Reviews
Katherine McLaughlin
An ageing misanthrope is given a new lease of life and a fresh outlook by a pretty, young woman. Woody Allen wheels out this tired old trope for his 44th feature film set in his favourite era on the French Riviera with a light romantic yarn between Colin Firth and Emma Stone playing out as predictably as one might imagine. Thankfully this old fashioned unravelling mystery proves to be a far more enticing affair than anticipated due to the striking backdrop of glitzy 1920s fashion, sparkling evening soirees and expertly curated jazz accompaniment.Chinese conjurer Wei Ling Soo is the talk of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few contemporary playwrights have enjoyed as many revivals as polymath Philip Ridley. The first two of his 1990s gothic East End trilogy — The Pitchfork Disney and The Fastest Clock in the Universe — have recently been staged again to great effect and now it’s the turn of the final play in the trilogy, Ghost from a Perfect Place. When it was originally put on at the Hampstead Theatre in 1994 it shocked audiences with its full-on violence. But what is its impact today?Set in a badly scorched flat in the East End of London, the play opens with 76-year-old Torchie Sparks, a granny with a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Nicholas Hytner’s 1988 Magic Flute may have trilled its last at English National Opera, but judging by the wit, the joy and the energy on display last night it would be absolutely criminal to put the director’s even more elderly Xerxes out to pasture – the show that brought Handel back into fashion when it premiered in 1985.I was a little too busy being born to attend the production’s first outing, so came late to the party at its most recent outing in 2005. Revival director Michael Walling has refined his ideas since then, and there’s a lot less fuss and faff among designer David Fielding’s Read more ...
David Nice
“It takes a star to parody one,” wrote theartsdesk’s Edward Seckerson, nailing the essence of this immortal spoof-fest’s last incarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Star quality was assured given the presence of Damian Humbley, peerless in Merrily We Roll Along and even the unjustly short-lived Lend Me a Tenor, who’s in this transfer. Sophie-Louise Dann, a genius of a performer who dazzled as a prima donna in that last and even stole the show as a minor lovesick aesthete in a Proms Patience, isn’t – she’s busy preparing her Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham just down the Strand, though Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack Thorne's new eight-part drama is set in a fictional but recognisable small English village, Overton, where life is centred on farming and racehorses. A green and pleasant land? Not so much; this is a series with a group of pill-popping, shagging teenagers at its heart – well, it is from the man who wrote Skins.In the opener, we meet the group of friends as they play a game of chicken, jumping into a huge grain silo. It's reckless, but it's fun, as is drinking all night then stealing a car and driving like a maniac through the narrow country lanes. And when it all goes wrong and one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Cilla Black still fighting fit and eminently telly-worthy at 71, it feels a bit odd to find a three-part dramatisation of her life popping up on ITV. Black apparently gave the project her blessing and has hailed Sheridan Smith's performance in the title role, but all this does is to tacitly suggest that it's a fairly harmless piece of entertainment which is unlikely to go poking about in any dark or controversial areas. Team Cilla would surely have had the scheme quashed otherwise.Thus it was no great surprise to find the first episode (of three) of Cilla bringing us a fluffy, comical, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colours her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings, it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography. And since that very early death – and early death, whether suicide, accident, disease or murder has been sometimes seen with rabid cynicism as an outstanding career move – she has, over the past two decades, become something of a cult figure. Or rather her imagery has, collected by the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You may have had to search for his name in the closing credits of this final episode of series two of The Village, but all plaudits were due to its composer Adrian Corker, who gave us a great score which majored in atonality. The acting here remained top class, and the landscapes were still unsurpassable (more on which later), but for conveying a sense of unease in the air, it was the music that brought the atmosphere home.And there was a lot to be uneasy about as this second series closed, even if the more depressed narrative of the opener seemed rather behind us. The Twenties have brought Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.Visual artists Forsyth and Pollard’s first Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“There goes my hero,” sang the Foo Fighters at the end of the Invictus Games last night. True to form, the Foo Fighters’ performance was a barrage of energy and goodwill, which closed the games - characterised by much the same - on an all-round high. Rather touchingly, and with a sensitivity to context not all rockers are known for, the band had selected songs from their catalogue which best reflected the spirit of commitment, resolution and endurance that the games were celebrating.The Olympic Park appeared to be full to the rafters - or to Anish Kapoor’s peculiar red spiral, which is the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that Nash saw the sunflower as a symbol for the soul, turning to the sun; indeed one of his last paintings was “Solstice of the Sunflower”.The final phrase Graham-Dixon used about this highly literate and intelligent artist was that he had been haunted by life, haunted by death, and by the ghosts of war. Unusually, Nash was an official war artist in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
From one great operatic storm to another. 2014 opened at English National Opera with David Alden’s Peter Grimes, gale-tossed and wet with sea-spray, and now the director turns his attention to Verdi’s Otello. Restlessly urgent, Edward Gardner’s opening assaulted us with timpani thunderclaps, stabbing into the silent auditorium as Otello himself would do just a few hours later. Tragedy is written into the musical fabric of Verdi’s opera, and in Alden’s new production we have a pervasive emotional horror that matches it blow for blow.2014 marks Alden’s 30th year working with ENO. Anyone feeling Read more ...