Reviews
judith.flanders
It’s hard to work out why the Royal Ballet has not indulged in more Jerome Robbins, so eminently suited does it seem for their taste for emotional understatement. In the Night had a few outings in the 1970s, and has only now been revived, possibly after seeing the audience response to the Mariinsky’s immaculate performance of the same in London a year ago.To Chopin Noctures, three couples play out their relationships. To paraphrase the famous description of Waiting for Godot, nothing happens three times. But in that “not happening” Robbins dissects the art of the pas de deux, constructing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal German band, offering a new perspective on their creative process and what they had issued. More than any of this, its three discs were a great listen and as essential as any of their albums - Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Future Days.Re-reviewing The Lost Tapes is unnecessary, but taking it as a yardstick for the year’s other reissues is, by turns, Read more ...
fisun.guner
William Boyd wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of his 2006 espionage novel, and since it’s integral to the whole he retained its two-part structure. The first concerns the World War II activities of former British intelligence spy Eva Delectorskaya, the second, set in 1976, concerns her efforts to lay the past to rest. Not only has the past cast a dark shadow over her life but it continues to endanger it. For this she enlists the help of her daughter.Yet if you’ve read the book, the most compelling parts concern the daughter and the contemporary political events that intrude upon her Read more ...
Helen K Parker
I’m sure we can all remember the joys of making collages and tissue-box houses/fortresses as children. And we all remember plasticine, right? Innocent childhood art materials that kept us busy while our parents and teachers put their feet up. Even as adults the most disturbing collages we’ve seen are those presented by Monty Python, and the most disturbing plasticine creation we’ve seen is Morph.But Jack King Spooner is no Tony Hart, and in his newly released sequel to his original freeware game Will You Ever Return? - appropriately named Will You Ever Return? 2 – is the proof that an Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” observes Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) in Northern Irish director Jon Wright’s creature feature. And, credit where it’s due, the mirthfully monikered Grabbers presents us with some classically mad shit. Set on the fictional Erin Island - a fishing village off the coast of Ireland - Grabbers is Wright’s second feature after 2009’s Tormented.After a prologue involving the fatal molestation of fisherman by an unseen sea monster, we’re introduced to Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle). He’s rebounding off rock bottom, drunk and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pantomime is one of the great festive traditions and the version of Dick Whittington envisaged by John Bishop in this one-off comedy drama checked off every single one of the clichés. Taking a writer’s credit alongside Jonathan Harvey of Gimme Gimme Gimme fame, the Liverpool comic drew on his experiences on regional stages near the beginning of his showbiz career in pulling together the script.Bishop starred as Lewis Loud, a local radio DJ making his pantomime debut at the Grand Theatre Lancaster as part of a group of characters straight out of central casting. There was soap star Tamsin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For much of 2012, London theatre seemed to celebrate the playhouse as much as the play, turning certain venues into essential destinations. I'm thinking, of course, of Shakespeare's Globe, whose mindblowing Globe to Globe season - its namesake's canon performed in as many languages as there are plays - redefined the concept of marathon well before the Olympic athletes came to town. Or the Royal Court, which traversed the year in high, heady style, setting established names (Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp) alongside gifted newcomers (Luke Norris, Hayley Squires) and fast-rising Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
If 2012 is to have a cinematic legacy, it may just be remembered as the year big-screen time travel came of age. While Rian Johnson’s pulpy noir Looper explored the moral and spiritual implications of a world in which decade-hopping has become the norm, first-time director Colin Trevorrow hones in on the concept’s core emotion. Our universal longing to go back, to recover, to alter the past, is both what makes time travel such an enduringly popular trope, and what sustains Trevorrow’s particular offbeat, quietly joyous take.Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is a disillusioned college grad living out much Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BBC makes a habit of dramatising the difficult lives of those who have entertained us – tortured comedians, anguished singers, even troubled cooks. Whatever you make of their merits, the message accumulating across all these biodramas is that the audience’s pleasure comes at the cost of the artist’s pain. Or as Alfred Hitchcock put it in The Girl, “Who pays our wages? The audience.”And so to the master. In The Girl Hitchcock became the story rather than the storyteller, not for the first time or the last (the film starring Anthony Hopkins as Hitch is coming soon). Based on the testimony Read more ...
peter.quinn
On Sailing to Byzantium Christine Tobin's utterly singular music fuses with the amaranthine force of WB Yeats's poetry to create one of the most transporting jazz releases in aeons. From the iridescent colours of “The Wild Swans at Coole” and the statuesque tranquility of the title track, to the subtly ornamented melodic line of “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and the deeply poignant “Long-legged Fly”, the album's unique sound-world and intense depth of feeling completely seduce the senses.Tobin's incredibly empathetic band features Liam Noble (piano), Phil Robson (guitar), Gareth Lockrane ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I was going to make a strenuous effort not to give away the ending, but since it's all over the front pages of the newspapers there's not much point. This rambling Downton special spent two hours going nowhere in particular, albeit very charmingly, but Julian Fellowes had been keeping his knuckledusters hidden behind his back. In the closing few minutes, he gave us the new heir of Downton and got rid of the previous one, the much-loved Matthew Crawley.Apparently Dan Stevens, who played Matthew, decided as long ago as February that he was leaving the show, so he might have expected a slightly Read more ...
fisun.guner
It was the year that everyone got just a little hysterical about Damien Hirst. That and the art market that made him. But that didn’t keep the visitors away from his retrospective at Tate Modern. The exhibition had more crowds than Wembley Stadium, or at least more than for any other exhibition in Tate Modern’s 12-year history (and possibly for any exhibition since Tate records began). It was cleverly curated (i.e. heavily edited) so it wasn’t half as execrable as some critics claimed it was (or said it would be before seeing it). And at least it reminded us why anyone had made such a fuss Read more ...