Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Conducting a piano concerto and playing a piano concerto are normally two separate jobs. Not at last night’s Prom, where Lahav Shani did both – and not just in a breezy Mozart concerto, but the beast that is Prokofiev’s Third. It was quite the feat, like climbing Mount Everest carrying not just your own supplies, but everyone else’s too. I hope he was on at least time-and-a-half.Of course, it’s not just a question of doing it at all: it’s only worth it if it’s done well, and it was. Shani (pictured below), who also conducted the rest of the programme (with the Rotterdam Philharmonic) in more Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.This is unnerving to those of us brought up on old-school public broadcast TV where the rule was that even when what the director had put on screen was obviously a reenactment, a caption indicating "dramatic reconstruction" was obligatory. Not only did that mealy-mouthed phrase clutter the image, no matter which arty font was used, it also broke the viewer’s full engagement with the moment, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in 2018, Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth is a multi-sensory oratorio written to commemorate the 146 workers who perished in a factory fire in what was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York’s history. Scored for orchestra and female chorus, each voice part represents an individual worker who died, most of them Jewish or Italian immigrants.The piece begins with a depiction of passengers on a board a ship, and in this performance the female voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland were on their standard excellent form, swaying Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Amy Gledhill won the Don and Eleanor Taffner Best Comedy Show, the main award at the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Make Me Look Fit on the Poster. The show has variously been described as “bawdy comedy delivered with a blush”, “a funny woman rightly confident of her comedy talents” and “a brilliant physical comedian”.Accepting her award, Gledhill said: “This is insane. I saw the other people on this list and I thought, 'I don't have to write a script!'”Gledhill originally came to Edinburgh fame as one half of the sketch duo The Delightful Sausage, with Chris Cantrill, who was also Read more ...
David Kettle
L’Addition, Summerhall ★★★★ Bert and Nasi – or, more fully, writers/directors/actors Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas – are virtually Fringe royalty, having carved out a niche in recent years with playful, provocative shows that question theatrical conventions alongside often serious real-world topics (the Syrian conflict in 2017’s Palmyra, for example, or the EU and Brexit in 2016’s Eurohouse). This year they’ve almost transformed themselves into a meta-theatrical Morecambe and Wise, however, for a show (first seen at last year’s Avignon Festival) created with Tim Etchells, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The book by Tilar Mazzeo on which Thomas Napper's film is based is subtitled “The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled it”, though one suspects that the life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was a little less Mills & Boon-ish than the version seen here.Nonetheless, the film is an enjoyable romp through the picturesque vineyards around Reims during the turbulent days of the Napoleonic wars, as Barbe marries François Clicquot and finds herself faced with a historic choice.Barbe is played by Haley Bennett (also one of the producers) as a woman who gradually reveals hidden depths and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I had been softened up for the Medicine Festival by a recent visit to the global music extravaganza WOMAD – a trio of us met a guy called Paul aka SpriITman – an ex-IT expert who after a health crisis realised he was a healer. Bear with me on this.All three of us, no spring chickens, had health issues. I had been hospitalised for a couple of nights after a bad bike crash and couldn’t sleep on my shoulder, one of us had bad skin problems on her hands, and other had a damaged knee. After some magic from SpirITman, all three of us were essentially cured. Sleeping was ok again, hand more or less Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Hugh Masekela used to give advice for concerts like this one: “If you haven’t got tickets, turn yourself into a cockroach.” Every seat for Aurora Orchestra’s Beethoven’s Ninth by Heart Prom had already sold out on the first morning when season booking opened back in May, and the queue for returns at the Royal Albert Hall last night must have had well over a hundred people in it.This performance, preceded by an illuminating, engaging and amusing 45-minute “musical and dramatic exploration”, was a reminder of quite how far Aurora has grown in confidence and stature, and has evolved its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the Plays That Went Wrong and the multi-role six-hander Operation Mincemeat, there was Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The 39 Steps: four actors on a collision course with feasibility.Barlow is a comedy hero for creating the National Theatre of Brent in 1980, where as preening thesp Desmond Olivier Dingle he performed two-handers with a rotating door of partners that included Jim Broadbent. They considered no topic too epic, from the Zulu Wars to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Barlow’s 2005 version of John Buchan’s 1915 spy thriller, filtered via Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, Read more ...
Justine Elias
Strange noises fill the crisp nighttime air in a small Alpine village: Avian shrieks and some wild beast a-rustling in the hedgerows – or are those the screams of a desperate woman?Into the strange, scary, funny world of Cuckoo comes a British-American family that has upped sticks and packed the entire household – dad, stepmom, and little daughter – to rural Bavaria, where the father will be renovating the local spa-resort.Dragged along is the dad’s elder daughter from a previous marriage. That’s Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a gangly punk rocker, yearning for her California home and her old Read more ...
David Kettle
REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★ The Jews have had enough. After decades – centuries, in fact – of suspicion, name-calling, finger-pointing and violent persecution, they can’t even leave their Gants Hill or Barkingside flats, where London smears into Essex, any more. In 2019, though, things have really come to a head thanks to one figure: Jeremy Corbyn. Something needs to be done.Step in twins Dan and Lauren, plus dodgy ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak, who steals the show with his wide-boy pronouncements at their granddad’s funeral. Have the unlikely siblings got the balls to act Read more ...