Reviews
Tom Birchenough
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”It was an idea that obviously came to fascinate Wenders, and he has been integral in the process of expanding it into Cathedrals of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Old sins, the saying goes, cast long shadows. These are nothing, however, to the shadows cast by old productions. Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto looms larger than most in this regard – a lowering giant of directorial inspiration, with 30 years in rep and as close to cult status as opera gets. As Christopher Alden’s new Rigoletto made his way through the darkened streets yesterday more than just assassins lurked in the shadows.I say new, but of course this Rigoletto has almost as long and tortured a history as Verdi’s hero. It started life back in 2000 at Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Abandoned Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Strypes broke through initially with an amped-up version of the blues, akin to the sounds of the early Sixties London blues rock explosion that gave us the Rolling Stones. Tonight proved that they’ve since taken a Tardis through the decades - although no further than 1992 or so - but have kept fast hold of their smash’n’grab garage band ethos. Where bands such as Foals and Everything Everything explore futurist technology in a rather fussy, uninspiring manner, these Irish teenagers engage with the past in a way that’s visceral and hugely exciting.Clad in black suits with white shirts and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first of three Royal Festival Hall concerts during the first half of 2014 from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Charles Dutoit, all three programmes consisting entirely of French music. The other two will be in May. In between the Swiss-born conductor, a sprightly 77-year-old, will have picked up a Lifetime Achievement gong at the International Classical Music Awards in Warsaw.The relationship between the RPO and Dutoit seems to work well, not least because the repertoire he is working with them on is abolutely his home territory. These were the works Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crikey. Line of Duty was pumping dangerous levels of octane first time round. For this new series we’re in for an overdose. After one hour the body count is racking up: 3 coppers (shot), 1 witness under protection (burned to a crisp), AN Other (defenestrated). Plus that lovely soft Keeley Hawes has been waterboarded in the lav and has assaulted a noisy neighbour with a wine bottle. If it’s cheering up you need, best retreat to Call the Midwife, where they have window latches you can trust.Series creator Jed Mercurio is proud to deliver a cop show that cops don’t have to watch with curled toes Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The makers of 8 Minutes Idle have a kickstarter campaign to thank for the cinema release of their offbeat comedy, which was made in 2012 but has sat on the shelf since. It's a charming (perhaps knowingly so) low-budget romcom, adapted from his novel of the same title by Matt Thorne with Nicholas Blincoe, and directed with a light touch by Mark Simon Hewis.It covers an awful but life-changing week in the life of Dan (the ever wonderful Tom Hughes, a huge star in the making), a young call-centre worker in Bristol who's drifting through life by way of emotional inertia. On Monday morning his mum Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Many successful writers turn to their pens having failed miserably at everything else. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and subject of Sky Atlantic’s new mini-series, spent all of his youth failing, but unlike literary contemporaries Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, failure seems to have been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The side effects of a racy lifestyle required his withdrawal from both Eton and Sandhurst, while a brief engagement, to the exquisitely titled Monique Panchaud de Bottomes, had to be quashed by his well-connected but overbearing mother.Professional life Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Stellan Skarsgård is having a good Berlinale. The veteran Swedish actor proved the main calming influence in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volume One (***), which the Berlin festival screened as a world premiere in the director’s version, running at 145 minutes. That’s about 25 minutes more than the UK will be seeing from 21 February, when both parts of the work will be released. There are no prizes for guessing which scenes seen in Berlin won’t make it to your local screen, on grounds of decency – though there will be for spotting the exact moments when, and how, body-doubles were cut into Read more ...
fisun.guner
Some artists are diminished by major retrospectives, including those artists we consider great. A gap opens up between what you see and what you hear, which is why you can never judge work with your ears, or at least your ears and nothing else. The reassessment – largely subjective, but hopefully an informed and considered subjective – shouldn’t come about because of a few bad or indifferent works, or on the evidence of a gradual failing of powers (even giants sleep, and while the well of creativity may be deep it’s rarely never-ending), but when a whole body of work that follows the arc of a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The trend of celebrating anniversaries by digging out old classics might suggest that no good new plays are being written, but at least it gives us the chance to re-assess their worth. Theatre Royal Stratford East, the legendary Joan Littlewood’s old venue, presents a new production of Oh What a Lovely War in its 60th anniversary year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the First World War. This classic, first staged in 1963, is a powerful anti-war tract — but is there any more to it than a flamboyantly theatrical humanity?The idea for the musical originally came from BBC producer Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us romance with added zombies.However, recent efforts The Decoy Bride, Not Another Happy Ending, I Give It a Year and About Time Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life as they know it has come to an end from their privileged life high in a luxury Melbourne apartment. Whether they are bickering about how the New Yorker has gone downhill or despairing about terrorism, they remain insulated from the world by their own self-absorption.The stoppage of the title directly refers to the electricity, water, telephone line, mobile network and internet. The baser side of these Read more ...