Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
Pianist Mitsuko Uchida's concentration, calm and grace under pressure are an inspiration. Towards the end of the first piece on her programme, played to a packed Royal Festival Hall last night, the quiet but insistent high-pitched screech of a fire alarm kept going off. Low voices on walkie-talkies at the entrances to the hall were also audible. Whatever the confusion they were sharing with each other, they were failing to lift it. While the noises persisted, Uchida continued the delicate hand-crossing dialogues of Schubert's F Minor Impromptu from the D935 set. She would quizzically hover a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Ghosts are walking at the Young Vic. Katie Mitchell’s stark, startling production of Chekhov’s final lament is not just an evocation of a lost era, but a summoning of the spirits haunting Vicki Mortimer’s chilling sepulchral mansion. This is a Cherry Orchard cast into shadow – literal and figurative – but pulsing with furious energy. The past will not go gentle into that good night; it calls out in a keening cry.At just one hour 50, Simon Stephens’ taut adaptation combines elegy with economy. The stripped-back text suits Mitchell’s absolute clarity of purpose, although the excised repetition Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It takes some brass neck to look at one of the most destructive events in London’s history, which destroyed a chunk of the poorest part of the city and left an estimated 70,000 people homeless, and think that it wasn’t dramatic enough. But that must have been what went through the head of Tom Bradby, the political editor of ITV News, when he was writing his four-part drama: we were deeply immersed in espionage, war, assassination plots, kidnap and a spendthrift, philandering king before as much as a single spark began to fly.Unless, that is, we were to consider the sparks between hapless Read more ...
Simon Munk
Which you is you? Where does your soul live? Who cares if a clone of you dies? For a fairly simple puzzle game, The Swapper asks some serious questions. And importantly, it asks them with subtlety, deftness and atmosphere – that enhances the excellent gameplay.Exploring a semi-ruined space station, your fragile astronaut finds a strange device that lets you create up to four clones of yourself. These clones will walk, grab, jump as you do, but you can place them far from you. More than that, you can swap your control, your consciousness, to them if you have direct line of sight. And that's Read more ...
fisun.guner
That there is something of the Sherlock Holmes about Dr John Thackery – the Shakespeare-quoting, opium and cocaine-addicted surgeon in this Steve Soderbergh-directed 10-part drama set in a New York hospital in 1900 – hasn’t gone unnoted. But although Thackery, played with a certain gruff charm by Brit actor Clive Owen, is clearly a maverick with a clandestine habit, a happy outcome for his patients is rarely on the cards.Surgical techniques being fairly primitive, and a modern and safe anaesthetic procedure also some way off – and what with the electricity short-circuiting and setting Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Motherly love is stretched to its very limits in Xavier Dolan’s deeply affecting melodrama. It's pitched to perfection and shot in a claustrophobic 1:1 aspect ratio, which is occasionally opened up to evoke a rush of liberating joy. This stylish and emotionally charged cinematic experience marks out the maturing of one of the most exciting filmmakers working today.Set in a fictional Canada in 2015 where late Nineties and early Noughties music and fashion are all the rage, Diane Despres (Anne Dorval) picks up her son Steve (Antoine–Olivier Pilon) from the juvenile facility he has been Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When it first opened in October 1996, Ayub Khan Din’s East Is East was hyped as the best Asian play since, well, ever. And audiences flocked to see this 1970s migrant story both in Birmingham, where it opened, and at the Royal Court, which was a co-producer. Three years later, a film version — directed by Damien O’Donnell — was equally popular, suggesting that Brit film could be as bright as the best of Brit drama. Now the play returns to the West End with a cast led by Jane Horrocks and the playwright himself.Khan Din plays George “Genghis” Khan, a Salford chip-shop owner who came to England Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Judge is the Chaka Khan of movies: it’s every movie, it’s all in here. Directed by comedy specialist David Dobkin, there were high hopes for this first outing from Team Downey, Robert Jr & Susan Downey's production company. To ensure excitement, Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque’s script has enough plot for five films: The Judge is a crime drama, court thriller, family melodrama, bromance, romance and comedy. Skewed to an older audience, The Judge looks like a family drama with lawyers in it - the kind of tight ensemble piece made by Hollywood of yore. Think To Kill A Mockingbird (an Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There is a 1953 Volkswagen parked in the Great Court of the British Museum, and we are reminded that Hitler persuaded Frederick Porsche (who gave his name of course to a hideously expensive luxury automobile) to design a people’s car. The postwar economic miracle of the defeated Germany finally allowed the Beetle to go into mass production; 21 million of them in fact – the largest number of a single model ever produced, until its hugely successful run ended in 2003. Here is a neat paradox: how an idea of one of the monsters of history became a protagonist of effective technological advance Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Director Christian Petzold avoided Germany’s grim version of heritage cinema – the war, the Wall – until last year’s Cold War hit Barbara. His fascination with his country’s present suppressions, though, helps him peel away its past’s familiar veneer. Phoenix uses a melodramatic film noir plot – Hitchcock’s Vertigo, mostly – to make a stylistically and emotionally spare masterpiece about how it felt to still be alive in Germany just after the war.Cabaret singer Nelly (Nina Hoss) returns to Berlin with a bandaged face battered in a concentration camp. Plastic surgery almost restores her old Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
First the good news. At 73, is Plácido Domingo anywhere near retiring? Er, no. When the question came up in an interview on Sunday (on video below), he answered : "The reason I don't retire is because I can still sing." And then with a glint in his eye: "I still feel I have to know the the right moment. Not to sing one day more.... nor one day less."And more good news: Domingo does give an affecting performance as Francesco, the aged Doge of Venice in I Due Foscari, in a rather staid and conservative globe-trotting production of Verdi's early opera, which has also also been seen in Los Read more ...