Reviews
David Nice
Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare’s dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and you might think we’re back more or less where we started nine months ago. But what the febrile imagination of Russian theatre surrealist Dmitry Krymov gives us is the rude mechanicals’ Very Lamentable Comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, Sort Of, along with audience interpolations beyond anything the priggish Theseus, Hippolyta and lovers ever ventured, in an often hilarious, occasionally tedious and anything but Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the torture meted out to prisoners of war by their Japanese guards in WWII. She wears fetish gear comprising a purple bolero over conical tits with teat-like nipples that point heavenwards, a restraining collar linked to a leather g-string and tightly-laced, thigh-high boots. Her body is visible yet constrained and her head is similarly encased in a helmet- Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This venue’s current programming is devoted to examining the state of Britain’s public services, with a revival of Nina Raine’s Tiger Country, about the NHS, coming next month and, playing now, Roy Williams’s Wildefire, about the police. This play about cops and corruption stars Lorraine Stanley, whose “previous” includes films such as Gangster Number One, He Kills Coppers and The Hooligan Factory. She would also like us to take into account her stints in Waking the Dead and Trial and Retribution.In this epic coming-of-age story Stanley plays Gail Wilde — nicknamed Wildefire because of her Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If a band gets up and says “We are only going to be playing songs from our new album, not actually released here yet” normally most audiences would groan mightily. But somehow Susheela Raman has educated her audience to expect the unexpected. Her somewhat wayward musical path has included Indo-jazz, rock covers, Tamil voodoo music and introspective songs. It has not been one that a manager or record company would have recommended. They tend to like more of the same.Susheela and her band did all the songs from the new album The Queen Between, only officially released in France I believe so far Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour. In others, a flurry of brushstrokes captures the energy of the forest, the wind in the leaves, the light breaking through to the velvety Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This time of remembrance has inspired a fascinating theatrical skirmish. In one corner, Nicholas Wright’s 2014 Regeneration, an adaptation of Pat Barker’s trilogy; in the other, Stephen MacDonald’s 1982 two-hander Not About Heroes. Both plays, currently touring, concern the pivotal meeting of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, but while the former examines shell shock and its treatment in compelling detail, the latter is content to place the poets and their enduring creations centre stage.Sassoon (Alastair Craig, pictured below with Simon Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It has always been obligatory when talking about Steve Martland to describe him as an iconoclast. Before his sudden death in May 2013 at the age of 58, he forged a reputation for himself as a self-styled outsider to the musical establishment, speaking scathingly about the Proms, and eschewing established orchestras and ensembles in favour of writing for his eponymous band. Members of that band joined Colin Currie and the Aurora Orchestra to pay spirited homage to Martland, and place him in his musical context.There were two Martland pieces to enjoy, one in each half. Starry Night, for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.The piece opens with a voice-over in a whiny Brooklyn accent, as if we might be in Scorsese land or Sopranos world. It's a jolt to discover that the voice belongs, entirely plausibly, to the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a conundrum for some in the industry how John Bishop, so beloved of the BBC, which has given him several vehicles to parlay his Liverpool-lad-made-good comedy, can still, as a multimillionaire, perform his smiley Everyman persona with such conviction and be met with such affection - as indeed he was at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham where I saw his Supersonic arena tour.It cannot be a case of, as an old show business saw (attributed to many) has it, “Sincerity; if you can fake that, you've got it made”, because, although he made a very good fist of it in Skins and Route Irish, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On and on the stately galleon sails. The fifth wodge of Downton Abbey has been light on utter knuckle-gnawing preposterousness. Plots conjured up at random from thin air have been in slightly shorter supply than usual. The very worst you can say of it is that Lord Fellowes is no Agatha Christie. The poor old blighted Bateses have now been subject to a matching pair of cack-handed murder mysteries. To get accidentally banged up once in a slow-moving crime plot may be counted a misfortune. Twice looks like cluelessness.Last night brought further proof that the upper classes are just as capable Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game. This highly anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, who was not only a gifted mathematician but also an ultra-marathon runner, is made even more alluring by an exquisite cast of Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley and Alan Leech (Tom in Downton Abbey), with Charles Dance and Mark Strong muscling up pivotal supporting roles.This beautifully designed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rock music excessively rewards its pretty young corpses. Edwyn Collins’ survival, like Wilko Johnson’s, is much more remarkable. Two massive strokes in 2005, when he was only 44, should really have finished the ex-Orange Juice singer. Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s film plunges us without preamble into the dramatised, subjective reality for Collins back then.The hits – “Rip It Up”, “A Girl Like You” – and the quick, sardonic wit of the old Edwyn on the pop promo circuit appear as ill-fitting fragments, of little practical use as we see waves crash against the Scottish coast, and the singer Read more ...