Reviews
Hanna Weibye
"Be careful what you wish for," fairy tales teach us. After I wished in December for more bite in Scottish Ballet’s saccharine Hansel and Gretel, along comes this revival of Liam Scarlett’s 2013 version of the same story for the Royal Ballet. Depicting as it does child neglect, domestic violence, paedophilia, murder, psychosis and suicide, Scarlett’s Hansel and Gretel has bite all right.Dark is an understatement here, in the black cavernous underground space of the Linbury Studio Theatre. Jon Bausor’s highly effective set bisects the stalls, bringing the audience right into Hansel and Gretel’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Holst: The Hymn of Jesus, Delius: Sea Drift, Cynara Roderick Williams (baritone), Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir, Hallé Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)Surprising musical effects are often achieved with relatively simple means. Holst's Hymn of Jesus contains several striking moments. Such as the bold modulation during the full chorus's “Glory to Thee, Father!” at the beginning of the second part. It could suggest a novice composer fiddling aimlessly with a sequence of unrelated major triads, but here it'll have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. Holst's ecstatic setting of Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Such is the level of confidence that the Silent Witness producers have in their new ensemble that star turn Emilia Fox barely lifted a scalpel in the latest instalment of the BBC’s long-running crime series. Either that or she needed a night or two off, and who could blame her? It's now in its 17th series, and Fox has stuck it out for more than half of them. And with four dead bodies to look at this week, it’s a high pressure job that you’re just bound to take home with you.So step forward the other lot: new guy Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern), research whiz Clarissa Mullery (Liz Carr Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Anyone familiar with Mark Kermode’s reviewing will already have heard his adulation of Steve McQueen’s latest film, 12 Years a Slave. An edition of The Culture Show dedicated to McQueen’s career could, then, have gone a bit weak at the knees in veneration. Instead, it roamed freely, making many intelligent connections across McQueen’s restless artistic journey from Turner Prize-winning video artist to hotly tipped Oscar shoo-in.That’s just one of the very many ways in which McQueen breaks new ground, in what’s becoming a really remarkable career. Rather than letting his artistic success Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There are occasions when just one band isn’t enough. Hence the rare experience of the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic joining forces for a performance, in the Strauss’s Voice series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, of An Alpine Symphony under Juanjo Mena. With around 130 players at his command, on stage and off, along with wind and thunder machines, xylophone, castanets, cowbells and other paraphernalia, Mena had the palette for vividly bringing out all the richness of the orchestral colour.Since this was Strauss’s last tone-poem, 15 years in the making since a day Read more ...
james.woodall
Sam Mendes thinks King Lear is a bigger play than it is. In a new staging he directs at the National Theatre, he wants it to be about a convulsion of nations, a reordering of borders, bombing populations. When Lear arrives to carve his kingdom into three - entirely in his own self-interest, not his daughters’ (in the play) - over 30 soldiers are stood to attention rear stage. The illusion suggests 300 and proposes that this is a ruler whose every command is enforced by the mere shouldering of hundreds of guns. Shakespeare’s Lear is in charge, or his “authority” (as Kent states), is. No one Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The best thing about Warpaint is their rhythm section. The all-female LA quartet have received critical plaudits for both their albums, wisely releasing their latest eponymous collection in the dead zone of January, maximizing media attention (why don’t more bands do this? It was the making of the Scissor Sisters back in 2004). The foursome are determinedly un-showbiz, letting their music do the talking and dealing in tasty power-femme sound-bites. In this they are admirable but their music, a woozy amalgam of the Cocteau Twins and grunge, lacks actual songs (although there are three catchy Read more ...
peter.quinn
Featuring two of the most celebrated bands in traditional Irish music, this mouth-watering double bill as part of the ninth Temple Bar TradFest drew a capacity crowd to St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. With incredibly tight tune playing, pinpoint phrasing and a powerhouse backing section, Frankie Gavin & De Dannan kicked things off in dramatic fashion. By the time fiddle player Gavin launched into “The Wild Irishman”, his impressive bow work was sending clouds of rosin flying off in all directions. The second set of tunes, three barndances (including the great “Lucy Farr's”) plus another Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
For lovers of PS2-era games, the conversion of titles like GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City to mobile platforms has delivered a welcome dose of retro-gaming thrills, but for real fans of Rockstar's crime epics, a visit to San Andreas is the one they have been waiting for. The eighth game in the GTA series was a big step forward in terms of the explorable area and the sheer number of things you could do in the game. From the slums of Los Santos to the gambling palaces of Las Venturas (the game's equivalent of Vegas), GTA: SA feels like a living world and one where you could happily spend hours Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Assuming you care at all, your favourite incarnation of Tom Clancy's industrious CIA agent Jack Ryan is probably Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Before him came Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, and afterwards there was Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears.But Affleck's Ryan was a dozen years ago, enough of a gap to give fresh-faced new boy Chris Pine (who has also rebooted Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk) some space to put his personal stamp on the role. This new episode is a kind of Ryan prequel, a story created by screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Feminism suddenly seems to be all the rage in London theatre. Yesterday, I reviewed Nick Payne’s Blurred Lines, and tonight I saw this show by American provocateur Gina Gionfriddo, whose Becky Shaw was at the Almeida three years ago. This current show is a light comedy, with some good bright lines, an entertainment that takes several pauses in which ideas are expounded and discussed. It’s a bit like being back in college: a mix of laughs and study.The set-up has an admirable clarity: two former college room-mates meet up again after some two decades apart. Catherine is now a hot academic who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In Irish mythology, a stray sod is an enchanted piece of grass that, if stepped on, leaves a person feeling disorientated and lost, even in familiar surroundings. Although there's no reference to this in Tommy Tiernan's new show, Stray Sod, there's plenty of self-knowing stage Irishness – even, briefly, Oirishness – as he delivers a riveting 80 minutes of comedy that's a sort of state-of-the-nation address about his home country.Tiernan won the 1998 Perrier (now Edinburgh Comedy) award in 1998 for an intricately woven and beautifully delivered tale based on his Irish Catholic childhood; Read more ...