Reviews
judith.flanders
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects. The last company anyone expected, however, was the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s junior company to its senior world-class sister, the Mariinsky.What drew them? Well, the company has an extraordinary Soviet heritage, playing host to some of the great names of 1930s experimental dance. It probably helps, too, that it is now funded by an Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As the second series of Zooey Deschanel-starring US sitcom New Girl gets underway on E4, it’s an interesting exercise to revisit first impressions. I note that when the pilot originally aired, theartsdesk was not as harsh as I was on a show which, over the course of its first year, quickly became one of my favourites. In her remarkably prescient conclusion, our Veronica Lee suggested that by toning down the central character’s kookiness and the stereotypes the show made of the rest of the characters, New Girl could turn out to be great.The strength of the show is in its ensemble castIn the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It begins with two gunshots. Lee Marvin is a guy who just wants his $93,000. "I want my money" is the mission statement for Point Blank, a film that is as timelessly entertaining as it is influential. But putting it that way doesn’t grab the sensation of watching a film that is so exciting you may forget to breathe for all 92 minutes of it.Beginning as a film editor and then moving up through TV, Boorman, who also made Deliverance, Excalibur and Hope and Glory, wrote in his 2003 memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy about the “essential mysteriousness of movies” - and Point Blank is an Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
What becomes of children “born out of sadness and loneliness”, exiled from Wonderland or Neverland, longing for remembered golden afternoons, but forced to confront the chilly twilight of adulthood? This new play by John Logan brings Alice Liddell and Peter Llewelyn Davies – the real-life inspirations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan – face to face, not just which each other, but with their creators and their fictional selves. Like the repressed, incomplete men who created them, they hopelessly pursue happiness, along topiary-lined avenues, across mermaids’ lagoons Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One of the weapons deployed by Blighty in World War Two was humour. Stoical, deflating, relentlessly making light of the darkness, British wit refused to take the Third Reich as seriously as it took itself. The biggest cannon in our arsenal of laughter was PG Wodehouse, or it would have been if the creator of Jeeves and Wooster and, most pertinently, the pompous black shirt Roderick Spode hadn’t accidentally found himself on the other side, and apparently batting for them too.In 1940 Wodehouse and his wife Ethel were living as tax exiles in Normandy, and failed to make their excuses before Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual Sadler’s Wells Flamenco Festival is a hidden treasure-house of brilliance, too quietly sneaking into London in the unappealing limbo between winter and spring, but surely one of the great global gatherings of the dazzling individualists in this mysterious dance form. Flamenco ranges from the red-top populists like the ebullient exhibitionist Farruquito to the wilfully innovative Israel Galván, who lit up two Sunday nights in a row which both brought the house to their feet in ovations.Israel Galván’s the real galvaniser. Half a silent-movie comedian, half a mesmerising midnight Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Long before Amy Winehouse, there was a north London retro soul'n'jazz girl with a beehive hairdo making inroads into the Top 40. However, after a short run of hits in the early Eighties Mari Wilson never achieved the epic popularity of her dark-haired successor. Thus we find her in a Brighton basement playing a cruise ship set to a chicken-in-a-basket audience.The Komedia is laid out Vegas cabaret-style, all tables, wine bottles clinking and late middle-aged couples of all sexualities tucking into deep fried calamari, burgers, lasagne and, of course, chicken. Wilson’s show is gentle, designed Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Quite simply, the performance was one of those rarest of events in the theatre that will be talked about for generations - the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, with the former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin making his debut as Crown Prince Rudolf.This has been a "must-see" evening since the minute it was announced by Moscow's Stanislavsky Ballet not only with Polunin now having rock-star status in Russia, but also for MacMillan’s choreography which is not found in any other Russian theatre. Extra chairs were put in, people were even sitting in the aisles. The full run Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always a treat to see the shrewd, penetrating gaze of DCS Christopher Foyle back for one of its all-too-brief runs, though no doubt rationing Foyle's War to short series at long intervals is what has enabled writer/creator Anthony Horowitz to sustain it for so long. The three episodes in the new Series 8 find Foyle back in Britain, following a trip to the USA to "tie up some loose ends" from a previous case.It's 1946, and he's becoming embroiled in the Cold War as East faces off against West and rampant paranoia stalks the corridors of power. One of the strengths of Foyle has always been the Read more ...
geoff brown
Any conductor who ends a concert with only one leg on the ground, as if engaged in the Highland fling, is either a little fanciful or has been utterly carried away. In Keith Lockhart’s case last night, it was probably a bit of both. No-one can take charge of Duke Ellington’s big band tone poem Harlem by impersonating a lamp-post, especially at its roaring end, the epitome of jubilation in sound. But the BBC Concert Orchestra’s transatlantic Principal Conductor is also a conscious showman. Sometimes his hands trace such sensuous curves that you feel he’s stroking a Ming vase.All his gifts for Read more ...
Gary Raymond
If you’re one of those who always felt the opening credits of True Blood held more substance and delicious dark corners than the comic-book titillation of the programme that followed, then The Bloody Ballad could be exactly what you’re looking for. Written by and starring the extremely impressive Lucy Rivers, The Bloody Ballad rolls around in all of those glimmering rusty disgusting snapshots that make up the opening sequence of the vampire soap opera and comes up grinning, stinking and energetic and sweaty and meaty. And it is all the better for it.The Bloody Ballad is the joyously grim Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Pulsating and cinematically proud with an opulent urban palette, Trance positively storms onto the screen. Fast becoming a national treasure (if he hasn't broken through that particular ceiling yet) Danny Boyle is also one of the few directors with the visual chutzpah to make a film this bombastically exciting set in the UK. A heist thriller located in a so-chic-it's-barely-recognisable London, Trance features the handsome trio of James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel. Whilst not quite the mind-fuck it purports to be, it nevertheless challenges you to keep apace with its surging Read more ...