Reviews
Jasper Rees
Sarah Millican’s career blossomed on the back of a divorce. Her husband upped sticks after seven years of marriage when she was 29. The rage and sorrow catapulted an innately funny office worker into a second career. For her new show, entitled Home Bird, the story has moved on and her subject is buying a home and installing her boyfriend. Only he’s not happy with the arrangements in the garden. The shed, he complains, is not suitable for self-abuse. That, Millican explains, is because it’s a greenhouse.Such is Millican's insouciance about privacy that she may as well be in that greenhouse Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Liam Noble has kept his fans waiting so long for some new music, they were beginning to wonder if he’d turned into David Bowie. The British jazz pianist’s last album of originals, Romance among the Fishes, was released in 2004. Since then he’s recorded the highly regarded Brubeck, which Brubeck himself declared "an inspiration and a challenge for me to carry on”, and collaborated with distinguished players on both sides of the Atlantic. But his fans, while enjoying the live performances, which have built his reputation as one of the great piano improvisers of the contemporary scene, were Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
A single movement is all it takes. A wounded man is held at gunpoint, and instead of cringing away from the inevitable bullet, he lifts his head and looks his would-be executioner in eye. This simple gesture does not just save his life – it sets in motion a drama that will ultimately consume the lives of everyone caught up in it.This pivotal confrontation takes place in the rubble of a village, between black freedom fighter George Jozana and white South African soldiers Papa Louw and Josh Gilmore, during the civil war in Angola. Having decided to keep Jozana alive, the Afrikaans officer Read more ...
David Nice
There’s a scene in Mozart’s most metaphysical opera which Ingmar Bergman, creator of what is still the richest of all Magic Flutes, describes as “at the outermost limit of life”. Hero Tamino seems to have reached a point of no return and no going forward. “When will this darkness end?”, he asks, and voices reply, “Soon, soon or never”.We must believe the extremity in that rite of passage. But not only are the vital choral responses unmysterious and perfunctory in this new ENO production; Complicite director Simon McBurney has it that the page of a giant video-projected picture book has Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The original Chainsaw Warrior was a single-player boardgame, published in 1987 by tabletop gaming powerhouse Games Workshop - home to the better-known Warhammer 40,000 wargame and endless shelves of lead miniatures and associated acrylic paints. An odd mix of solitaire card game and dice-based RPG, the game cast you as an archetypical Eighties Bad Dude tasked with fighting waves of zombies and mutants to defeat an evil entity known as Darkness at the heart of a ruined New York.Chainsaw Warrior on Android, iOS and PC is the same game. No, I mean it really is EXACTLY the same game. Rather than Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most years at the Fringe, there's considerable division over the winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award, but not in 2013 when Bridget Christie won for A Bic For Her, a show that expertly fillets everyday sexism and misogyny. Even those who remarked that they never knew feminism could be funny - idiots all, of course - acknowledged the show is an hour of superbly crafted comedy.At the start of a residency at the Soho Theatre, Christie sets out her stall - “Women were invented years ago when God realised that Adam needed an audience for his jokes,” she says, and we're off. She makes an early Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Dracula story has seen almost infinite permutations, though none of them ever manages to improve on Bram Stoker's still-haunting original. This new Anglo-American production keeps Stoker's late 19th-century setting, but has transformed the befanged Count into a kind of supernatural corporate raider stalking the sneering, avaricious fatcats of the City of London. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dracula (***) still retains his familiar Transylvanian roots. Professor Van Helsing, on the other hand, has made a dramatic switch to the dark side and is now the Count's ally and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Can tango ever really be interesting as a pure dance stage show? After all, like most forms of social dance, its truest incarnation is in the fleeting and contingent encounters of the dance hall, the public ball, the open-to-all-comers late night bar. Making tango slick, polished, professional and repeatable enough to put behind a proscenium has all too often made it clichéd and even boring, predictably marketed through the putative sex appeal of tight dresses, twining ankles, and “Latin passion”. But by taking both the name and the inspiration for his latest piece from milongas, tango’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What happens when a citizenry marginalised by society and weakened by an illness that could well be fatal are also called upon to rise up to demand the treatment, not to mention the civility and compassion, that are their due? The answer is on often grievous yet ultimately heartening view in How To Survive A Plague, David France's immensely stirring chronicle of the activism - spawned in New York and then spun out elsewhere - that accompanied the first decade or more of the AIDS crisis. Nominated this year for an Oscar, journalist France's thoroughgoing record of events at first stirs Read more ...
philip radcliffe
How many times can a director re-work the same show and still come up with something fresh, gripping and memorable? This is James Brining’s third version of Sondheim’s killer thriller musical Sweeney Todd. He produced an award-winning version in 2010 at Dundee Rep. He turned to it again last month for his first production since becoming artistic director at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Now, he has re-worked it for the in-the-round confines of the Royal Exchange, initiating a trans-Pennine collaboration between the two theatres. And he is scheduled to deliver a fourth version in 2015 in a co- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
As a director, Alfonso Cuarón is a stickler. In his renowned Children of Men, he sought to dismantle cinema, to break down the glass wall between audience and content by making the film more like a live event. To a great extent, he succeeded, opening with a 17 minute continuous take and, later, using the expertise of Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski (known as Chivo), he would fashion takes of stunning length and complexity. No wonder that his next film, Gravity, took over four years to make: he needed to top his last one.So he has. Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the best kept secrets about contemporary theatre is that audiences rather like short plays. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with epic classics, but sometimes it makes a change to witness a playwright who has something to say and manages to say it with economy in 90 minutes or less. New writing’s master of this trend is Debbie Tucker Green, whose plays don’t linger too long on stage, nor do they burden you with an interval. Her latest, Nut, is typically short, just 70 minutes — but is it any good?Elayne, a young black woman, is depressed. When the plays starts she is discussing Read more ...