Reviews
Adam Sweeting
For a man who lives in an agreeable region of France, Jonathan Meades grew strangely passionate in the course of this fascinating excursion around Essex. The thuggish-looking narrator travelled by small, functional Toyota rather than Magical Mystery Tour-style charabanc, though the latter would have been perfectly apt for tales of Cockneys seeking escape in the county described by one sneering commentator as "the dustbin of London".The word "Essex" arrives dragging heaps of clanking debris attached to its rear bumper, and Meades began his odyssey with an extended demolition of Essex- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Kings Place’s Bach Unwrapped season invites audiences to come at the composer from new and unexpected angles. Bach gets arranged, adapted and re-orchestrated, and his legacy is showcased in works from three centuries. Occasionally however he also gets played straight – and it doesn’t get much straighter or more authentic than the Academy of Ancient Music and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge performing the St Matthew Passion.Hall One is a lovely, intimate concert hall with a malleable acoustic and good sightlines, but what it definitely isn’t is a church. Bach’s Passions have the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another presidential movie. Another year, another lead role for a stuttering English monarch. Hyde Park on Hudson feels like the product of one of those irony-free meetings in Burbank. You know, the ones in which executives crank up a cinematic concept on the basis that if the audience liked X, they’ll suck up Y. And hey, why not hit them with some Z too? Thus a few days on from Lincoln and with memories of The King’s Speech still warm, we have a film in which an iconic leader of the free world, in this case Franklin D Roosevelt, receives a visit from stiff, diffident George VI Read more ...
peter.quinn
Truly an ensemble cast, the Wayne Shorter Quartet's playing on Without A Net - marking Shorter's return to Blue Note Records after 43 years - fuses disparate elements into something transcendent and utterly original. From the slow burn of “Myrrh” to the searching, high-velocity romanticism of “Starry Night”, two of six new Shorter compositions featured, the album takes small group music-making to another dimension. The uniquely collegial four-way dialogue has been developed since the quartet - Shorter plus pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade - first assembled Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
As a parable on the dissolution of the American Dream, the story of self-made billionaire David Siegel is almost too good to be true. Much like another recent documentary – Bart Layton’s spellbinding The Imposter – Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles, broadcast last night in BBC Four's Storyville strand, lays out the kind of story that could only be told by a documentarian, because coming from a screenwriter it would sound both too neat and too far-fetched.Admittedly on one level, the Siegels’ story is as familiar as they come: Florida real-estate mogul David got rich fast in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade or so, Simon Stephens has emerged as one of Britain’s premier playwrights. As well as being a prolific penman, with three volumes of collected plays already in print, he has been tutor on the Royal Court’s Young Writers course and a regular at the National Theatre. He has also enjoyed collaborating with the best directors, one of whom is Marianne Elliott — their version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time transfers to the West End next month. Now they revisit his 2002 play, which they staged together originally at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.Set in Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Aimee Mann must surely be one of the most unstarry of stars. While most of her fans were still in the bar thinking about what they might have as a pre-gig aperitif, she strolled onstage to join support act Ted Leo for a couple of new songs they have written together. No grand diva entrance here, she just strapped on a bass guitar and stood next to the Costello-ish Leo pulling at those strings. Moral? Never ignore the support act, it might feature the person you've paid to see.When Mann returned after the interval there was no costume change, no big fanfare to signal the start of her set, Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Central to this thoughtful show is not really the use of light in art per se but how light appropriately serves a post-minimalist shift from the work of art to the environment itself. For the most part, the works here endeavour to shape the space around us or invoke a response on a physiological level.The lower gallery’s main room is dominated by Cerith Wyn-Evans’s S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E ("Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motives overspil..."), 2010, made up of floor-to-ceiling columns of incandescent lights which “breathe” by slowly glowing bright and dimming, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Body-horror proves a viable family business with Brandon Cronenberg’s writing-directing debut, a chilly, queasy successor to dad David’s best work. Cronenberg Sr.’s Videodrome (1983) – which caught its era’s potential for bootleg, endemic visual sex and violence and the interdependence of people and screens – is a decent comparison to Brandon’s Antiviral, which pushes our obsession with celebrity to satiric extremes.We follow Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) in his work at the Lucas Clinic, where celebrity’s diseases are stored and fans pay to be infected, sometimes serious sickness a small Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo put him in the running for a Pulitzer in 2010. Deservedly so. Set during the Iraq war and featuring a talking tiger (played with verve on Broadway by Robin Williams), it was inventive, funny and profound. Gruesome Playground Injuries is none of these.Doug and Kayleen meet aged eight in the nurse's office at school. He has fallen off his bike while cycling on the roof. She can't stop throwing up. The play comprises snapshots of their lives over 30 years, jumping back and forth in time: at the school prom, at a wake, after accidents and after a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The television channels have been making documentaries about our boys, and indeed girls, in Afghanistan for the best part of a decade. We’re used by now to the imagery, which mainly consists of dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom. Prince Harry: Frontline Afghanistan was an occasion to stir an extra ingredient into the brew: dust, joshing, weaponry and boredom, plus a chap who when he loses at strip poker makes the front page of every newspaper in the western world.For reasons which won’t need much unpacking, the channel which normally brings you things called Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
"You're a hero, man! You will never pay for a drink for as long as you live." Sounds easy enough, but after the sensational crash sequence in the opening scenes of Flight, heroism will never be the same. The Oscar-nominated script by John Gatins is a morally skilful examination of one terrifying what-if: what if Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who sensationally landed US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, had been a closet drunk?Also Oscar-nominated is Denzel Washington for his portrayal of Whip Whitaker, heroic pilot with a problem. Striding down a hotel hallway on Read more ...