Reviews
fisun.guner
"In the midst of life we are in death.” This is a line we may feel compelled to reverse as we encounter the first exhibits in the British Museum’s extraordinarily powerful exhibition, for this is a display vividly bringing the dead to life in the very midst of their extraordinary demise. But then, “ashes to ashes” conveys particular resonance, too, for we all know that Pompeii, a town situated in the Bay of Naples, and its lesser known, less populous neighbour Herculaneum, were both covered in a thick layer of ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79. In a single day, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on two billion dollars' worth of hits”. Who really knows? Who actually cares? You don’t measure the sheer joy of Chic’s “Good Times” or Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by counting the cash or doing the math. You simply use your ears.As Johnny Marr pointed out, Rodgers is responsible for countless records “you’d have to be made out of stone not to be Read more ...
David Nice
A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.Richard Egarr (pictured below by Marco Borggreve), directing from the harpsichord, no doubt deserves the credit for the line that passed, without Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Billy Budd John Mark Ainsley, Jacques Imbraillo, Matthew Rose, Philip Ens, Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Glyndebourne)I missed this staging of Britten’s Billy Budd, first performed in May 2010. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the best of Britten’s operas, taut, well plotted and musically flawless. The brass-heavy score is a marvel, its battleship grey orchestral palette accompanying an all-male cast. It contains one of the greatest, yet simplest of Britten’s inspirations in the form of the stark sequence of orchestral chords heard in Read more ...
David Benedict
Faced with an unfamiliar play, it’s usually hard to spot exactly where the writer stopped and the director started. Not here. This is one of those occasions where a director’s voice is considerably and almost constantly louder than the playwright’s. You might think you’re seeing Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party but what you’re getting is Matthew Dunster’s assault upon it.Ackland’s 1949 adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s short story is a subtle evisceration of upper-middle-class manners. Living in post-war comfort, the highly respectable Skinner family are dressing for a local garden Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an arresting moment towards the start of In the House when a character looks the camera – and by extension, the audience - directly in the eye. A warm trusting face and a slight squint hint at vulnerability (see clip below). His name is Rafa, and he is the best friend of Claude, who regularly visits Rafa's house after school to help him with his maths. But we soon learn that Claude’s furtive intention is to infiltrate an ideal suburban home as part of an observational writing assignment.Among the piles of vacuous contributions from his classmates, Claude’s account of what he did on Read more ...
Simon Munk
We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.The result is both hugely satisfying to play from a hind-brain, hand-eye coordination point-of-view, but Read more ...
Louise Gray
It’s not often that a performance’s technological properties leaves you simply slack-jawed. Robert Wilson’s very long Swedish-language version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play did – at the same venue, though this time in 2001 – when the surtitle machines broke down (the audience gave an audible gasp of horror and then settled to its collective fate), but that was for altogether different reasons. Compared to what Ryoji Ikeda and his team are capable of, even the beautiful crispness of Kraftwerk’s stage shows fade into the realm of the bland.In superposition, the Japanese installation artist – now Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais have decamped from their usual perch next to the House of Lords to cosy up to the work of Henry Moore. They can be found at Moore’s home and studio at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, in a tellingly succinct anthology of the towering giants of modern European sculpture. At first glance Rodin’s extraordinary evocations of energy and sensuality, literally embodied in the models he studied so intensively, and Moore’s semi-abstracted helmet heads and upright motives, don’t have much in common. But the compare-and-contrast thrust of this wide-ranging compilation, also Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How do we know Jesus Christ was a Jew? He was still living with his mum at 33 and she thought he was God Almighty. Are you offended? I sincerely hope not and profuse apologies if you are, but that was the first religious joke I remember from my Catholic childhood, and which managed to take a swipe at two religions for the price of one.I also remember - and on my occasional forays into church still do - hearing priests crack jokes about God and the Pope from the pulpit. Maybe it's a Catholic thing, because I have never heard a left-footer make the complaint that Ann Widdecombe - former Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“My honest instinct,” says Jim, the hero of Bruce Norris’s The Low Road, “is one of resentment.” And while this contemporary fable of industrious bees, aka capitalist speculators, is set in the past, and is full of good jokes, it is also laced with emotions that are a tougher sell. Here a humorous tale of a life of entrepreneurship comes hand-in-hand with some satire that is bitter as well as being funny.Beginning, like so many 18th-century English novels, with the finding of a foundling child, the play starts with a snapshot of Massachusetts in 1759. The parentless baby (sired by one G Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In his 1970 television documentary for Granada, I Was a Soldier, British filmmaker Michael Grigsby was one of the first to look into the experience of US soldiers returning home from Vietnam. “Vietnam syndrome” may have been a few years away from any formal diagnosis, but Grigsby caught the mood of three young Texans – David, Dennis and Lamar – back from the conflict and struggling to re-engage with a society that has become alien to them.Grigsby returned to the town of Brady and its Texas environs 40 years later, and the result is his new film We Went to War (co-directed with Rebeka Read more ...