Reviews
Thomas H. Green
For a decade these two outfits, the Hammer & Tongue poetry collective and the Slipjam:B crew of hip hop MCs, have been taking each other on. They both run their own successful nights but this evening is their yearly face-off. As it reaches its climax, after a series of rounds, the two units are onstage together, MCs stage right, poets stage left, taking turns to front up, laying into each other, riding a thin line between affable digs and bawdy insult.Poet Michael James Parker heads to the front. Flick-haired, 6’ 4” and wearing a blissed grin, his verse goes for the existential nub of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zero Dark Thirty could have easily gone by the name of the Danish thriller from last year, The Hunt, it’s so furiously single-minded. As it is, the film's striking title is a military term for half-past midnight - the timing of the Navy SEAL raid which shot dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The shadowy, nail-biting recreation of that infamous operation forms the film’s finale and is its pièce de résistance. But Zero Dark Thirty also gives us the undisclosed story of the 10-year search for bin Laden: the moments of discovery and revelation, as well as the frustrations and deadly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When feminism was really cool, female playwrights would write flatshare dramas about a group of women, each of whom was representative of a certain way of life. The play title would just be a list of their names. The classic example is Pam Gems’s Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi from 1976. Does this mean that Amelia Bullmore’s new play, which also has a title listing its female characters, is a trip down nostalgia lane?Well, you certainly can’t complain about its star cast: Gina McKee, Tamzin Outhwaite and Anna Maxwell Martin — they play Viv, Di and Rose, who meet at university at the age of 18 in Read more ...
David Nice
“It looks like the Coconut Lounge,” remarked John Adams as he stepped up jauntily to introduce the first of two big string pieces composed 30 years apart. The folk with their drinks at the candlelit tables, though, were never allowed to sit back and let it all wash over them.The seminal Shaker Loops of 1978, heard here in its string-orchestra incarnation of five years later, buffets and charges you as it flies or coasts through space, the polar opposite of the more placid minimalism which inspired it. That was nothing, though, compared to the strange adventure of Adams’ recent String Quartet Read more ...
philip radcliffe
On 1 July 1916, the battalion of Lancashire volunteers recruited from Accrington was all but wiped out in about 20 minutes as they took on the task of attacking the village of Serre on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. Out of 700 men, 235 were killed, 350 wounded, “mown down like meadow grass”. Such was the fate of the Accrington Pals, formally the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) of the East Lancashire Regiment. Some of the lads were as young as 16, inspired by local pride and national patriotism to fib about their age in order to join their mates.Accrington was the smallest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As political campaigns go, Bob Servant's bid to win a by-election in Broughty Ferry (a real-life seaside suburb of Dundee) looks more like a drunken practical joke, or the result of an ill-judged bet. A fluent and shameless liar whose only credentials are a lifetime of dodginess, Servant's motives are venal and his ambitions entirely self-centred. He knows nothing about politics or, apparently, anything else, expect perhaps selling hamburgers, which he has done for many decades.Adapted from Neil Forsyth's books, Bob Servant Independent is low-key and low budget, but looks capable of building Read more ...
fisun.guner
We love the snow but hate the cold, and for almost 300 years Northern European winters were bitterly, catastrophically cold. Crops failed, there were famine riots and people died of hypothermia during the Little Ice Age. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, no population suffered at the hands of Old Man Winter quite as much as those in the Low Countries. Winters were long, life was harsh, but in Brussels Pieter Bruegel the Elder was singlehandedly inventing the winter landscape of our imaginations.Bruegel painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, during the coldest winter for a century. At first Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's not an easy trick for an outsized action hero to grow older gracefully or credibly, but Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a shrewd choice of vehicle with which to launch his post-political film career. The way he tells it, being Governor of California was only ever intended to be a temporary time-out from Hollywood. Back in his first leading role since 2003's Terminator 3, he has little difficulty in seizing control of the screen.However, he has carefully scaled down his ambitions. Playing Ray Owens, sheriff of the small town of Sommerton, Arizona, Arnie has adopted a laboured senior Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was surely a no-brainer for ITV to produce a series about grand houses presented by Julian Fellowes with stories about those who lived and worked in them. But while it may sound wholly derivative to many, at least Fellowes - unlike a raft of celebrities presenting television programmes these days - has the wherewithal. He's an acknowledged expert in the field - although (wittily, I think) the titles were a neat rip-off of Downton Abbey's and he shamelessly plugged his upstairs-downstairs drama in the opening scenes.In the first of a two-parter he explained he was “trying to find the real Read more ...
Heather Neill
While Kafka specifically declined to indicate exactly what kind of creature Gregor Samsa becomes in his horrific overnight transformation, translators of the novella have gone for a variety of options: bug, beetle, cockroach or vermin. In this stage version, there is no attempt to imitate the appearance of any insect by means of costume or make-up; instead Gísli Örn Garðarsson uses his gymnastic skills to indicate movements alien to human beings while retaining Kafka’s underlying sense of a suffering man trapped in his new body.This production, a joint enterprise between the Lyric and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Hare's 1998 play wasn't terribly well received when it was first produced by the Almeida; several critics regarded it as a thin work, weakly directed by Richard Eyre, and opined that Liam Neeson was miscast in the role of Oscar Wilde. Now comes a revival, directed by Australian Neil Armfield that has, on the face of it, dream casting in Rupert Everett as the Irish playwright hounded by the British ruling classes for his homosexuality.It's a play of two halves, in more ways than one, as Hare creates a sort of diptych of Wilde's life. The first act is set in the louche Cadogan Hotel on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As proof that the American cinema for the most part exists to waste its actresses, along comes Won't Back Down. A peculiarly reactionary piece of tosh, it masquerades as a crusading film in the spirit of Norma Rae, the Sally Field Oscar-winner from decades ago that in fact is snarkily referenced in passing. The story of two determined mums who take on the Pittsburgh school system and (guess what?) win, Daniel Barnz's film exudes the breathless if misplaced confidence of a pre-schooler who hasn't yet learned anything of the realities of life and thinks that all experience can be reduced to a Read more ...