Reviews
emma.simmonds
Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins. And perhaps even more importantly than that, whilst making her first film, the ingenious documentary The Arbor, Barnard encountered Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In this classical anniversary year we’ve had masses of Wagner and Verdi, plenty of Britten (and still more Britten) but not much has been heard of 2013’s other birthday-boy, the notorious Carlo Gesualdo – prince, priest, composer and murderer. Best known for the extraordinary chromatic contortions of his madrigals and the stark, chiaroscuro beauty of his Tenebrae Responsories, the legend of his private life still dwarfs all. And it’s this story that provides inspiration for Salvatore Sciarrino’s 1998 chamber opera The Killing Flower.An unaccompanied female voice pierces the blackness with Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
Simon Munk
Games provide the illusion of choice, they pretend you interact with them. Really, most videogames simply wait for you to press the right button before advancing one step to the next point where you have to press the next right button. Both The Stanley Parable and Device 6 explore the idea of choice brilliantly.The Stanley Parable was released as a "mod" for Half-Life in 2011 but now gets a full and redesigned release in its own right. This truly bizarre game sees you guiding Stanley, an office drone who one day discovers his fellow workers have simply disappeared, through a maze of choice. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The comedy of manners is not dead. It’s alive and kicking, often literally, at this north London venue in actor Simon Paisley Day’s new play. Although the title suggests a group of teenagers dancing in a warehouse, the actual subject of the play is a handful of couples who have left their children behind in order to spend three days relaxing in a remote countryside location. Throw in one or two wild cards and this laughter machine is soon turning over.We are in a holiday cottage in deepest Wales. Keith and Briony are a teacher couple from London who have a three-year-old son, Fin. At first Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the term “world music” became a category in record stores, it’s doubtful that triple harps, cerdd dant and canu plygain would have been thought to belong under the umbrella. And yet here they were on display at WOMEX. The annual world music expo has put down roots in Cardiff this year, and to bid welcome to the delegates Cerys Matthews hosted a celebration of traditional Welsh music under the title Gwlad y Gân/Land of Song. Bar the odd burst of Under Milk Wood and a version of "Men of Harlech", very little of it was, for obvious reasons, in English.If Welsh folk music is less widely Read more ...
David Nice
If ever there were a week for London to celebrate Poulenc in the lamentably under-commemorated 50th anniversary year of his death, this is it. Two major choral works and two fun concertos at last join the party. But if Figure Humaine and the Concerto for Two Pianos look like being well positioned in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Barbican programme on Saturday, Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s chosen two were the victims of his own success in Prokofiev interpretation. The Seventh Symphony, chronologically the last in this programme of works circa 1950 to tie in with The Rest is Noise festival’s agenda, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
“Love and pain is like peace and war - you want one you have to have the other.” It’s a line that pretty much sums up From Here to Eternity. The title of James Jones’s novel and the classic movie which it spawned gets rather lost in the new musical from Tim Rice, Stuart Brayson, and Bill Oakes. It’s a moment that should stay with us long after leaving the theatre but having set up a promising double-duet between both sets of doomed lovers on this scary ride to the apocalypse of Pearl Harbour, 1941, Tim Rice and his composer Stuart Brayson signally fail to deliver the emotional climacteric Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We have plenty to be paranoid about in the most surveilled country in the world. British contributions to the conspiracy thrillers that bloomed so fruitfully in the US around Watergate have, though, stayed slim. Maybe that’s one reason Closed Circuit’s extreme Secret Service behaviour in the aftermath of a bomb atrocity at London’s Borough market feels so fake.CIA agents snuffing out inconvenient people on city streets is cinematic second nature. MI5 hunting Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall’s high-powered barristers through Dalston back-alleys takes more swallowing. So does some of the dialogue in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Still only a year out of college, the diversely gifted trumpeter, composer and bandleader Laura Jurd has risen rapidly to prominence, enterprisingly bypassing the ritual of hanging around to be noticed by creating her own scene and ensembles. One of these, the Chaos Collective, this week curated a small festival in which another, the Chaos Orchestra, last night performed a range of new work. Most hotly anticipated were the arrangements of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, celebrating the centenary of its first performance. Django Bates tells the story of Charlie Parker’s spontaneous Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The funny business of being British, and the even funnier business of being foreign, are at the heart of the latest vehicle for the talents of David Mitchell and Robert Webb. They’ve conquered the sketch format and the grimy sitcom but in Ambassadors they branch out into trickier terrain of comedy drama. The show's task is to snigger at the absurdities of international diplomacy while also showing signs of some sort of beating heart.Mitchell plays Keith Davies, our new man in Tazbekistan, a tinpot Asiatic amalgam of a couple of post-Soviet republics where the methods of communism have made Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It had to finish with “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease”, the commentary on a building block of British life which marks the passing of time more acutely than anything explicitly counting the minutes which precede leaving the field, whether in sport or life. Roy Harper originally released this elegy in 1975, when he was in his 30s. As last night’s encore, it was even more poignant. Harper is now 72. There were moments when he explicitly said he might not see an audience again. He was in fine form: alive, joking, scatty and, at times, on fire. It didn’t feel like a final bow, but with a Read more ...