Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
Puck is an assassin in a tutu and Theseus is a murderous thug. In Headlong's deliciously macabre dramatisation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for midwinter audiences, director Holly Race Roughan extracts all the menace from Shakespeare’s “fairy play”, deftly chopping up and juggling the text to underscore the violence that frames the woodland escapism. When we enter the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, we are lulled into a false sense of ease as the music director and pianist, Richie Hart, plays Christmas carols as meditatively as if he were performing the Goldberg Variations. Then a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Last Dinner Party’s second album, From the Pyre, is one of this year’s most enjoyable. Its lead single, “This is the Killer Speaking”, is a belter that’ll be around for years. Their musical and pop chops are hard to argue with. They’re a band who can put on a show which combines theatrical opulence and rockin’ zest. I’ve seen them do it. Tonight, however, they undermine themselves during the latter half by sabotaging the concert’s forward momentum Things start well. The quintet, accompanied by a male drummer introduced as “Luca”, appear on a stage set akin to a ruined church Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Axis: Bold As Love, the second album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was released in the UK during the first week of December 1967. In America, it came out in January 1968. Now, it is the subject of a multi-disc box set titled Bold As Love.Why this puzzling new title – “Bold as Love” is the track closing the album – has been chosen is unknown. No reason for losing the word “Axis” is given in the accompanying book, or in the promotional material: which describes this as a “box set containing [the] landmark 1967 album Axis: Bold As Love.”This is not the only mysterious feature of this four-CD/ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Whoever thought of creating an exhibition comparing the brilliance of JMW Turner with that of John Constable deserves a medal – maybe Tate Britain’s senior curator, Amy Concannon? Even if you are familiar with the work, seeing their paintings hung side by side reveals surprising similarities as well as differences.The rivalry between them has not been cooked up as a marketing ploy; it was real. On show is a snippet from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner. It’s varnishing day for the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition of 1832. Turner saunters in with a brush load of crimson paint and dabs it onto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having given us Peter Jackson’s monster documentary series The Beatles: Get Back four years ago, Disney have returned to the Moptop well to deliver this spruced-up reissue of the Beatles Anthology. This epic history of the Fab Four originally aired in six-episode form in the US and the UK in 1995, but that was expanded to eight instalments for VHS and LaserDisc releases in 1996.The USP of this latest version is a supposedly new ninth episode, a sort of post-match roundup assembled from mid-1990s interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison with interpolations from producer Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Spies are basically actors. They create fake personas in order to achieve their ends. But the difference is that they do this 24/7. All the time. Especially during a secret operation. So the first thing to say about David Eldridge’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1963 classic, which first opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre last year, is that it offers the strange joy of watching actors playing characters who are themselves acting a role. The second thing to say about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is that this is first of Le Carré’s novels to be put on stage – and in some respects Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
When Yard Act headlined the O2 Academy in Glasgow back in 2023, they might have thought returning there as a support act would indicate a career that had taken a wrong turn. That’s where they found themselves on this jaunt with the Hives, though the reality was less a reflection of their status as a band and simply that what was announced as an arena tour for the Swedish garage rockers had been downgraded to a more modest setting. Not that the Leeds quartet seemed affected by it. Singer James Smith was typically verbose as ever, praising his band, their music and Glasgow itself before Read more ...
Clare Stevens
Since 1981 Ryedale Festival has presented a mouthwatering array of concerts in picturesque churches and glorious stately homes in North East Yorkshire, characterised by interval drinks and picnics in lovely gardens or sunny terraces on long summer evenings. This year it took a short, sharp dive into a very different seasonal atmosphere, presenting its first Winter Weekend from 21 to 23 November, with just four events in the charming market towns of Pickering, Malton and Norton.Pianist Ethan Loch, who won the keyboard final of BBC Young Musician in 2022, set the scene in his opening recital on Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The battle of the Scrooges is fast becoming an unofficial London theatrical tradition, as – for the third year – audiences must choose between the mince-pie-laden delights at the Old Vic and the atmospheric ghostliness of Ally Pally. Jack Thorne’s spikily imaginative, sumptuously staged version has been winning hearts and minds since 2017, but in 2021 Mark Gatiss, king of the ghost story, began his bid for Dickens devotees with an adaptation that’s Christmassy and crepuscular in equal measure. Since Gatiss’s deliciously ectoplasmic take is – comparatively – the newest kid on Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Even people who are unfamiliar with Kneecap’s sharp but raucous music may well be aware of the legal issues that have beset the Irish-English bilingual rappers over the last eighteen months. As support for the oppressed people of Palestine has caused them no end of grief in the UK, the USA and beyond.Fortunately, this has done nothing to tame this mouthy and opinionated trio, and with a partisan crowd which included many who loudly proclaimed themselves to be part of Birmingham’s Irish community, they dedicated “Get Your Brits Out” to “all the paedophiles in the Royal Family”. Similarly, Read more ...
David Nice
Even top conductors can have difficulty with Elgar’s late romantic suppleness. Vasily Petrenko of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Santtu-Mattias Rouvali of the Philharmonia have made a heavy meal out of the “Concert Overture” (= symphonic poem) In the South (Alassio). Not Edward Gardner with his London Philharmonic players, strings on top, glowing form, woodwind hyper-sensitive, in a perfectly paced journey of a soul.Elgar took his melancholic as well as his boisterous side on holiday in Italy. Gardner’s trajectory was one of restlessness and unease eventually erupting in a vision of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She’s still best remembered for her portrayal of Carrie Mathison in Homeland, but Claire Danes is an actor with plenty of moves up her sleeve. In this eight-part drama penned by Gabe Rotter, she plays author Aggie Wiggs, renowned for her book Sick Puppy but now crippled by writer’s block. This is in the aftermath of her break-up with wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), following the death of their young son Cooper in a road accident, leaving Aggie living in splendid isolation in a mini-mansion in leafy Oyster Bay, Long Island. Indeed, this locale is so upscale that it has tempted real estate Read more ...