Reviews
theartsdesk
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros: Global A Go-Go, StreetcoreLisa-Marie FerlaAs well as marking the 10th anniversary of Joe Strummer's death, 2012 would also have been the year the legendary Clash frontman turned 60. The reissue of these two albums, recorded with his last band the Mescaleros, is therefore doubly timely.The band's three albums built on the very best of the globe-trotting, more experimental themes that had begun to sneak into The Clash's work before they disbanded in 1985, but did so in a way that kept them vital and accessible to those of us raised on three-chord punk Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the non-Olympic sport called “Name Britain’s greatest living playwright”, most of the contestants have always been men. Nowadays, that is all changed and the odds-on favourite would be Caryl Churchill, who has been creating provocative and boundary-busting drama for four decades. Her plays Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money are curriculum classics, and her recent work — Far Away, A Number and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You — triumphantly proved that her originality remains unimpaired with age.The same can just about be said of her latest. The play has no named characters, and consists Read more ...
David Nice
Updating Chekhov is nothing new, despite the preliminary flurries about this production. Yet the singular directorial take can only highlight the master’s modernity in the bigger issues. If Australian iconoclast Benedict Andrews had continued as he seems to begin, with a Stanislavsky-like realism for today, passing anachronisms like the optimism for a better life in centuries to come, the idleness of a servanted household and a shockingly abrupt duel might jar. But phantasmagorical moments keep breaking through until the tenuous security of the three sisters stuck in a provincial Russian Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Cage: As Is Alexei Lubimov (piano, prepared piano), Natalia Pschenitschnikova (voice) (ECM)One of the few avant-garde composers whose name is widely known, thanks to the infamous 4’33”, John Cage’s reputation as a fungus-collecting prankster can overshadow the fact that he was also a deeply serious, highly intelligent composer. 2012 is his centenary year, and new Cage discs have been slipping out imperceptibly, as you’d suspect he would have wanted. Pianist Alexei Lubimov’s account of Cage’s 1988 visit to the USSR is a joy to read, accompanied by a wonderful selection of Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It's not like we don't already love him, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt couldn't possibly get more adorable than he is as the fearsomely skilled bike-riding good guy in Premium Rush - a film that may remind older moviegoers of a 1986 bike messenger film Quicksilver. Anyone who remembers that film can now forget it because Premium Rush is so much more exciting and almost completely more plausible than its predecessor that it upends the whole bike messenger film genre, much in the way The Imposter upped the ante for documentaries. Yes, you could say Premium Rush was a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Don’t say this hasn’t been on the way for a while. For years now we’ve had the public working on television for free. They sing for free. They juggle and ventriloquise and suck up to Simon Cowell for free. They even live in glass houses for free. Meanwhile, back at home, the audience makes the key decisions about who stays and who goes. One blue-sky thinking-outside-the-box lightbulby brainstorming roundtable session later and you have the bizarre metatexual freak that is The Audience.In The Audience, the audience is no longer monitoring events from the sofa. Well, it is, but it’s also up Read more ...
mark.kidel
John O’Keeffe’s 18th century classic Wild Oats is a play about players and an uproarious love letter to the theatre: a perfect fit for the re-opening, after 18 months of massive refurbishment, of Bristol’s Old Vic, originally constructed in 1766 and the oldest surviving working theatre in the UK. When a group of players approached the city’s merchants at the end of the 17th century, seeking help with the establishment of a venue in which they might perform, Bristol’s plutocrats sent them packing, as theatrical activities were considered too subversive. Bristol’s first theatre was set up Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Ruinous is a harsh word to wield against any artistic decision. However, the Russo/American voiceover chosen by Igor Rezenov to accompany his new PC game Fibrillation, no other printable judgement is strong enough. The game itself is a brief but beautifully atmospheric horror designed to be played in a single sitting. Your comatose character wanders through the grainy and confusing landscapes of his hypoxic mind, attempting to find a way out of the various catacombs, and to flee a terrifying entity which stalks him.As you move through doorways into warehouse storage rooms, geometric mazes and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Patti Smith does not appear to change very much, visually. Her image is undoubtedly part of her appeal, especially in Brighton with its large lesbian population. She arrives on stage in pale blue jeans, a white shirt and a baggy cardy-style jacket, face unadorned with make-up and hair straggled down around her shoulders. From a distance she looks very much as she did in the mid-Seventies. She certainly doesn’t look 65.Her Brighton audience are zealously partisan. This has a dual effect. It gives the evening real electricity and a sense of laser-focused affection which Smith bathes in, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently admitted in an interview that she hadn’t heard of the play before she was asked to take on the lead. It may be a world away from the buxom bar-maids and big-hearted bimbos that have become Smith’s trademark, but the double Olivier Award-winner makes light work of a role that carries the weight of theatre’s greatest actresses.Smaller than almost everyone else on stage, and disappearing into sofas, melting Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Even Meryl Streep, bless her, is allowed the odd dud, and Hope Springs is a snore. Much has been made of the film shifting Hollywood’s attention toward the middle-aged – meaning, in their terms, anyone 20 or older. But director David Frankel’s reunion with his Devil Wears Prada star merely proves that dogged earnestness can be just as soul-sapping as the latest teenage gross-out venture. One can’t imagine Prada’s Miranda Priestly sitting this one out without a well-aimed mot juste.Perhaps Streep just wanted a complete about-face after the demands of The Iron Lady, the actress turning for Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's a truism in dance music culture that “everyone's a DJ nowadays”. It's generally meant in a flip, pejorative sense – suggesting that cheap technology means every man Jack and his dog can put a sequence of records together and the role is somehow devalued. But it hides a rather more positive truth, which is that dance culture is intrinsically participative, that the line between industry and punters is so blurred as to be non-existent, that those punters truly are easily as important as the hallowed DJs they look up to.Certainly at the Dimensions Festival, the boundaries seem pretty fluid Read more ...