Reviews
Adam Sweeting
There's no denying the allure of a well-crafted legal drama, and there's also probably a hefty swathe of fans pining for the return of Maxine Peake in Peter Moffat's superior Grays Inn yarn, Silk. They will have found plenty to cheer in Suranne Jones's thumpingly enjoyable performance as Lila Pettitt in Lawless [****], one of the female-centric pilot shows in Sky Living's new Drama Matters series.Lila has just been appointed the country's youngest-ever female recorder (a judge by any other name), and is pitched head first into the Lewis Carroll-esque maelstrom of life on the bench. Read more ...
Simon Munk
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance," wrote Aristotle. And you know what, the old Greek geezer knew a thing or two. While this downbeat stealth/platform game delivers a pure aesthetic thrill, it sadly fails to follow through in a cohesive theme or thrilling play.A boy ends up chasing a mysterious and ghostly girl in a rainy European city – something happens and he, like her, is trapped in a darkened, Escher-esque version of that city, permanently engulfed in darkness and rain. Like her, he now is only visible in the rain – under Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Not long ago James McAvoy finished a brutal run as Macbeth, and he’s back in Filth as another manic Scotsman hurtling towards self-destruction. The setting is Nineties Edinburgh, and his character, dodgy policeman Bruce Robertson, has a Machiavellian genius for getting one over on his copper colleagues, until his addiction-fuelled luck runs out, and he comes crashing down. He’s the first-person narrator for most of the story, and though repulsively believable, his grip on the narrative starts separating from reality.It’s a compelling performance that pulls out all the stops, and then some, Read more ...
fisun.guner
I read someone recently describe Sarah Lucas’s sculptures as “aggressive”. Perhaps being greeted by a roomful of huge plaster cocks, mechanised wanking arms and greasy doner kebabs with two fried eggs in an abject arrangement of the female sex can feel a little confrontational, but aggressive? There’s surely something deflecting and bluntly one-note when it comes to the merely aggressive. “Aggressive” rarely lets other emotions in, and Lucas’s work is a many shaded affair.There’s lots of humour for a start. And like all the best humour, at least British humour, behind the slapstick there's Read more ...
David Nice
Interviewed live just before his Proms performance of Britten’s Serenade, Ben Johnson was asked the usual question as to whether the composer wrote especially well for the tenor voice. “He writes amazingly for every instrument,” came the reply. If we needed a single-programme testament to that special genius, this all-Britten celebration from Vladimir Jurowski and his London Philharmonic Orchestra was it. In addition to the two billed soloists, there were at least a dozen from within the orchestra who proved the point. And what sounds, what textures, whether Britten was writing light or dark Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever it was about the kings and queens of England that so intrigued Donizetti, it certainly wasn’t their politics. The third, and last, in WNO’s autumn cycle shows Elizabeth once again in a state of unrequited love with one of her rebellious (and much younger) nobility, but wholly unconcerned with affairs of state; and the one thing that distinguishes her from the average abandoned woman of Romantic opera is that she has the power to decapitate her uncooperative swains. Freud would have nodded sagely; but it’s unlikely that Donizetti was thinking of emasculation.Though neglected, Roberto Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A baby's brain is polished off by a throbbing welter of maggots. A field of sheep are on fire. A screaming child whose hands have been tied to a kite is flying out over the North Sea. How do you make an opera out of any of this? The answer of course is you don’t. You leave this kind of thing to cinema or the novel. Opera is - contrary to popular belief - extremely bad at spectacle, especially if the aim is to terrify. Horror has never had much of a look-in as a genre in the art form. So it was always going to be a challenge for composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney to transfer Iain Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The new puritanism of the American cinema continues apace with Thanks For Sharing, which follows on from the more elegantly made but comparably dispiriting Shame in positing Manhattan as the most sexually dysfunctional place on earth. What did New York do (besides elect Michael Bloomberg as mayor three times over) to deserve all this carnal angst and obsessiveness and shame? Lord knows, but even the wonderful Mark Ruffalo can't lift the spirits of a film that wallows in its therapy-speak environs. One doubts audiences will be sharing this one once word of mouth kicks in.Ruffalo plays Adam, a Read more ...
Mark Valencia
Calixto Bieito’s fantasia on Fidelio may be lording it on the other side of the Thames but Orchestra Mozart, on its first-ever visit to London, was happy to place its trust in what Beethoven actually wrote. As if to prove that wild-child provocateurs don’t own the playground, traditions were reaffirmed at the Royal Festival Hall last night in this urbane and civilised concert led by two of music’s grown-ups, Maria João Pires and Bernard Haitink – late-notice super-subs for the advertised but dually indisposed Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado. The Bologna-based band is evidently formed of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The guilt of knowingly sending our sons to war with defective equipment and fatal results certainly resonates today. Who takes the blame? Do we get ministerial resignations or arms-dealers going to prison? Going back to post-World War II, this is the shocking dilemma that Arthur Miller deals with so harrowingly in All My Sons, bringing it home to each one of us by focusing on just one family.Here we have what he conceived as an “ordinary” American middle-class family in Midwest in August 1947 living with the knowledge that dad’s greed and deception has contributed to the death of 21 young Read more ...
Nick Hasted
What would you do if your six-year-old daughter vanished in broad daylight, and the man you’re sure took her is walking free? The answer for Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman, pictured bottom left) is as plain as the paranoid survivalist’s stockpiles that fill his basement. But his direct action against Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the apparently child-like man he’s sure is a monster, ripples against multiple traumas and secrets in this crime film of novelistic breadth.The most interesting character in Prisoners’ superbly cast assembly of victims and victim-predators isn’t Jackman’s shattered vigilante, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sex please, we are Japanese. This astonishing collection of about 170 paintings, prints and illustrated books from 300 years of Japanese art, known as “shunga” or spring pictures, come in part from the culture of the “floating world” (ukiyo-e) mostly located in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), from the mid 17th- to mid-19th centuries. But shunga go beyond the world of paid-for pleasure, of courtesans and actors, of that world of pleasure that was allowed, as so many other worlds weren’t in the strict and hierarchical society of Japan. (Ordinary people were not allowed to participate for example Read more ...