Reviews
aleks.sierz
This venue continues its promotion of American drama with another prize-winning play from across the pond. Hot on the heels of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, with its casting of Emila Fox, comes this play by David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his critically acclaimed Rabbit Hole, which also earned several Tony Award nominations and a film adaptation with Nicole Kidman. For Good People, Hampstead has tempted national treasure and Olivier Award-winning actress Imelda Staunton to play the lead.This is that rare thing — an American play about classHer character Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first room of Ruin Lust is a knockout. Three large-scale pictures indicate the enduring fascination that ruins have held for artists over the centuries. John Martin’s apocalyptic view of Vesuvius smothering Pompeii in a vast cloud of volcanic ash (main picture) is like a vision of Hell. The engulfing dust storm is shaped like a fiery grotto – seductive yet repellent. In its fleshy recesses, the erupting volcano appears like a fire-spurting nipple, while the flames reflected in the water tinge the sea blood red, making it impossible to distinguish the actual waves from the lava swamping Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The beautifully adorned Grand Budapest Hotel is not only home to the fastidious, foul-mouthed concierge Gustave H. and his bellboy and confidante Zero but to a myriad of other fantastic characters. This is director Wes Anderson's candy coloured ode to the art of storytelling, and his tribute to the actors he's collaborated with and strong friendships he's forged via his illustrious filmmaking career. Anderson's eighth film is a warming, welcoming and, of course, whimsical comedy caper which whizzes by at a break-neck pace and is gifted with his signature air of melancholy.This hotel is Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Whether fingerprint or labyrinth, the swirly logo for Marrakech Biennale 5 feels apt. The festival has left its mark upon the city. It questions Moroccan notions of identity. And, going by the tagline, “Where are we now?” it reflects the ease with which you can get lost in this rich and bewildering land.But the artists in this 10-year-old event, know their way round North Africa. Almost a quarter of the 43 participants are from Morocco. Many more have strong links with the region. And the majority of works are site-specific, that is, fully orientated to the five main venues.Curator Hicham Read more ...
David Nice
Roll up, roll up, to hear Juan Diego Flórez deliver his nine cheek-by-jowl top Cs in the umpteenth performance of Laurent Pelly’s slick, often funny Donizetti comedy. Does the whole thing still fizz? Only up to a point in Christian Räth's revival. Yet I’d still rather see this – or Don Pasquale, or L’elisir d’amore – any number of times than endure any more of the composer’s “unjustly neglected” tinpot tragedies.Let’s be fair: Covent Garden’s ever-personable Director of Opera Kasper Holten warned us that Patrizia Ciofi was recovering from a virus. And that may have explained the cloudy middle Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If ever an Oscar ceremony pointed to the fundamentally schizoid nature these days of Hollywood’s defining love-in, the 86th annual Academy Awards was it. On the one hand, you had an out-gay host in Ellen DeGeneres taking selfies, ordering pizza, and generally trying to treat the crowd at the Dolby auditorium as an extension of her own funky, vaguely edgy persona.On the other, you had a running theme about heroism in the movies that landed as limply as leading actor Matthew McConaughey’s cringe-making acceptance speech, an extended paean to God and to the actor himself that seemed utterly Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A series about the bizarre shenanigans of a family of ludicrous aristocrats would seem an unlikely hit for 21st-century Sunday night telly. It worked for ITV’s Downton Abbey, though, and while that’s off air, BBC One is glueing over five million to the settee with Blandings, its adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s tales of the dotty Lord Emsworth, and his prize sow, the Empress. We're already well into the second series, with quite a roster of comic acting talent visiting Blandings Castle and threatening each week to destroy Lord Emsworth’s patch of bumbling, piggy Eden. In places, it’s a lot of fun Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
On paper this sounded promising: a gothicky song-cycle of historical London and the dark, seamy side of the city, performed a stone’s throw from where they do Jack the Ripper tours. Lead performers were Marc Almond, whose distinctive voice we have loved for 30 years, ever since his pervy soul debut with Soft Cell, and John Harle, a more than useful jazzy classicist who is often original and known for his TV theme tunes. Thown in the mix was some Iain Sinclair psycho-geography. An intriguing combination with a positively reviewed album The Tyburn Tree, of which this show was a presentation. Read more ...
Naima Khan
From the creators of the much-lauded The Oh F*ck Moment comes I Wish I Was Lonely, a participatory look at modern communication and the human psyche. Flouting the rules of mainstream theatre, this by turns poetic yet provocative piece encourages the audience to keep all mobile phones on (imagine!), to answer whatever calls may come through, and even to use Twitter and Facebook to our hearts' delight. And having provided our mobile numbers on a piece of card, we receive the number of an anonymous member of the audience in return. So begins a newly fragile, temporary connection to a stranger we Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“Goya!” I scribbled enthusiastically in the first moments of La Pepa. “Dos de Mayo! Art as witness to history!” Despite the clichéd use of flickering strobes and a stock “chaotic” soundtrack of shouts and crashes, this opening scene purporting to represent the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1812, known in Britain as the Peninsular Wars) reminded me of the Spanish painter’s testimonies in oil to the horror and grandeur of that war; as shafts of yellow side-light pierced the blackness, unknown arms were flung up in the pose of the Tres de Mayo's doomed revolutionary before a firing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title, The Great War in Portraits makes very plain its use of portraiture as a lens through which to view this earth-shattering conflict, but any anxieties about its handling of such a tricky approach are quickly assuaged.The exhibition begins with Jacob Epstein’s Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill, 1915-16 (pictured right), a sculpture that still shocks Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...