Reviews
Heather Neill
Clybourne Park won Bruce Norris a slew of awards on both sides of the Atlantic a couple of years ago. His fearless, shocking, very funny response to Lorraine Hansbury's classic A Raisin in the Sun tackled hypocrisy in racial matters brilliantly and in language blithely free of political correctness. It is not surprising that Purple Heart, written eight years earlier, in 2002, falls somewhat short of the later play.Where Clybourne Park has a clear social and political target, Purple Heart's subject is less well-defined: the nature of love, kindness and grief. Norris indicates in a programme Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Compile a list of the subjects you thought may be unsuitable for a sitcom, and it will almost certainly include a person with learning difficulties, assisted suicide and an army bomb disposal team.Well all three of those now exist – Derek and Way To Go have just finished their first series on Channel 4 and BBC Three respectively, and on the latter channel last night Bluestone 42, set in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, made its debut. And while the makers may have had a modern-day M*A*S*H in their heads, they have some way to go before reaching that comedy's heights - they don't even Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I'm so worn out with it," a character remarks in a different context well into Rufus Norris's film Broken, to which one is tempted to respond, "Ain't that the truth!" A dissection of so-called "broken Britain" in all its jagged disarray, stage director Norris's debut film wants to be excoriating but is instead mainly exhausting and feels infinitely longer than its briefish running time. Norris gets good performances out of a notable cast, and it's interesting (to put it mildly) to see certain actors cast defiantly against type, but the material suffers from being a continuous, non-stop Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When Justin Bieber finally arrived on stage last night the volume of the screams from the teen audience topped 100 decibels. I know because I measured it on my iPhone. That, however, wasn’t the first deafening noise from the capacity crowd of 20,000. The previous half-hour had been punctuated by a series of boos borne out of growing frustration. Bieber had been scheduled to arrive at 8.30. By 10.25, when the stage lights started to rise, he needed one hell of an entrance.Fortunately he had one. Dressed in a white suit and with a giant pair of wings Bieber descended from the domed roof on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It looks as if Broadchurch will reveal itself as a "town-with-murky-secrets" story, but on the evidence of this first episode we can expect it to be done with a skilful touch and a fine eye for detail. The trigger for the action is the death of 11-year-old Danny Latimer, but writer Chris Chibnall is focusing on the effect this has on family and friends as much as on the grim event itself.Broadchurch is a small seaside town in Dorset where violent crime is largely unheard of. When Danny's body is first discovered on the beach, suicide or an accident are canvassed as possible causes. Then Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Definitely not the M that hit with “Pop Muzik” in 1979 and then swiftly vanished. This –M- is a bona fide, stadium-filling superstar. In France, that is. In Camden though, last night, Mathieu Chédid confounded any expectations of what stadium rock ought to be. The evening was rounded off by Chédid and his band dancing in a line to a playback of last year’s single “Mojo”, just as they’d done in the video. They make open and shut gestures with their hands, mimicking a mouth. The audience do the same. Pity that this often bewildering and sold-out show, the first of –M-’s two-night London run, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Of all the pairings you might have thought would star in a cross-generational road movie, I suspect Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand would be the last names you would have put together, despite their undoubted comedic talents.Rogen is Andy Brewster, an immature single guy who has invented a green cleaning product that he's schlepping around various uninterested companies, Streisand his long-widowed smothering mother Joyce, constantly calling him with inane questions that he impatiently replies to if he can bothered. They live at opposite ends of the country and don't see each other much beyond Read more ...
David Nice
Who’d have guessed a full house for the third of The Rest is Noise festival’s Berlin nights? This time there were no obvious superstars, unless you follow singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and you know the impeccable track-record so far of young conductor André de Ridder. The programme of three very different composing voices from the Berlin of the early 1930s was not a crowd-puller either; yet the audience of mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings even stayed and cheered for Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, perhaps enticed by the promise of an after-interval encore Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A drama that opens with the disappearance in the woods of a beautiful blonde teenage girl is going to evoke memories of Nanna Birk Larsen racing away from her murderer in The Killing. A drama set in a rural English village peopled by loamy eccentrics and sozzled toffs is likely to summon thoughts of Midsomer Murders. Put ‘em together and what have you got?Mayday is working a nightly hourlong shift across the week. This is an occasional style of scheduling that works well so long as the story grabs the viewer by the throat and refuses to slacken its hold. Five Daughters, about the murder of Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
We've hardly gone wanting for big-screen robots of late – Michael Fassbender's inpenetrable cyborg was the best thing in Ridley Scott's overly ponderous Prometheus last year, while many have argued that Pixar reached its pinnacle with disarming robot-rom WALL-E in 2008. But with this oddball debut, director Jake Schreier is reaching for something different, something smaller and lonelier and more human, and if he never quite grasps it his pursuit makes for compelling viewing. The eponymous Frank (Frank Langella) is a retired cat burglar, living alone and succumbing to Read more ...
David Nice
Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by piecing together a performing edition of the most familiar one. Stagings of Die Dreigroschenoper with singing actors and a deft director can knit this celebrated hybrid together. But a concert performance that tries to be true to the 1928 premiere’s mixture of balladeers and fairly hefty opera singers to fill out the updated, jazz-meets-Bach riff on John Gay’s thieves-den Beggar’s Opera will be very lucky to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...