Reviews
aleks.sierz
There is so much public anxiety about paedophiles on the internet that it’s surprising that so few plays tackle the issue. Now Los Angeles playwright Jennifer Haley brings her new play on the subject, which won the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, to London after winning awards in the States. She takes a sci-fi approach: in the near future the internet has evolved into the Nether, a virtual zone in which all the senses can be stimulated — and this is a potential paradise for paedophiles.Here is the set up: Sims is a successful businessman who has developed the Hideaway (a future version of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you’ve reached the top of your profession and then spent twenty years there, retiring is going to be hard. It will be many times harder if, like New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, you were only twenty-four when you reached that rank, and only in your mid-forties when injuries came calling and roles started to fall away - unwelcome signs that the end of a classical ballet career is nigh.With this tour of four new duets created especially for her, Whelan is experimenting with a new career as a freelance contemporary dancer. This is not a move made by many retiring ballerinas, since Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For all it’s a balmy July here, the litany of appalling news from the world’s conflict zones will have left many of us feeling less than summery at heart. In that frame of mind, you might wonder whether Coppélia, English National Ballet’s latest production, is quite what you want to see. We are speaking, after all, of a frothy 19th-century comic ballet, full of charading silliness, populated by unfeasibly cheerful peasants, and ending happily with the all-too-predictable wedding. Sharp social commentary – or existential comfort – it ain’t.But ENB has several treasures on its hands that make Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Forties and Fifties, seen through the eyes of Shostakovich and the Pet Shop Boys, were the historical centre of gravity for last night’s courageously broad Proms programme. Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2, a gently serialist folk exploration from 1937-8, introduced the era, with the Soviet composer’s 10th Symphony and the Pet Shop Boys’ retro biography of Alan Turing (**) offering markedly contrasting interpretations through their depictions of Stalin and the Enigma-decoding, convicted homosexual mathematician.Tavener’s Gnosis, opening Prom 7 (****), was the exception. Through a setting of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Comedy, and a bit with a dog.” That’s what audiences really want according to the hapless would-be impresario Mr Henslowe, and that’s certainly what they get in Lee Hall’s new stage adaptation of John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love – several bits with a dog, in fact.There was a time when film-makers had it all their own way, pilfering freely from literature in a process which was entirely one-way. But trends have turned, and now you’re more likely to see the show-of-the-film than the film-of-the-book. Currently in the West End you can watch Dirty Dancing, The Commitments and The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is an opening ceremony for? For the taste gendarmerie on Twitter, it’s a juicy chance to fall on the festivities like a pack of wolves and tear the thing to shreds. For homegrown celebrities now domiciled far from the host country, it’s a chance to reaffirm vows of patriotism in public. For everyone else, it’s a party attended by some ridiculously beautiful athletes, plus the codgers of the bowls team.Bombastic? Certainly. Bloated? For sure. Tacky? Hell yes. Any ceremony featuring John Barrowman and Susan Boyle is hardly calculated to score maximum points for artistic impression. Even Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
There’s so much high drama and scandal surrounding the production of Orson Welles’ feverish cruise through the dark side of human nature it’s no surprise the resulting film is a bizarre labyrinthine of twists and tightly strung lunacy. Welles’s exorcism of personal and professional demons in this impassioned and witty tale of moral bankruptcy remains as compelling and confounding today as it was back in 1948.Already on the fringes of Hollywood, Welles got himself into considerable debt on the making of Around the World in 80 Days, and in a desperate move contacted Henry Cohn, head of Columbia Read more ...
aleks.sierz
While it is something of a cliché to be reminded that forgetting the past is a sure way of repeating it, the problems of the Middle East are so acute that this thought might be worth taking seriously. In Holy Warriors, playwright David Eldridge’s new look at the struggle for Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Middle Ages to the present day, the scope is ambitious and the subject matter as timely as can be. But is the play any good?Subtitled “a fantasia on the Third Crusade and the history of violent struggle in the Holy Lands”, the play is an epic that sweeps all before it. Here is Saladin Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Grecian palace on a studio lot. Gods wander about among the plywood and polystyrene looking deific. As a child is raised to the heavens a voice(over) is heard to intone the following legend.Oracle: You don’t want to believe those myths you’ve read in boys’ own books about the heroes of ancient times. That Roger Lancelyn Green is so tediously on-message. Take the dozen labours of the demi-god Hercules…Young mother of Hercules (from the pages of Playboy): Wait up while I flash a 3D breast at everyone's goggles, but just once or we'll never get our PG rating. Now let’s get on with the retarded Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
If last year’s Ring cycle triumphantly proved that world-class opera can be done at the Albert Hall, this Rosenkavalier suggests that the less epic end of the repertoire isn’t such a sure thing. That is not to say that this performance was dud, far from it; rather that its few problems were venue related. Balance was the main issue, though Robin Ticciati did a great job of whipping the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a passionate frenzy in the Prelude and then taking things down a notch and keeping them there to avoid engulfing the voices. The audience will have had a different experience Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Purge is the night each year when the US government turns off the law and lets mayhem rule, allowing crimes including murder and rape. Just let it all out of your system, citizens, goes the official logic, and crime on the other 364 days will plummet.Writer-director James DeMonaco’s concept in the original, box office-topping The Purge limited the action to a home invasion in the suburbs, and promised all sorts of illicit nastiness. But as this expansive sequel proves, he’s more interested in the social implications of the people becoming their own bread and circus. With the New Founding Read more ...
Heather Neill
We know how the story ends, but then so did Euripides' first audience in Athens in 431 BC. Medea was already a familiar character of myth, a sorceress whose ungovernable passion for Jason led her to commit horrible murders when he abandoned her for another woman. Now, as in the Golden Age of Greek drama, the chief interest is in the way the tale is told. And the National Theatre has assembled quite a team for the purpose.Ben Power, writer of this version, and Carrie Cracknell, director, have both dealt with the classics in innovative ways before. Power's A Tender Thing retold Romeo and Juliet Read more ...