Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
My phone's predictive text posed an interesting question. Robert le Doable it insisted on calling last night's opera. And it's often been asked of this and other grands opéras. Are they doable? Such was the munificence of the times in which they thrived, and such has been the collapse in their popularity, are grands opéras worthy of resurrection? And do we have the resources and good will to do justice to their singular vision? If any opera company could meet the all-singing, all-dancing demands, it is the Royal Opera House. And if any of the hundreds of grands opéras that graced Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Support bands tend to get short shrift, but it would be criminal not to give Evil Blizzard their due here. Made up of three bass guitarists with assorted effects pedals and a drummer who also sang, three members of the band were in pink pyjamas and wearing masks, while the fourth was in black leather and a Hawkwind hairdo. They produced industrial levels of noise around steady riffs and a variety of filthy bass sounds.One member removed his silver, robotic mask to reveal a scarecrow hood underneath, and a song later removed that too, only to be left with a third, featureless rubber face Read more ...
Heather Neill
Woking and Mars both provide subject matter for cartographers. John, who reckons he’s an achiever, is updating the local A to Z, while Behrooz, once a colleague of John’s, is exhibiting his paintings of the red planet. There’s a neat overlap in their occupations: the Martian invasion in H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds took place on Horsell Common, Woking.Tom Morton-Smith, one of the winners of the Papatango New Writing Competition, is not afraid of metaphor. In an age when religion and family structure no longer provide a moral life-map, it may be difficult to tell the difference between Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Usually when a band playing a venue the size of the Brighton Centre asks if the crowd would like to hear a new song the response is somewhat muted. However, this is a crowd of eager fans, average age around 17, and they yell back affirmatively with all their might. Rizzle Kicks are in their home city and it shows (especially when they later lead a chant for Brighton and Hove Albion FC – “Seagulls! Seagulls”). The song in question, “That’s Classic”, turns out to be a corker, built round a steel drum motif from Latin standard “Aquarela do Brasil” - the one repeatedly played in Terry Gilliam’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The romcom is an oddball. Though an ever-present at the multiplex, of all the genres it remains notoriously reluctant to take wing. The path of true love ne’er did run without all the usual box-ticking plot swerves. Full credit then to Celeste and Jesse Forever, for coming at the problem from a sideways angle. In this reimagining, boy and girl have lost each other before the start of the movie – they’re divorcing – but are still best of friends. In fact, creepily so.Celeste (Rashida Jones) is a thriving PR executive and finger-on-the-pulse author of the self-explanatory Shitegeist. She can Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Thomas was alone. And then, he wasn’t. As story-time opening lines go, this one is on a par with "once upon a time" in its simplicity. Simplicity, however, can be misleading. Our eponymous hero Thomas may in fact look like a simple red rectangle with the ability to move and jump, but thanks to a mysterious "event" within the computer programme he is part of, he has also been imbued with sentience. And he is not alone.Described by creator Mike Bithell as a minimalist game about friendship and jumping and floating and bouncing and anti-gravity, the aim of this avant-garde game is to manoeuvre Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bulgakov gets about more than you’d think. As a character in the play Collaborators, the Russian novelist was most recently seen helping Stalin with his memoirs. Within the last couple of years his novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard have both been adapted for the stage, while A Dog’s Heart was turned into an opera. All of these works were imbued with the Bulgakovian scent for phantasmal satire. So what's next for an author hooked on shape-shifting and the surreal?Don’t run a mile quite yet, but his memoir of serving as a young doctor in rural Ukraine has been turned into a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We never glimpse the source of the old money in Sarah Wooley’s new play, for it’s his funeral that opens proceedings. We will get no sense of the man, or the extent of his wealth, or the way he spent it. The eventual irrelevance of such a specific title typifies a muddled and terribly trite evening.Maureen Lipman plays the dead man’s widow, Joyce, who appears at the funeral as a rabbit trapped in the headlights, a sexagenarian naïf, who seems to be completely ignorant of the world and its ways. We’re asked to believe that Joyce has been, if not literally locked up, then cloistered by her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's Academy Award season within the showbiz-centric world of The Bodyguard, but even the greatest of Oscar obsessives - count me among them - would be hard-pressed to toss many a trophy in the direction of the 1992 film or toward the largely stillborn stage musical that it has now spawned. Widely panned at the time of release (the film received more Golden Raspberry nods for the year's worst than it did golden statuettes), its pulpy narrative looks even more threadbare on the West End stage, notwithstanding the news value of the return to the musical theatre after a dozen years of Broadway Read more ...
David Nice
Her Majesty was making a rare concert-hall appearance to present the Queen’s Medal for Music, and any little Englanders in the audience might have been tempted to link royalty to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But conductor Robin Ticciati, with a generosity and wisdom beyond his 29 years, raised this orchestral masterpiece to the universal level it deserves. Elgar’s "friends pictured within" trod air and revealed every aspect of their often shy, beautiful souls.It should come as no surprise that the score transcends labels of nationality, provinciality even. After all, what is "Nimrod" but the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over the last couple of months Mumford & Sons have quietly become the biggest band in the world. If there was a coronation it came at some point between the headline-making second album, Babel, and this sell-out first arena tour. When the announcement came earlier this week that the folky foursome are to headline next year’s 20th anniversary T in the Park festival, I seemed to be the only one who was surprised.Given the context, it was probably fair to consider the band’s SECC show as something of a dummy run for Scotland’s biggest stage. With their soaring melodies and heartfelt choruses Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As anyone who saw The Next Three Days, A Good Year, or Proof of Life will know, Russell Crowe has frequently been one to squander his talent in mediocre or plain terrible fare. His latest, The Man with the Iron Fists, is a 1970s-inspired martial arts menagerie which makes LA Confidential feel like a very long time ago. It’s an almost literal assault on the eyes and ears – entertainingly mad and fitfully bad. But at least this time Crowe looks like he’s having a ball, and to be fair you might too.The Man with the Iron Fists is the passion project of Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA (aka Robert Fitzgerald Read more ...