the biogas installations. But it’s possible to concentrate on Wagner’s greatest theatrical gift: not his stagecraft or stage imagery, but his management of time and psychological growth through purely musical means. And the final act of Die Walküre, which the Wales Millennium Centre mounted in a concert performance by Welsh National Opera on Sunday, is the best possible example, with its evolving Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stonehearst Asylum is bookended by classic Hammer horror scenes. Within minutes of Dr Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) being dropped off at the titular, fog-bound mansion by a swiftly exiting coach and horses, he meets a full-blooded Gothic gang: stiff-backed asylum overlord Dr Lamb (Ben Kingsley), his leering henchman Mickey Finn (David Thewlis), and beautiful, sexually terrified Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale). Elsewhere on the premises lurk Dr Salt (Michael Caine) and Mrs Pike (Sinead Cusack). This enviable cast relish Joe Gangemi’s archly witty script, and its finally moving debate on who is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971By 1971, when he was playing the Bitter End in New York’s Greenwich Village, Dion DiMucci had already experienced the equivalent of two separate stints as a pop star. In 1961, he began a run of hits with the swaggering “Runaround Sue”. From then and into 1963 he racked up other classics such as “The Wanderer”, “Ruby Baby”, Donna the Prima Donna” and “Drip Drop”. The arrival of The Beatles in the US charts in early 1964 put paid to his run of hits. Times had changed. But in late 1968 he was back in the Top Ten with a heartfelt version of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
They begin with “My Door is Never” from 2007 album Reformation Post TLC, and close a little over an hour later with “Sparta FC”, from early in the century, and from a long-gone Fall line-up. In between, a flurry of blurred, brutal songs from the new and most recent albums set about pummelling a packed house at the Brixton Electric. There were toxic, thrilling elements to The Fall’s set – in particular the tight fist of vitriolic rock 'n' roll that is “Fibre Book Troll” (‘I wanna fucking Facebook troll’) and the extended highlight of both the new album and the set that is “Auto Chip 2014-2016 Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You’re already in the land of the unpredictable with Pina Bausch. Creating unease was her métier. But when she pulls a gag intended to convince you that something has gone badly wrong on stage, and then it really does, the discombobulation is profound.When stage hands brought on a portable ballet barre, some 110 minutes into Thursday night’s opening performance of Ahnen (German for “ancestors”, but also “foreboding”), a few hearts among the Sadler’s Wells audience may have leapt: ah, at last, they thought, we’re going to get something more like dance. But the barre was a trapeze for Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Described by the Tate as the Laurel and Hardy of the art world, John Wood and Paul Harrison are best known for appearing in superbly timed, comic videos using their own bodies to explore spatial relations. Projected over the concrete stairwell of the Carroll/Fletcher gallery 100 Falls (pictured below right) is excruciating to watch. A black-clad figure in a white room disappears from view up a wooden ladder. Seconds later he plummets down to crash land in a crumpled heap on the floor. Sometimes he smashes into the wall, sometimes his legs are bent awkwardly beneath him. Surely he must be Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If the thought of the annual trek to Hay-on-Wye for the literary festival in May fills you with as much gloom as it does me (and I don’t have to go as far as most of our readers), you might do worse than sample the town’s chamber music festival this weekend as a healthy change or at least a soothing antidote.This is a new event crystallised out of an existing occasional series of concerts featuring the Fitzwilliam Quartet. And though it’s unlikely to spawn chamber music on every street corner of this small border town, in the way that bookshops once exploded out of Richard Booth’s original Read more ...
Barney Harsent
This latest Friday night vehicle for archive footage and pop performances was the tour bus, as BBC4 invited us to hop into the back of the van for a quick spin through the "golden age" of touring rock bands (which the producers clearly felt ended with the Eighties).The designated driver was high priest of prog pomposity Rick Wakeman – but long gone are the flowing locks and gowns that were once his trademark, replaced by a look that falls somewhere between youngish Bill Maynard and overstuffed straw pillow. Given the subject matter – the often harsh reality of life for a touring band – this Read more ...