Reviews
joe.muggs
In a world where everyone is expected to be a “brand”, Gilles Peterson sets some very interesting precedents. Probably best known as a radio DJ – currently on BBC 6 Music, plus his globally syndicated Worldwide show – he also remains as in demand to play in clubs as at any time in his 25-year career, he runs the Brownswood label, and has his own Worldwide Festival, currently with winter and summer editions in different locations in France plus four years running in Singapore and one in Shanghai. And somehow his individual personality remains at the heart of all of this.His annual award show Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You don't have to know the difference between Dennis Wise (who is referenced during it) and Ernie Wise (who is not) to be immensely gripped by The Pass, the scorching new Royal Court play that traffics ostensibly in the world of football only to widen out into as corrosive a study in psychic implosion and self-destruction as the London theatre has seen in an age. Factor in a star performance from onetime History Boys student Russell Tovey that this actor's career to this point has in no way suggested, and one finds an early candidate for both the most surprising production of the year and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
We return to the dramatised Selfridges five years after the opening of the store that changed the face of British shopping - and yet, despite proving those who doomed his enterprise to failure wrong, the smile on its eponymous owner’s face is as false as his moustache is magnificent. Although Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) was able to turn on the charm for visiting journalists in tonight’s series opener, the absence of his wife and daughters - back home in the US where the girls, we are told, were finishing school - cast a shade over the celebrations.Although Rose (Frances O’Connor) did Read more ...
David Benedict
It’s costume drama meets adventure story, it’s got smouldering manhood and heaving-bosomed women with sex, swordfights, politicking and even beautifully lit Prague doubling for 17th-century Paris, but the question hanging over the BBC’s lavish new Sunday-night primetime series The Musketeers is: what exactly is it? And then Hugo Speer’s Captain Treville loses patience and barks: “You three, my office, NOW!” and it hits you: this is Charlie’s Angels in thigh-length boots.Okay, we’re not in Seventies LA but there’s almost as much product on the (artfully arranged) hair of our three heroes who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If it ain't broke don't fix it, and writer Heidi Thomas obviously has no intention of tinkering with the Call the Midwife formula. Virtually nothing has changed, except that there's a new character, Sister Winifred, while Chummy (Miranda Hart) is now living with her husband PC Noakes (Ben Caplan) and has a baby son. However, you can't keep a born midwife down, and Chummy's return to the Nonnatus House mothership by the end of the episode was a foregone conclusion.To be fair, the scenery has been altered slightly, because the nuns and midwives have moved out of the old Nonnatus House into a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Ah, Giselle. Despite being cobbled together from a huge stack of 19th-century literary and dramatic tropes – fans of La Sylphide, Robert le Diable, Lucia di Lammermoor, Walter Scott and German Romanticism will feel right at home – and having a score from Adolphe Adam that is definitely not in the first league of ballet music, Giselle is endlessly compelling: the ballet sticks in your mind. The miraculously-intact 19th-century choreography of the second act is part of the attraction, but so is the character of Giselle, the peasant girl who, seduced and betrayed by a nobleman in disguise, kills Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Small Faces: Here Comes the Nice - The Immediate YearsWhen theartsdesk last covered Small Faces’ reissues in May 2012, the review concluded “the Deluxe Editions are probably (who knows what might lurk in obscure archives?) the last word on these albums.” As anticipated and as revealed by this box set, more did indeed lurk in obscure archives. Moreover, the appearance of Here Comes the Nice calls into question just what half of those Deluxe Editions of the band’s four albums used as their sonic source materials. This new release boasts that it is “all sourced and remastered from recently Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Unlike television, with its series of Spooks and Homeland, theatre has more or less ignored the secret services. For reasons of snobbery (thrillers are somehow beneath the interest of young playwrights) or because of playwriting clichés (write what you know is difficult in the secret world, where no one really knows what’s going on), this is a relatively unexplored area. But in the era of Wiki-leaks and Edward Snowden, surely few subjects could be more timely?The story of Ciphers begins with a dead body. Justine, employed by the secret services, is found lifeless, having apparently committed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Kearns introduces himself as himself as he comes on stage then, very carefully - tenderly almost - he lays out a blonde wig, a pair of women's high-heeled shoes and a skimpy dress on the floor. They stay there until the final segment of his show, untouched and without mention. He puts on a ridiculous oversize tonsure wig and a pair of joke-shop false teeth. Oh and he is wearing a horse costume, and “rides” Trigger as he performs the first bit of the show - which he tells us is about "disguise, expectations and failures".Kearns won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards best newcomer gong for this, Read more ...
fisun.guner
What once appeared daring and transgressive will often barely raise an eyebrow given time. This much is obvious – or at least up to a point, since much avant-garde art continues to challenge and/or bemuse well into the 21st century. But the reverse can also be true. What was once produced as a work typical of its time can now make us feel very uncomfortable. Hannah Höch was a member of Berlin Dada in the years immediately following the First World War. These were the Weimar years in which artists who were later denounced as degenerate by the Nazi regime produced scabrous attacks on Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The first half of this concert was quite the family affair: Martinů’s Concerto for Two Pianos featuring the eternally youthful Katia and Marielle Labèque, with the latter’s husband Semyon Bychkov conducting.Any natural rapport took a while to manifest itself, though much of that should be laid at the composer’s door – the first movement of this curious piece favours constant and rather directionless motion over more traditionally concerto-like interplay. The result is a thick texture, with lots going on in the middle but the whole somehow failing to sound lush. The second Read more ...
Simon Munk
Set in an icy, fantasy Norse-influenced world, with an art style based on the 1950s work of Disney artist Eyvind Earle, The Banner Saga is immediately, aesthetically, vastly different from most videogame fare. But it's not just in visuals that it strikes out.The Banner Saga's key innovation is in making the player feel far less heroic. This isn't about saving the universe, it's about surviving the next battle.In the icy lands where the game is set the sun has stopped moving, the gods are long dead and to cap it off humanity and their semi-allies, a race of horned giants called the varl, are Read more ...