Reviews
Matthew Wright
The emergence of artists’ collectives, bristling with idealism and wacky manifestoes, is usually a sign of a vigorous cultural scene. London’s new improvised music scene enjoys several successful examples, of which Loop is perhaps the most prominent. Last night’s Loop club night at the Vortex showed the idea at its best, combining new and established acts across a range of genres.There was - in homage to Valentine’s Day? - something old, something new, plenty that was borrowed, and even something blue. The new act was the band of percussionist Bex Burch, who plays the gyilli, a Ghanaian Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Barbican’s ongoing season of baroque operas and oratorios has been a mixed bag. Most recently The Sixteen’s Jephtha was a rather lacklustre affair, leaving me nervous of committing to the many hours of Handel’s beautiful (but protracted) Theodora. But I needn’t have worried. Harry Bicket and The English Concert gave this late work all the pep and personality that was so lacking last week, driving it through its rather uneven acts to a conclusion of sudden pathos and beauty.It helped that Bicket had booked a dream-team of soloists, led by Rosemary Joshua as chilly heroine Theodora Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Several hundred photographs, of varying scales and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints in superb tones of greys blacks and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years.Stardust is the title given to this self-selected retrospective, three years in the making, the photographer his own curator, and the word neatly encapsulates the fascinating conundrum of photography itself. As Bailey himself puts it, “it’s not the camera that takes the picture, it’s the person” and these photographs are as much about Bailey as his subject Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s an improbable fact worthy of five minutes’ ironic banter that there are so many panel shows presenting five minutes’ ironic banter on a series of improbable facts. Lee Mack, presenter of Sky 1’s new take on the genre, Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, has been a team captain on BBC One’s Would I Lie to You? for the past six years, so has had the time to get his head round the most improbably amusing facts. If your mind craves even more improbable facts, there’s always Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth, chaired by David Mitchell, Mack’s opposing captain on Would I Lie to You? Mack and Mitchell could Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Is it odd that, in a bill containing an achingly contemporary première and a classic meditation on the First World War, a pastel-painted present for the Queen Mother’s birthday should race away with the honours?Not if it was by Frederick Ashton, the Royal Ballet’s founder-choreographer. He’s been rather an undersung genius since his death, but maybe last night will tip the balance towards him again in the capacity crowd stakes, for his plotless Rhapsody (1980) was the standout piece in the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill. Much of the credit goes to Steven McRae, who danced his heart Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
José Padilha’s glossy reimagining of RoboCop is entertaining but mostly forgettable. Geared towards the profitable 12A market, its good looking but illogical action sequences are no replacement for the grimy, grubby and magnificently realised dystopian world from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 scathing satire.Just like Verhoeven did back in the 1980s, Padilha is making his way into the Hollywood arena thanks to his adept hand at fast paced action sequences, which can be witnessed in his superb Elite Squad films. Unlike in Verhoeven’s version however, the screenplay penned by newcomer Joshua Zetumer Read more ...
mark.kidel
Plunging into the lonely vortex of the long distance web wanker isn’t obviously gripping theatre, but Chris Goode’s seventy-minute descent into tawdry solitude and digital fantasy doesn’t do too badly.Nothing much happens on stage, as John, a wannabe erotic science-fiction writer, communes with the audience as well as with Carlos, a Los Angeles- based model who plies his trade on a porn site and chat room. As he talks to us spectators, we become implicated in uneasy voyeurism, alleviated by wry and sometimes intentionally facile banter, as if John were desperately trying to make us Read more ...
David Nice
This is more an excuse for celebration than a review. Six years after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 – the birth year we were marking last night – I rolled up in a foggy Edinburgh one February day and chose it as my alma mater on the strength especially of one concert which showed what musical life in the city might be like: trumpeter John Wilbraham playing Bach and Handel with the SCO under Roderick Brydon. I fell in love with the venue, the Queen’s Hall, as much as the orchestra. In 1982 I proudly took on the role of the SCO’s student publicity officer. It’s a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Andy Plaice
“I like it when you’re a bastard,” George Gently growled at his sidekick, halfway into the first episode of this sixth series set in 1960s Northumberland, reassuring us that the partnership is very much back on when all appeared to be lost the last time around. And what a terrific opener it proved to be.The cliffhanger for series five left the inspector (Martin Shaw) and his Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) at the hands of a gunman in Durham Cathedral. Both were shot – in Bacchus’s case emotionally shot too – and we picked them up a year later trying to resurrect their working Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Dungeon Keeper is a mobile conversion of the classic PC strategy game that manages to take every fun element from the original and firewalls it behind a 'Free to Play' mechanic designed purely to nag you into handing over surprisingly large sums money. Let's lay this out from the start - it is an abomination; It is a dark pit of anti-fun; It is the hand that takes.The original Dungeon Keeper was a huge hit in the late Nineties. The player must stock a dungeon (of the ...& Dragons variety) full of monsters, traps and other dungeon-y paraphenalia in order to stop any heroes who might decide Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Delve into the personal life of Charles Dickens and she emerges, revealing another side of an author whose stories seem so wholesome. According to The Invisible Woman author Claire Tomalin, Ralph Fiennes’ film about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is very different from the book upon which it is based. Scripted by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady and Shame), The Invisible Woman, in which Fiennes stars and well as directs, gives us a more complex view of Dickens-as-man, albeit through a dark lens, literally and metaphorically.Ellen Lawless Ternan (Felicity Jones) lived from 1839 to 1914, yet almost Read more ...