Reviews
graham.rickson
Elgar: Enigma Variations, Vaughan Williams: The Wasps, Fantasia on Greensleeves Kansas City Symphony/Michael Stern (Reference Recordings)Listen to the tiny second Entracte from Vaughan Williams’s Wasps suite and you’re amazed at how such a beguiling, intoxicating piece could have remained so little known, and at how French the music sounds. Unsurprisingly, it was written after Vaughan Williams had briefly studied with Ravel. The lightness and delicacy are extraordinary, and Vaughan Williams’s typically modal chord progressions sound more Gallic than usual. Delicious stuff, following a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is the directorial debut of Eve Best, better known as a talented classical and comedic actress, who was last at Shakespeare's Globe appearing as Beatrice in a superb Much Ado About Nothing opposite Charles Edwards's Benedick.Best's reading of the Scottish play - her favourite Shakespeare - is pleasingly straightforward and she introduces few thrills and spills (and there's a minimalist Birnam Wood in Mike Britton's simple but elegant design), nor a big idea that imposes itself on the text without illuminating it. This is a production that allows the actors to breathe – and pleasant Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a summer awash with Russian ballet, at its best extravagant, limpid, spectacular - an experience of emotions processed through the eyes - a visit by an American company comes from a quite different sensory position: dance as intelligent motion, rhythmically schooled athleticism. While the American ballet was generated by a grandly classical Russian, George Balanchine, one of the things your eyes constantly search for in watching a US company is the way the Russian ballet genes, nurtured in Tsarist palaces, mutated when they met the bold, open-air, workaday grace over the Atlantic.Boston Read more ...
Nick Hasted
What goes on in some homes would scare the sturdiest horse. Take Anna (Maria Hofstatter), whose daily routine might strike some serial killers as pathological. Semi-naked self-flagellation and circuiting the house on bleeding knees is the least of it. “Sexual wildness destroys”, a kitchen homily reminds a woman whose desires are buried in punishing Catholicism. But when paraplegic Muslim husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh, pictured below with Hofstatter) reappears demanding his conjugal rights, anyone’s faith would shake.Paradise: Faith is the middle film of a trilogy by Austrian director Ulrich Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You've got a political scandal, so who ya gonna call? It had better be Olivia Pope, whose company Pope & Associates specialises in protecting the image and interest of the power-elite, frequently (though not exclusively) within the Washington DC Beltway.Olivia (a crisp, crunchy and aerodynamically power-dressed Kerry Washington) has serious crisis management credentials, having been Communications Director at the White House. Indeed, her connections reach right to the top, since she's also the ex-lover of President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). In fact not all that ex, since the Prez Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
At first glance, Rogue Legacy looks like a straight retro platformer in the vein of Castlevania or The Lost Vikings. You must negotiate a castle and other environs made up of floating platforms, floor spikes and fireball-spewing traps while collecting loot hidden in chests or inside the smashable furniture while being harried by varied enemies who mostly follow set paths.Of course, the devil is in the detail and - in this case - the title. Rogue Legacy is a form of "roguelike" - a class of RPG descended from the ancient ASCII game Rogue and noted for being brutally unforgiving. Rogue's single Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When any arts institution gets a new head, the media scrutiny of their first work is usually intense. The Royal Court theatre’s new artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, has defused this tension by staging not one signature play, but a season of six plays during a festival of other events. Mint, the debut play by director Clare Lizzimore, comes roughly midway through this Open Court season, which has also seen short runs of work by playwrights Lasha Bugadze, Lucas Hnath and Suhayla El-Bushra.All of these have been performed by a company of 14 actors — including Anna Calder-Marshall (pictured Read more ...
Sue Hubbard
Artists love a good revolution. The social upheaval, the bubbling up of new ideas and the breaking down of old ones, attracts them like flies to fly paper. The Mexican revolution was no exception. During the years 1910-1940, Mexico attracted large numbers of international intellectuals and artists, seduced by the political maelstrom and apparent freedoms that beckoned in this culturally diverse and varied land.For many European artists Mexico seemed like a primitive (if somewhat fictional) Nirvana, with its stunning scenery, indigenous culture and mysticism that fed the modernist appetite for Read more ...
caspar.gomez
The smell is like a squidgy hash spliff marinated in hickory-smoked barbecue sauce. There’s an additional top note of tangy, excited human musk and a hint of vinegary organic waste. By the weekend’s end this Parfum de Glaston will have infused everything, from unworn clothes to the tent to even skin and hair. It will take days to shift, permeating the pores as completely as this temporary city of madness sandblasts the mind. But let’s not get carried away before we’ve begun. To peak too early would be a classic rookie mistake.Thursday 27 JuneThings begin, then, on a sunny A303 that turns Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A champagne cocktail with a hefty dash of bitters, Jonathan Kent’s production of this exquisite Noël Coward comedy of impossible passions is as wince-inducing as it is delightfully effervescent. A hit at Chichester Festival Theatre last autumn, it sees Toby Stephens slip suavely into the role of Elyot Chase opposite a sloe-eyed Anna Chancellor as his ex-wife, Amanda.From the moment the two collide on their adjoining balconies at the French resort where both are honeymooning with new spouses, the atmosphere fizzes with sexual tension. For all their elegance, all the artfulness of their verbal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teamwork, as the song once said, makes the dream work. Homo sapiens knows this, if not quite by nature, then at least by nurture. Turns out that there are some chimpanzees in Leipzig which are all over the team thing too. Offered the chance to pull together on a simple mechanism to retrieve a nut – one each – two chimps will work in tandem to make it happen.Perhaps these are just highly efficient Teutonic chimps who uniquely understand the meaning of Vorsprung durch Technik. But no. That stat about sharing 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees? It seems the ability to cooperate is part of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Off we jolly well go.” With that, The Flamin’ Groovies’s Chris Wilson announced the arrival of “Shake Some Action”, the band’s classic evocation of rock ‘n’ roll swagger. In 2013, 40 years after it was first recorded, it's still magnificent, a headlong rush of chiming, descending chords and soaring vocals. “If you don't dig what I say, then I will go away,” sang Wilson. And without a mass audience, The Flamin’ Groovies had gone away. Wilson left in 1981 and the band fizzled out in 1992. Now, they’re back.Beginning last night with a ragged version of 1973’s “Let Me Rock” was a statement. This Read more ...