Reviews
Jasper Rees
Where next for Gareth Malone, who would ardently like to teach the entire planet to sing in perfect harmony? He began all those series ago with the ruffians and rapscallions who make up the average sixth form, most recently took his outreach work to tone-deaf soldiers’ spouses and for his next stop he’s boarding a plane to export The Choir Stateside. Other constituencies who could use a healing stint singing under Malone's pastoral wing would include politicians, football supporters and anyone to do with The X Factor. But for the moment, it’s back to the office for Gareth.In ep one of The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alonso Berruguete, Vicente Carducho, Juan Antonio Conchillos y Falco and Pedro Machuca are hardly familiar names in the Anglophone art world, but their drawings are on view in a revelatory exhibition. The British Museum is showing nearly all its Spanish drawings and a fine, succinct collection of prints, in an anthology called From the Renaissance to Goya. It makes for a particularly piquant sequel – or rather, prequel - to the high art of that temperamental genius, the Spaniard Picasso, whose Vollard Suite has just been on view. The milestones it encompasses are various. There was the Read more ...
Helen K Parker
It’s all about the smash and grab in Runic Games’ new adventure Torchlight II, which offers up more booty than you can shake a rune-encrusted staff at. Forget story and character, the aim of this slickly designed action RPG is quests, exploration, and killing copious amounts of enemies with a plethora of weaponry.Accompanied by Matt Uelmen’s beautiful soundtrack, your character gallivants through the game’s levels collecting so much stuff that it becomes frequently necessary to load your critter companion up like a pack mule and send them back to town to flog your unwanted gear. And get some Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s nothing like having a fatwa hanging over you to find out who your friends are, for those who might be taken for natural allies may surprise you. And so it was when Salman Rushdie received his death warrant 23 years ago on St Valentine’s Day: there were those who proved their mettle, or at least found common cause with the imperilled writer. And then there were those whose instincts did not lie in the advocacy of free speech but in maintaining, as they saw it, a diplomatic pragmatism. Their principles, it seems, were flexible enough to allow them to spill ink for the British press Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The St James Theatre has risen, phoenix-like, almost literally from the ashes of the Westminster Theatre, which was first a chapel, then a cinema and latterly a drama theatre that played host to productions of Oscar Wilde and Harley Granville Barker plays, among many others, and where Tyrone Guthrie once directed. In the 1950s and 1960s it was home to a production company run by producer Tony Furness and actor Alan Badel.The theatre, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace, burned down in 2002 and now, as part of a new commercial development on the site, a company led by Robert Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When you hear Christian Tetzlaff play you hear Brahms, or Beethoven or, in this case, Bach. What you don’t hear a lot of is Tetzlaff himself. I mean that in the best possible way – so willing is the violinist to submerge himself, to set aside ego and agenda. It’s an approach that is at its purest in Bach’s solo violin music, and as he presented the sonatas and partitas to a full Wigmore Hall last night the generosity of this extraordinary musician allowed his audience to set ourselves aside for a moment too as we listened.It has been almost 20 years since Tetzlaff first recorded Bach’s Read more ...
Laura Silverman
When Hindle Wakes opened in 1912 in London, the script was burned in the street. Stanley Houghton, a member of the Manchester School of playwrights, had exposed one of society's double standards: that it was fine for a man to have a guiltless fling before marriage, but it was not acceptable for a woman. The problem with Bethan Dear's earnest revival is that the play no longer holds the same moral force. Today, the idea that Fanny Hawthorn, a mill girl, goes away for the weekend with Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner's son, and then refuses to marry him is hardly shocking.Solidly constructed, Read more ...
bella.todd
There’s a vivid moment in this Joe Penhall revival when Christopher, a psychiatric patient suspected of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, finds himself caught in the linguistic crossfire between his two rival care-givers. Oblivious to everything but their argument, the doctors continue to shout across their subject as he sinks to the floor, the tormented vertex in a taut dramatic triangle. Never mind the ones inside – it’s the voices outside Christopher’s head that seem to be doing the most damage.When Blue/Orange was first staged, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play at the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Kevin Rowland has gone to great lengths recently to ensure that no one is under any misconceptions: the return of Dexys is no nostalgia trip. Last night’s show in Edinburgh hammered home the point. There aren’t many bands that could return after 27 years (give or take a smattering of gigs in 2003), play for two hours straight, perform only four old songs - even if those were stretched out over 45 extraordinary minutes - and yet still satisfy every demand made of them.Before that raucous, rather moving finale, there was the pressing business of performing the new album, One Day I’m Going to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown (and, just occasionally, the hollow laugh) has however emerged in the form of Roger Rees’s What You Will – a brisk hour-and-a-half’s trot through Shakespeare’s greatest hits, with a little autobiography and a lot of accents thrown in.A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rees can spin an anecdote with style, has plenty to tell, and the elegant shamelessness to steal them when they are not his own. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Circus and church, and a whole lot of other extremes, come up against each other in bewildering opposition in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s re-released 1989 Santa Sangre, a cult film of which it could truly be said, “They don’t make them like this any more.” It’s practically a one-off, visually spectacular and musically vibrant; if you’re looking for equivalents, Buñuel, Ken Russell at his most hysterical, and the Italian horror-and-gore genre of the Seventies (think Berberian Sound Studio) are the nearest you might get.The opening scene finds hero Fenix seriously out-of-his-tree (literally) in a Read more ...
David Nice
Pick the right dream, and you just might retrieve a precious memory, even in nightmarish terrain where everyone else has lost theirs. That message seems to have been uncannily prophetic for Bohuslav Martinů, who began work on Julietta in 1936, soon to face the terrifying clean slate of a longer exile from his beloved Czechoslovakia with the onset of the Second World War. The pity and the pain of severance are already there in this seething operatic adaptation of Georges Neveux's crammed-to-bursting dream play. Director Richard Jones holds them effortlessly in the forefront of a production Read more ...