Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Despite the presence of Jude Law as a disillusioned old underseadog, the real star of Black Sea is the 50-year-old Russian submarine on which most of the action takes place. Now called Black Widow, the vessel lives on the river Medway near Rochester (pictured below right), whither director Andrew MacDonald and his crew hastened with cameras at the ready .Black Sea is the story of a group of battered, embittered North Sea workers spat out by various companies and corporations. Law plays Captain Robinson, an ex-Navy man and veteran submarine commander who has just been sacked by salvage Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Watching this edition of Imagine… on Colm Tóibín, it was impossible not to be reminded of Graham Greene’s dictum about childhood being the bank balance of the writer. The key event in Tóibín’s childhood came at the age of eight, when his father’s serious illness saw Colm and his brother sent away to live with an aunt, and a sense of acute abandonment set in that saw him develop a stutter. His most recent novel, Nora Webster, was about just that kind of bewildering silence of a mother after the death of a father.The rivers of grief flow richly through Tóibín’s work. “I’ve never known happiness Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Santa Claus does make it to the Menier Chocolate Factory this Christmas but his name is Sam Byck and he plans to fly a 747 into the White House and “incinerate Dick Nixon”. So not the Christmas show, not in any traditional sense, actually not in any sense, but a hymn to the disenchanted and disenfranchised of America and in particular the infamous few for whom the Dream finally died when they exercised their right to bear arms and “moved their little finger” around the trigger. Hail to the Chief. Bang.Stephen Sondheim’s bitterest, blackest, musical theatre piece Assassins was ground-breaking Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary.Despite chronicling a year of a group of immigrant children in the French school system, School of Babel (La Cour de Babel) is not about the politics of France’s attitude to immigrants or Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Bush is on a roll. Under artistic director Madani Younis, audiences are up, new plays are flowing in and there are plans to build a permanent studio space. Having just staged Radar, its annual festival of new writing, the venue now hosts Barney Norris’s Visitors, his debut play which previously premiered at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham and then had a run at the Arcola earlier this year. If it can hardly be called a cutting-edge example of contemporary playwriting, it is an impressively accomplished piece of craftsmanship.The writing is sensitive, rather quiet and immensely Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Even the most reluctant of completists should find the prospect of the Beethoven works for cello and piano undaunting. In their totality, these pieces consist of just five sonatas and three sets of variations, which fit neatly on to just two CDs, or occupy two recital programmes. The works are also very important in the early development of the solo cello repertoire. Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford describes the “confident, ebullient, fresh and youthful” sonatas of Op 5 as a genre which the composer, at the time, had “virtually to himself".French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and Russian-born Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode. It won the director the Best Film award in the Horizons Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
“I have quit smoking!” the rock star exclaims to rapturous applause, taking a luxurious drag on an e-cigarette. And the artificial smoke dissipates across the stage, revealing a 67-year-old Marianne Faithfull perched on an antique leather chair, shoulder raised and pouting as if caricaturing her own youth. It is a subtle and triumphant reference to her past of destructive drug abuse and yet tonight quite clearly shows that for Faithfull the stage (alongside nicotine replacement and a wooden walking stick) is now her crucial crutch for rehabilitation. Though she fills many a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This huge exhibition is an awesome and terrifying compilation of photographs of the sites of conflict, and the remnants of wars and conflicts of all kinds – local, civil, short, long, global, technological, industrial and hand-to-hand. Taken from the mid 19th century to the present, the images – hundreds, perhaps even well over a thousand – are oblique and often incomprehensible or unidentifiable without the expansive wall captions. This is a show requiring us to read as well as look. Some of the blandest or quietest imagery turns out to be of landscapes that have witnessed what we Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Expectations can be dangerous when it comes to live music, but sometimes managing them is easier said than done. Go and see a band like Jaga Jazzist, a genre-crossing collective of Norwegian multi-instrumentalists who skyrocketed to fame in 2002 when the BBC named A Livingroom Hush jazz album of the year, and you expect it to be big. Especially when it’s the group’s 20th anniversary tour and you arrive at Union Chapel to find the queue stretching around the block.As we filed in, I was in rock gig mode, prepared to leave with mild tinnitus, a few new bruises and a stupid grin plastered Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1) – Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966–1985America’s music could be jazz, gospel, blues or rock ’n’ roll. Or all of them. Each has black roots. Then there’s the white-rooted country, which also informed rock ’n’ roll. Taking the simplistic line has its problems and doesn’t allow for blurred boundaries, nuance and the fact that history is never neat, but it is clear that all these musical forms generally and initially proliferated amongst communities that are not native to the American continent. What about the music of native North Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
Russian prisoner Gavriil is telling his psychiatrist a story about a strange and frightening dragon who demands a female sacrifice from the local townsfolk every year. When Gavriil gets to the end of his hot-breathed tale, his doctor drily remarks: "Almost hard to believe that Stalin had a problem with it." The time is 1978 and we are in the USSR, a place where fiction is censored, writers are frequently imprisoned and real life is even more fantastical than fiction. Silent Prisoner is director-turned-writer Eve Leigh's first full-length play, and it is a subtle and slippery beast. The Read more ...