Reviews
Jasper Rees
The act of learning music, in a choir or an orchestra, rounds out a young person. What are the benefits again? All together now: improved social skills, concentration, discipline, self-esteem, numeracy, behaviour, confidence. Music makes you better. Society at large would benefit from investing in music education. It sort of beggars belief that this argument still has to be made. Meanwhile it would seem the DoE's idealogues and OFSTED's bean counters are inadvertently bent on beggaring the futures of British youth.You can’t get a decent music lesson in every British primary school, not if St Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?Rasoulof has had plenty of problems with the regime in his native country over the years, including arrest back in 2010, in the same campaign that saw his fellow director Jafar Panahi imprisoned and later banned from working in cinema. Just as Panahi responded to those circumstances by working outside any official structures with his This Is Not a Film, so Rasoulof made Manuscripts…, which arrived at Cannes last year shrouded in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Time doesn’t take any of the edge off Sam Shepard’s rollicking reflection on the dichotomy of America, the tussle between the myth and the dream, represented by two warring brothers trapped with an idea for a bad film in a sweltering California condominium. Written in 1980, it’s still brilliantly strange, raucously funny, rippling with resonance.Directed by Phillip Breen, this production first aired in Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre last year. It’s a very good fit for the Tricycle, whose intimacy heightens our sense of eavesdropping on one helluva sibling spat.Austin (Eugene O’Hare) is a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time that In the Club reached its final episode, fans of Kay Mellor’s pregnancy-pals drama were probably ready for a happy-ever-after. Across six eventful hours we had seen car crashes, assaults, social workers, a bank robbery and Jill Halfpenny giving birth in a car park. We’d also witnessed the usually glacial Hermione Norris living off wine and pizza in a student flat for weeks before popping out one of the healthiest babies of the series - although by that stage it was hardly the least realistic plot development.But to concentrate on the drama - and boy, was there drama - was, I Read more ...
geoff brown
Is there something about the start of a new cultural season, or indeed the Proms, that make classical music’s conductors rush to jump ship? Consider this. Last Friday, two days before his pair of Prom concerts with his American outfit, the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, so diffident on the outside, resigned from his important European post as the Vienna State Opera’s music director with immediate effect. Irreconcilable artistic differences were cited. Then on Monday morning, the day after fronting the patchily effective Proms debut of Qatar’s multi-national, peace-loving trophy Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Artist and critic Matthew Collings purported to set out the rules of abstraction through taking the viewer on a very bumpy ride through 20th century painting, with a nod to Cézanne to get us started. He set the scene by telling us that abstraction as a concept in art has been around for 100 years and early on we were presented with a genuine surprise: the large canvases, in relatively soothing colours, of freehand geometric forms that appeared wholly abstract by the almost totally unknown female – yes, female – Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint, from 1907.The classic dating for abstraction in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The frozen north of Norway seems an unlikely spot for a Serbian drug gang to be operating alongside a local mob, but this is the world which snow-plough driver Nils meets head on when avenging the death of his son. Throw in larger-than-life characters, cartoonish but very strong violence and a beautiful snowy backdrop and the result is the Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, a revenge drama which doles out its thrills at a pace in total contrast to the bleak serenity of the landscape which defines this part of the world.This formula has been seen before, most notably in the Norwegian Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There is a moment in Breeders when Ben Ockrent appears to be channelling Dennis Kelly’s chilling Utopia. Never mind the topical issue of homosexual parenting – should we even have children at all? Surely, argues Jemima Rooper’s eco-warrior Sharon, we would simply be bringing more people into a world that we have all but destroyed? Ockrent toys with that arresting darkness, before dismissing it in another droll one-liner. Sharon is really covering other insecurities; of course we should all cherish the desire to procreate.It’s a strange dodge – one of several – in a play that is otherwise Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Royal Opera House is on fire this month. Not literally (unless someone knocks over the flaming braziers outside) but with the varied illuminations of the Deloitte Ignite Festival, co-curated by the Royal Ballet and Minna Moore Ede of the National Gallery. The theme this year is Myth, and specifically Leda's rape by Zeus in swan form, and Prometheus's gift of fire to humanity. Artworks dealing with these two stories, or with swans and fire more generally, are to be seen all over the building, which this weekend was open during the day for a variety of public events, from film screenings to Read more ...
ellin.stein
Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the US Marines to high school, juvenile court, and the American Ballet Theater. His latest, At Berkeley, is an in-depth exploration of the University of California’s San Francisco Bay Area outpost (UC is made up of several self-contained component universities distributed across the state, with Berkeley the jewel in the crown).Expecting anyone who isn Read more ...
Heather Neill
There are 15 characters in Robert McLellan's quirky 1948 comedy, but the star is the language most of them speak. To mark the referendum later this month, the Finborough is mounting a season of Scottish work, including a trio of classics, under the title "Scotland Decides 2014/Tha Alba A'Taghadh 2014". While the linguistic medium of The Flouers o'Edinburgh is more accessible than this might suggest - Scots rather than Gaelic - it nevertheless requires a Southerner to make some effort to tune in.
Scots is more than a dialect of English and yet not a separate language. By the time the play is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the opening sequence he set the scene, biking straight across – and not at the traffic lights, either – the Cromwell Road to get to the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the film is timed to preview the major show “Constable: The Making of a Master” that there opens on September 20. That museum has the largest collection of Constable, which Read more ...