Reviews
Karen Krizanovich
Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel of the same name – itself akin to Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (famous in French schools for the vivid voice of its female narrator, the unfinished novel is mentioned early in the film), Kechiche’s sympathetic feature stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Britten’s innate theatricality shines through every single bar of his War Requiem. Atmosphere, drama, suspense, and high emotionalism are to a greater or lesser degree written into the piece (something which the naysayers always latch on to). And yet, with its planes of sound so precisely appropriated there is an acoustical part to be played and from the first tolling of bells and murmured choral entries of the opening “Requiem aeternam” in this performance from Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir it was clear that the sound of the Royal Festival Hall was to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American ladies, in the 18th and 19th centuries, passed their time in fashionable pursuits such as embroidering samplers and cutting out portraits of family and friends. Harking back to those days, Kara Walker has covered three walls of the Camden Arts Centre with a panoramic installation of cut-paper silhouettes, which she calls Auntie Walker’s Wall Samplers (main picture and below right: Auntie Walker’s Wall Sampler for Savages). Instead of sharing genteel pleasantries, though, she dishes the dirt on the plantation-owning white elite. Her top-hatted gents and southern belles may dance Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: Muswell HillbilliesRock’s rich tapestry currently has it that 1968’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is their best album. This deluxe edition, 2CD reissue of 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies isn’t going to alter that, but it does force the emphasis away from the notion that their most lasting legacy will be a fascination with and celebration of Britishness.The album found Ray Davies and co looking to American archetypes, musical and cultural, and bringing them into songs drawing figurative links between the former colony and those still wedded to the old country. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was much to be said for attending the third and final show of Crosby Stills & Nash's Albert Hall stint, because this was the night when they played their debut album in its entirety. Clearly much – almost everything, in fact – has changed since 1969, but though the musicians are four decades older, their original collective spirit survives remarkably intact.The addition of Neil Young turned CSN into a supergroup, but the original trio had a natural cohesiveness the four-piece version could never replicate, despite the fact that they were completely dissimilar characters with very Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park.The drama of the hazardous decontamination work has its own rules: preconditions for workers include the fact that if their personal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter. They’re just expendable pawns in bigger, evil games being played out in eerie countryside, and the parched streets of an Aboriginal part of town which looks like it’s been left in the sun to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sean Hickey: Cello Concerto, Clarinet Concerto Dimitry Kouzov (cello), Alexander Fiterstein (clarinet), St Petersburg State Academic Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Lande (Delos)Sean Hickey’s 2007 Cello Concerto solves the problem of balancing soloist with orchestra by keeping the accompaniment spare and light. The brazenly tonal language can’t help recalling several well-known 20th century cello concertos - those by Walton and Shostakovich come to mind. Like them, Hickey enjoys unusual sound combinations – the concerto’s slow movement contains a beguiling, quirky duet for cello and bass clarinet Read more ...
Mark Valencia
Toby Spence’s recovery from thyroid cancer is a cause for rejoicing, but surely it’s time we focused our attention back on his work rather than his medical condition? Apparently not. The pre-publicity for this Wigmore Hall recital made great play of the “profound insights into the human condition” that the singer acquired during his convalescence – a claim that must have ladled extra pressure onto him as he prepared his programme. Spence, though, is one of the most assured and intelligent of today’s princely generation of tenors, and if he harboured any concern that a copywriter’s puff might Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
It's often a sign of a good drama when, as it concludes, you find it hard to tell which character you dislike most. And so it is with Adult Supervision - all the way through, first-time playwright Sarah Rutherford skilfully manipulates your allegiances, causing your sympathies to shift and shift again until there is no one left to be redeemed.The action of this play takes place on the night of the US election in 2008. Natasha, an uptight, anxious woman with a shiny, too-perfect hairstyle, is hosting a results party for what we assume are a group of her friends. However, it soon becomes clear Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Internet porn, the sexualisation of childhood and the objectification of women are so commonplace in Western society that they go mostly unmentioned and unchallenged, even in the arts. So thank goodness for performance artist and comic Bryony Kimmings, who not only mentions and challenges these pernicious forces in so-called civilised society, but in Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, an award-winning show first seen at Edinburgh Fringe, fashions an entertaining show around them.It was created from a very personal perspective. Kimmings recently started taking an active care role in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Period dramas are all the rage, and you can imagine Breathless being plucked with forceps from a steaming cauldron in which bubbled Call the Midwife, The Hour, Mad Men, Heartbeat and inevitably a sprig of Downton, which couldn't hurt. It's 1961, the National Health Service is still regarded as one of the wonders of the known universe, and women are foolish little things who wear stylish frocks, are obsessed with hair and nails and keep getting themselves up the duff. As one posh lady put it, inadvertently finding herself in an "interesting" condition, "I've been such a silly muffin."Luckily Read more ...