Reviews
aleks.sierz
When science and the arts combine they form a new genre, which has the unlovely name of “artsci”. But although there have now been several plays about climate change in recent years, can an innovative partnership between a playwright, a scientist and a director throw any more light on a subject — global warming — that is vital, yet seems to leave most people cold. More tellingly, can theatre tell us anything about it that we don’t already know?The title of the piece, 2071, comes from the idea that this will be the year in which, as the scientist Chris Rapley says, “my oldest grandchild will Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Even the cold breeze along the Thames played its part in conjuring the chilly, epic Finnish landscapes of Jean Sibelius last night, though Finnish maestro Osmo Vänskä and the perfectly weighted phrasing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra can take primary credit. It’s unusual to have a single-composer programme these days, but Vänskä justified his repertoire with a performance of taut, lyrical and evocative power, which connected and illuminated different areas, historical and generic, of Sibelius’ career.From Smetana to Shostakovich, a school of broadly Romantic composers created musical Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
A significant milestone was passed this week: Tuesday 4 November was Equal Pay Day. From that day until the end of the year, the average woman in this country effectively works for free compared to her male counterpart, such is the disparity in wages. And in case you were wondering, it’s getting worse, not better. The moment arrived three days earlier this year than last.Over 40 years ago, the 187 women who worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham took extraordinary risks to try and do something about this injustice. They went out on strike in 1968, holding out against the management and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Broadmoor is not a prison. It just looks like one, as reiterated by umpteen craning shots which prowled around the Victorian red-brick exterior, assessing its brute institutional heft from every angle. For the first time, and after five years of negotiation, cameras have been allowed to document what happens inside this mythologised sanctum. Is it really the chamber of horrors of popular imagination? Is this where society’s malignantly insane are locked away for our better safety?Broadmoor’s staff are complicit in preserving its secrets. Rather than admit to working there and then spend hours Read more ...
David Nice
Dvořák’s rustic operetta sits, swinging its legs rather diffidently, historically somewhere between the neverland Bohemia of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and the lacerating reality of village life in Janáček'’s Jenůfa. The Cunning Peasant’s charms lie in its string of sophisticated songs and dances, more through-composed than Smetana’s, and in the abundance of not over-taxing roles, as well as chorus numbers, it offers to students.That the Guildhall School embraces these so cheerfully has much to do with the way that fine, underrated conductor Dominic Wheeler effortlessly drives the tractor, Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Pretty in Pink featured an interesting example of female friendship between a teenager and a grown woman. A record shop owner imparts motherly advice to her employee while also getting to grips with her own identity. In a similar manner, Lynn Shelton’s indie comedy (which was written by YA author Andrea Siegel) pairs up Keira Knightley and Chloë Grace Moretz, but shifts the focus away from teen angst to tackle the quarter-life crisis from the point of view of a woman who decides she needs to find herself 10 years after graduating from high schoolWhen Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to Megan ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How odd to recall that Michael Portillo was the Thatcherite brat they loved to hate, the man whose 1997 defeat at Enfield Southgate would have caused a Twitter meltdown had the 140-character phenomenon been invented in time. Today's repackaged Portillo has blossomed in all directions, from being a stalwart on The Moral Maze and Andrew Neil's This Week to documentaries about capital punishment and mental health. You could almost suspect he had something of the Lib-Dem about him these days, Euroscepticism aside of course. And then there's his ongoing infatuation with railways. After four Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is no exaggeration to say that Lloyd Newson has created a new theatrical language. Verbatim drama and intricate choreography would seem, on paper, to be fatally competing elements, yet Newson’s hypnotic fusion charges both word and movement with fresh meaning. Critically, the dance element of this typically confrontational new work from his company DV8, covering such harrowing topics as domestic violence, rape, incest, addiction and criminality, prevents it from slipping into hackneyed territory. A potential sob story with sermonising framework is reborn as an extraordinarily personal Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of course unavoidable circumstances do strike, and concerts do get delayed, but it’s astonishing just how often those circumstances seem to conspire against Valery Gergiev. Last night’s UK premiere of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera Levsha – the second night of a Mariinsky triptych of performances at the Barbican – started a nice round hour late, which was a real shame because once the drama shifted from offstage to onstage the work revealed itself as a bit of a gem.Based on a story by Nikolai Leskov (he of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), the opera’s plot is less about unfolding narrative Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one is more prescriptive than Tennessee Williams when it comes to stage and set directions. As he got older and wiser he made allowances for directors and actors to have their say. “The making of a play is, finally, a collaborative venture,” he concluded. What he would make of the Royal Exchange’s self-styled “bold adaptation” of his favourite play, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, is debatable. A co-production with the Royal & Derngate in Northampton and Northern Stage, there’s nothing “bold” about this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, though much trumpeted in pre-publicity, an Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When you're talking about dancers, the old adage about genius being 99% perspiration has a point. You have to work damned hard just to be average in professional dance; to be good, like Akram Khan and Israel Galván are good, takes sweat (and tears and blood, like as not). Still, all the perspiration in the world won't avail if you don't have that 1% of inspiration, a little blue flame of a pilot light in your soul, ready to spark the gas jets of hard work into fiery life, rather than just a lot of hot air.This show works because Khan and Galván are inspired. The premise is pretty simple: let' Read more ...
fisun.guner
So many words have been expended on Egon Schiele, that it’s almost impossible to imagine what more can be added for such a relatively small and narrow, albeit intense, body of work. His was an early blossoming talent, and in his short life – he was 28 when he succumbed to Spanish flu, dying three days after his pregnant wife, in 1918 – he produced works preoccupied by sex and decay, riven by anxiety and fear, often marked by a tone of aggressive swagger. The work appears not only to embody the spirit of Vienna in the age of Freud, but also to betray his youth. Not for nothing has Schiele’s Read more ...