Reviews
emma.simmonds
Listen Up Philip is so successful in its retro stylings that it comes across like a lost New Hollywood gem. Told in close-ups viewed through the grainy filter of Super 16 film stock, Alex Ross Perry's third feature takes its influences from the best of Seventies cinema, marrying the wit and navel-gazing of Woody Allen with the laid-back cool of Robert Altman (circa The Long Goodbye), while the film evokes John Cassavetes in its intimate portrayal of a relationship in tatters.It begins with our protagonist bragging about his accomplishments as he delivers a pointless and nonchalantly received Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Towards the end of her set Caro Emerald performs “History Repeating”, a hit song from 1997 that revived Shirley Bassey’s cool quota when she sang it with successful big beat duo, the Propellerheads. It’s perfect for Emerald, just the right ratio of hip electronic touches and classic showbiz pizzazz. This is where she lives, musically, dipped in swing-era vintage, but lathered in modernist sonic frolics. It’s a shame the same cannot be said for public perceptions of what she does, as is born out by her Brighton audience. Their response for at least two thirds of the hour-and-three-quarters set Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Adventures, the name of Matthew Bourne's company, has a ruddy-cheeked, Boys’ Own ring to it that has – until now – been rather belied by his oeuvre, which includes a dance version of Edward Scissorhands, as well as dark retellings of all the traditional story ballets. But the New Adventure which rolled into Sadler’s Wells last night really is an adventure – an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the desert island schoolboy story heavy with allegory about the propensity of human beings to descend into barbarism.Civilization and barbarism are complex terms, and political Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to believe that almost two years have passed since Phyllida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse. Harriet Walter’s stricken face as the play ended is still burningly fresh in the memory as we return to the theatre for Henry IV – Part II of a planned trilogy of all-female Shakespeare plays. Incarcerating us once again in a women’s prison, can the power of Lloyd’s conceit survive a second outing?Yes and no. While Julius Caesar rarely broke its theatrical frame, allowing the audience to dissolve the two worlds of Rome and the prison into one emotional arc, here Lloyd seems Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“Mahler, with a chamber orchestra?” In his introduction to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s winter season brochure, principal conductor Robin Ticciati anticipates the reaction of an audience brought up to believe that a chamber orchestra leaves its comfort zone somewhere in the early 19th Century. But the truth is that in the 40-odd years of its existence this innovative orchestra has persistently pushed at the boundaries of its core classical repertoire, where justified historically or musically – in the case of Brahms symphonies, for example, it is now widely acknowledged that early Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“I am spiteful! I am ill! You are not going to like this!” With these words Harry Lloyd opens his one-man show that adapts the Dostoevsky 1864 novella that is often hailed as the first work of literary existentialism. Lloyd is already on stage as the audience enter, darkly bearded, sitting in a dishevelled armchair on a floor created from stacked books beneath his bare feet, his haunted piercing eyes following viewers as they take their seats.He can’t wait to talk. Lloyd duly launches into a 70-minute diatribe that reveals the darker corners of the soul of an uneasy, unreliable narrator. The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Traditionally, art exhibitions have been about looking, but as more and more artists cross boundaries to engage with sound, touch and movement or to use film and video, work that is static and silent is becoming the exception rather than the rule.Curated by Sam Belinfante as a Hayward touring show, Listening focuses on the relationship between sight and sound. Ironically, the most resonant piece is totally silent. Sound Holes, 2007, by Christian Marclay (pictured below right) consists of photographs of the perforated metal plates indicating an intercom in a lift or beside a front door. Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Sir Mark Elder has a penchant for taking on large-scale works in Manchester, from operatic concert performances of Wagner and Verdi to Hollywood musicals. Following that line, he kicked off the new Hallé season with Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé ballet score in its entirety, described by the composer as “a vast musical fresco faithful to the Greece of my dreams”. We are used to hearing the odd suite, but rarely the whole work. It calls for large forces for the three parts with 13 scenes and lasts about an hour. Commissioned by Diaghilev, it evokes the glory days of the Ballets Russes and that Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
London homelessness charity The Passage was set up in 1980 and has been growing steadily so that it now provides a day centre, short-term hostel and long-term housing in an effort to help street sleepers get their lives back on track. Its annual "A Night Under the Stars" gala concert is the central event on its fundraising calendar, and assembles an extremely high standard of musician. The evening was compered by Jo Brand and Petroc Trelawny, both safe pairs of hands in their distinct ways.The Orion Orchestra, a cross-conservatoire group of students and recent graduates, was set up ten years Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Sartre said that hell is other people but most gamers know that hell is actually a gloomily lit dungeon filled with central-casting undead moaners and decorated as if Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen had ordered a job lot of gibbets, spikes and miscellaneous human remains.Infernal business as usual then in Hellraid: The Escape. You are a lost soul, trapped in the torture pits of hell by an evil sorceror. What to do? The clue is in the title.Hellraid: The Escape is a spinoff from the upcoming PC & console title, Hellraid and the game is set in the same universe as its big brother. Whereas that game Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M.Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn’s (Chiara D’Anna) relationship is presented in a slyly funny manner with tinges of sadness delivering harsh truths about the dark side of devotion. Evelyn likes it rough and Cynthia Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Ushering in the mucky-minded art-house crowd like the Pied Piper lining up kids for the snatching, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely describes itself as an erotic thriller set amidst the Kentucky wilds, while its fluid, meadow-fresh depiction of forbidden romance recalls Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. However, it's a film that turns surprisingly savage with 'hillbilly horror flick' a more apt description of where things end up.In fact diverse influences abound throughout; John Steinbeck’s East of Eden provides partial inspiration and there are allusions to the work of Carlos Reygadas (Post Read more ...