Reviews
David Nice
It’s Weimar Berlin time as the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival moves through the 20th-century music scene – so it must be Liza Minnelli time too. Or must it? Though she’s immortalised through her Americanisation of Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret, the Kander and Ebb torchsong for which she is most famous, “Maybe This Time”, belongs very decidedly to the 1960s (it was written for Kaye Ballard, not for the 1972 movie). Well, we heard that, and how - a number in itself worth the top ticket price of £100. We also had Liza singing Cole Porter and a starry-eyed Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
While Liza Minnelli belted out hits from the 1972 film Cabaret next door at the Festival Hall, we in the Queen Elizabeth Hall were meant to be getting the real deal - echt 1920s Berliner Kabarett performed by Germans in German. German actors had been flown in. As had members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Awaiting us was an enticing line-up of Weill, Eisler, Hollaender, Heymann, Hindemith and Schoenberg. The raw, rambunctious Berliner night life beckoned. It was not to be.For some curious reason, the Southbank Centre thought that stuffing a programme full of dull monologues Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is now part of the fixtures and fittings on British television. Its original stars, once alternative comedians, have become leathery gerontosaurs of the establishment. And yet on Comic Relief the grammar of giving has been largely immune to evolution. A star – usually a comic - goes out to Africa and reports back from a community in dire need of a basic necessity to alleviate suffering and death. They mug charmingly for the camera, make friends with the children and ask for your money.It’s a trusted method, but this year Richard Curtis has tried to shake things up a little. Rather than Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
Ballet Black open their eighth Linbury Studio Theatre season with a quadruple bill of new works which looks promising on paper but less so in actuality. The evening begins with Robert Binet’s EGAL, the title being a (now obsolete) Middle English word meaning equal, which Binet used as the piece’s crux. The work is a duet that’s meant to ‘"xplore the possibilities and complications that might arise if two people who are completely equal in every sense and ability were to encounter each other". Even though the blurb is rather loose, the piece still doesn’t manage to communicate much, if any of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Walking into the auditorium of a packed Heaven last night, we were instantly treated to the sensation of having our bodies invaded by thousands of infinitely complex machine insects. It's rare that a band can have such an instant and disquieting effect, but Fiium Shaark's music, we discovered, is as unusual as their name in many ways. At first seemingly entirely improvising, Rudi Fischerlehner on drumkit and Maurizio Ravalico on assorted high-tech looking percussion set arrhythmic patterns scampering around one another while Isambard Khroustaliov filled the spaces with itchy fragments of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's about time the world got to know South Korean director Park Chan-wook. His "vengeance" trilogy (and its middle segment Oldboy in particular) made an indelible impression on many but Stoker, Park's frighteningly meticulous English-language debut starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode, will considerably broaden his reach. This master of the macabre may have toned it down a tad for his ninth film but the majestic violence and taboo infatuations are pleasingly present and correct. Channelling Winona Ryder's seminally surly teen Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, Wasikowska Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is a problem with every single Richard Thompson concert and it is one of omission. With a songbook to rival the best in the business, every triumphant rendition of one song comes tinged with the knowledge that some other gem has been elbowed out of the way to make room for it. If you’re not careful you can spend the entire night curating an alternative, shadow concert in your head while failing to enjoy the evidence of your own ears or eyes.There was a bit of that last night in Edinburgh. Perhaps a little more than usual. There were times, when the likes of “Sidney Wells” and “If Love Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Will Franken is an odd-bod. The American - Missouri-born, now a San Francisco resident - is a character comic and impressionist, but not in the way we understand a Rory Bremner or an Alistair McGowan. He “does” famous people, for sure, but these are fleeting impersonations in a wonderfully free-flowing affair that weaves swiftly between stories and builds an hour of increasingly absurdist humour.Appearing on the set of God's Property, Arinze Kene's play about racial tensions in 1982 south London, which is performed in the same space earlier in the evening, Franken does some material about Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 1941 and 1945 when Beckett, who had worked for the Resistance, was in the South of France on the run from the Nazis, and not published until nearly a decade after its completion. Like his later dramatic works, it is preoccupied with profound existential questions – the inconsequentiality of being, the endless groping for meaning – reduced to the simple, immediate and human: the everyday made extraordinary.This Read more ...
Simon Munk
Crysis 3 arrives as the current generation of console hardware is being shuffled over to make way for the next – normally a very fertile time for games. Usually, the best games come out late in a home console's lifespan – when developers have learnt how to make the most of the hardware and tools they have, when creators can concentrate on just making good games and good art.Apparently not this time. This year will see the launch of the next wave of home consoles, but the current PS3 and Xbox 360 generation seem content to go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Independently-developed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The generational time-bomb is a popular dramatic device - ITV were at it only a couple of months ago with The Poison Tree - and new five-parter Lightfields boldly sprawls itself across three separate eras (1944, 1975 and 2012). Binding it all together is the titular location, a farmhouse in Suffolk, through which the different generations of characters pass.The rapid cutting between three separate periods featuring three different casts was hardly a guarantee of intelligibility, though you could more or less gather the gist of it as it whirled along. During the wartime period, 17-year- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Federico Barocci, who he? According to the National Gallery, a great Renaissance, mannerist and Baroque painter hardly known outside Italy, the National’s own Madonna of the Cat his only easel painting in a public collection in the UK. So while the Catholic church may be in turmoil, in central London there is a collection of images of colourful serenity, inspired by the Counter-Reformation of four centuries ago, and now appropriately resurrected for a contemporary audience. The show is a project over eight years in the making and for the gallery-going public, Barocci (c Read more ...