Reviews
graham.rickson
Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (Coro)The first few minutes of Monteverdi's Vespers are a knockout. Rarely has one sustained chord been so fruitfully deployed, and the big plagal cadence at the end is wonderful. Heard live, in a big, reverberant space, the Deus in adiutorium is invariably thrilling, no matter how much detail gets lost. David Nice reviewed a recent live performance by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen in Winchester Cathedral, but their second recording was taped in the more congenial surroundings of St Augustine's, Kilburn, and acoustically it Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At last, it’s here – the female-friendly BDSM movie that no grownups should restrain themselves from seeing. The one with the designer clothes and kinky accoutrements. The one with the “special” room for thrilling punishments. The one unafflicted by Christian Grey and his assorted neuroses.Aside from the brown and orange fritillary of its title and various unnamed butterflies and moths, there are no males at all in The Duke of Burgundy, writer-director Peter Strickland’s drily witty homage to the stylistically ambitious 1970s Euro-erotica of directors like Jesús Franco and Jean Rollin. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's the story they tried to ban! Reinventing the Royals was supposed to have been broadcast in January, but was yanked from the schedules when Prince Charles's staff at Clarence House withheld archive footage, apparently because of a behind-the-scenes battle between royal advisers.Anyway here it is now, and you can understand why Charles might have taken exception to how he's portrayed. For a start it's presented by Steve Hewlett, who was the editor of Panorama when it broadcast Princess Diana's confession of adultery in 1995. The smarmy-looking Hewlett (pictured below) now plies his trade Read more ...
David Nice
For those who never saw Samuel Beckett’s favoured performer Billie Whitelaw on stage as indomitable, buried-alive Winnie, peculiarly happy days are here again with another once-in-a-generation actress facing what Dame Peggie Ashcroft called “a ‘summit’ part”, the female equivalent of Hamlet. Juliet Stevenson makes you think not so much “what a great performance” as “what a towering masterpiece of a play” – and how often do star interpretations even of the big Shakespeare roles prompt that kind of reaction?This is, in short, the works: 90 plus minutes of perfectly modulated near-monologue in Read more ...
Simon Munk
The gloom of Victorian London might be shared with The Order: 1886, also reviewed this week, but the games couldn't be further apart. In Sunless Sea, you play a nautical captain, navigating the "Unterzee" of the waters surrounding a fallen, underground London. Or rather, you play lots of captains – because if this cruel game is about anything, it's about repeated death.Death comes from being eaten by a crew turned cannibal from a lack of supplies, from drowning after pirates hole your hull, or from your ship being swallowed whole by one of many foul monsters prowling the blacked-out waters. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Has there ever been a successful dinner party on stage? It seems no sooner has the table been set than domestic disharmony erupts: opposing personalities obligingly clash, the veil of marital bliss is torn asunder, and terrible secrets are spilled along with the wine. In other words, dinner parties are the playwright’s bread and butter.Torben Betts pays homage to mentor Alan Ayckbourn with his 2012 serving of darkly comic metropolitan angst, although the Seventies menu adds a soupçon of Mike Leigh. Uptight accountant Jess (Annabel Bates) and failed novelist Mat (Jack Johns) are the doomed Read more ...
Florence Hallett
When in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies Thomas Cromwell exclaims in exasperation, “to each monk, one bed; to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?” he sums up the state of moral decay into which the monasteries had apparently lapsed by the time of their dissolution. They had, we are told, become dens of iniquity, the monks indulging in every vice and pleasure they were supposed to abstain from, and in command of such monstrous power and wealth that it is hard not to feel that maybe Henry VIII had a point.Much as we tend to think of the monasteries as essentially medieval, Read more ...
David Nice
Hair-raising guaranteed or your money back: that might have been a publicity gambit, had there been one, for Sakari Oramo’s latest journey with the BBC Symphony Orchestra around a Nielsen symphony. That he knows the ropes to scale the granite cliff face of the Danish composer’s Fourth, “Inextinguishable”, Symphony was not in doubt (he gave a shattering performance with his own City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 1999 Proms). Less expected was his confounding of much-maligned Barbican acoustics with layered impressionism in a Sibelius tone-poem and Zemlinsky songs, and of an utterly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Jennifer Aniston changes pace without changing any fundamental perception of her skills in Cake, the austerely self-admiring new film that finds the onetime Friends star playing a none-too-friendly sufferer from chronic pain. Adopting a halting walk and clenched demeanour and delivering the majority of her lines with a gallows-humour mordancy that quickly palls, Aniston tackles the part head-on in a putative bid for the kind of career about-face Oscar glory that led Charlize Theron to the podium some years back in Monster. No such luck on this occasion: Aniston wasn't even nominated. But Read more ...
graham.rickson
The good news first: director Christopher Alden’s new production of Gianni Schicchi is quite brilliant, and one of the funniest, cleverest things you’ll see in an opera house. Puccini’s taut one-acter is difficult to mess up, but it takes some skill to present it this well. Alden’s version is full of pleasures. Like Rhys Gannon’s stroppy young Gheradino, who spends most of the action wearing headphones and playing on an iPad. Choreographer Tim Claydon’s mute, acrobatic Buoso Donati leaves this earth with some reluctance, his ghost continuing to haunt the stage. Victoria Sharp’s blingy Nella Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Mohammed's show has had a slight change of title since it debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, where it was called Mr Swallow - the Musical, and garnered warm reviews for its shambolic silliness.The set-up is that Mohammed’s alter-ego, the egomaniacal Mr Swallow, a lispy Northerner who is quick to take offence but is oblivious to all around him, has fashioned a musical, Dracula! - starring himself as the bloodthirsty count, of course – and we are watching the final dress rehearsal. Mr Swallow, for some reason known only to himself, makes his appearance on roller skates; it sets the Read more ...
Simon Munk
In terms of atmosphere, The Order: 1886 wins out in spades. It's just everywhere else that it falls down, unfortunately.Sneaking through the Ripper-stalked streets of an alternative Victorian Whitechapel, you can almost smell the stink of the slums. And certainly this matches the recent Assassin's Creed: Unity for the detailed and fetid depiction of dirty, litter-strewn cobbled streets. It's moments like this that The Order does excellently.Another high point is when the zeppelin you're on board crashes into Crystal Palace (about 50 years early, but never mind), and you stagger out of the Read more ...