Reviews
Matthew Wright
“Were we leaving Rio, or were we in New York?” Stacey Kent sings in “The Changing Lights”, the title song of her latest album, before moving on seamlessly to “Les Invalides, or Trafalgar Square”. The prosperous, wistful ennui that some of her recorded songs exude, propelled by her impeccable enunciation and glistening tone, is cosmopolitan with a slightly laminated, departure-lounge sameness. It can feel a little bit like a global franchise in polite enervation. The lyrics, by her regular collaborator, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, are in fact leagues away in subtlety from the rhythmical Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“You’ll only be staying here until one of the paddies shoots you.” The blunt caution given to Private Gary Hook on his arrival in Belfast sets the tone for the army’s attitude towards where he’s been posted, and the tone of locals towards an army any of them might ostensibly join. The breathlessly hard-hitting ‘71 not only captures these tensions with flair, but does so from the incompatible, irreconcilable points of view of those caught up in and sucked into them.’71 is the first feature film directed by Yann Demange, whose most recent television credit was the first series of Top Boy. The Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The advantage of basing drama on real events, particularly emotive ones like the 2005 London bombings, is that they have inbuilt resonance; the disadvantage, all too apparent in 2013 play Warde Street, is that it can be challenging to articulate a revelatory view. Familiarity with the arguments and sentiments expressed in this 80-minute piece vastly lessens its impact, and a burst of late tension (chiefly earned via the shortcut of a firearm) is further diminished by dubious use of reverse chronology. It’s a short play with grand ambition, sadly unfulfilled.Writer Damien Tracey focuses not on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's inevitable that Paul Daniels would introduce his wife and onstage partner as “... the lovely Debbie McGee”, one of two phrases now synonymous with the magician and comic. (The other, “you'll like this, not a lot”, makes an appearance later in the evening.) However there's nothing predictable about this entertaining show of magic tricks and illusions - most of them devised by Daniels, and others associated with great names from the past that the comic, a keen student of the art of magic's history, has given a modern makeover.I saw the show at the Broadway Theatre in Barking, and Daniels Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jason Stone’s directorial debut is chock-full of killer-thriller tropes. Serial killer with a religious bent; cop with a drink and drugs problem; smalltown investigator butts heads with intransigent chief of police in the big city; a lightbulb moment when a detective looks at the crime pinboard – they’re all here (plus a few more), but it’s no less enjoyable for that.Stone has gathered a terrific cast in this low-budget movie, with its shades of Fargo and Broadchurch. Susan Sarandon plays Hazel Micallef, sheriff of the sleepy town of Fort Dundas, who lives with her mum (Ellen Burstyn), self- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Usually, anyone bringing tuberculosis and transgression to the regional centres of Woking, Norwich and Milton Keynes would meet redoubtable opposition. In the case of Glyndebourne’s new touring production of La traviata, that would be a shame, because this is a lean, powerful version that reaches straight for the heart and gives it a good squeeze. In Russian soprano Irina Dubrovskaya and American tenor Zach Borichevsky, Glyndebourne has found very convincing replacements for the acclaimed Festival performers Venera Gimadieva and Michael Fabiano, who enact director Tom Cairns’ vision of Read more ...
fisun.guner
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in Mayfair: huge, spectacular churned-up poppy fields, whose sweetly blushing poppy heads were drooping from blackened stalks erupting from deeply encrusted, scorched, scraped and furrowed earth. To make such grand statements about the piteous nature of war, about the recklessness and hubris of humanity, about the hope that only rarely deserts us, and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tim Albery’s production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea takes plenty of liberties. There are moments when you scratch your head, quietly sigh, and think about your interval drink, or what you’ll eat when you get home.The cuts may disorientate Monteverdi affecionados. There’s also a bit of reordering, and no proper coronation. Albery’s new translation contains some excruciating couplets: Poppea is rhymed with "betray her" at one point, and later on there’s the pairing of strumpet and crumpet. Cupid is matched with stupid. Niggles aside, this is a wonderfully fresh, accessible staging Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite a 47-year history which has taken them from pomp to pop and established them as a top-selling global institution, there's still a lingering sense that Genesis don't think they've been taken seriously enough. This was detectable in Phil Collins's comment included here that "we're just popular and there's nothing wrong with that... I won't take the credit and I won't take the blame."This "it's not my fault, guv" approach seemed curiously defensive in the light of their colossal string of successful albums and hit singles. Genesis have been one of a bare handful of major bands who Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea is an opera with a one-track mind. The music throbs and pulses with dancing desire, suspensions and elaborate embellishments defer gratification, while recitative is poised constantly on the edge of melodic climax. Desire is everywhere, from the innocent flirtations of a young courtier and his lady, to the hopeless love of Ottone and of course the knowing, mature passions of the Emperor Nerone and his mistress Poppea. Without it, there’s a void at the core of the opera – a void no amount of fine singing or playing can fill.And try the Academy of Ancient Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?Adding anything to a story so familiar, so raked over and one played out in public is tricky. Most probably, there are few revelations left about the Oasis of 1995, the year they released their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? In its slipstream they racked up a set of mostly unbroken records: it sold 347,000 in the week of release; 2.6m applications were made for tickets to their Knebworth shows.A large proportion of the latter figure must have bought the album, begging the question of whether it’s worth buying again 19 Read more ...
stephen.walsh
So easily parcelled up as a master of opera buffa, Rossini is a composer who constantly surprises by the emotional and intellectual range of his best work. William Tell, which opened WNO’s current season three weeks ago, is a major progenitor of Verdi, even arguably Wagner: grand opera devoid of what Wagner himself called effects without causes. Now the company has added the much earlier Moses in Egypt, very much not buffa, but not strictly grand either, more like oratorio by a composer whose theatrical instincts were so strong that everything he wrote ended up as opera.This is of course an Read more ...