Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In Beatles’ lore, the Prince of Wales Theatre is totemic. Here, on 4 November 1963, the cheeky quartet played the Royal Command Performance before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. John Lennon quipped, “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery”. Now, 50 years on from the release of their first single, a tribute of sorts is taking place on the same stage with the arrival of Let It Be in the West End.Let It Be tries to hide what it is – at the end of the show, the cast members are introduced for the first time as “on Read more ...
josh.spero
There are two reasons I can often be found slumped on my sofa watching the 8.30pm cookery-show slot on BBC Two on a Monday evening: first, it has the perfect lead-in, University Challenge, after which nothing involving mental exercise is required; and second, I'm a greedy cook. Tonight saw the return to this slot of erotic gastronome Nigella Lawson with Nigellissima, whose cod-Italian title suggested exactly the food she would be cooking.But it's not so much the food I want to write about. Yes, it looked more desirable than Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Speedos - tagliata, chocolate cheesecake (not Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright. If Brick was conceptually ambitious yet small-scale, Looper gives us filmic chutzpah with the budget (and stars) to match.It’s set predominantly in a dystopian 2044, in and around Kansas City, with Read more ...
james.woodall
For a remarkable BBC Radio Four half-hour programme broadcast on 14 September, The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle, Chris Bowlby pieced together tales of treachery in the former German Democratic Republic. At one point a 1950s recording of a trial of a woman was played. Her cries above the rasping sound of the judge, if that’s what he was, sentencing her to death was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever heard.The GDR was a poisonous place, crawling with vengeful creeps like that Stasi judge whose mission in life was to maintain such a level of fear in its citizens that exposure of its actual rot Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Janine Jansen had every right to be nervous. The last time most of us saw the London Symphony Orchestra the audience spent the whole time laughing at their star soloist. But then Mr Bean has a very different skill set to Jansen. She's able to journey with silken smoothness across the musical stratosphere for what seems like eternity. He's able to blow his nose while playing the piano with the end of an umbrella. That said, one could have imagined Jansen's performance of Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto provoking laughter, but only from a sense of awe and astonishment.The concerto was the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio: had made it, that is, too static and unstagey. I wonder what Radcliffe would say about Katie Mitchell’s production for Welsh National Opera, revived this weekend by Robin Tebbutt, and a classic case of a director’s reluctance to allow an essentially statuesque, slow-moving work its natural space and pace.Unlike Wake-Walker, who virtually Read more ...
theartsdesk
R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
"There used to be among families...a position, a certain...call it 'parade'." So stammered Benedict Cumberbatch's rigidly principled, increasingly broken Christopher Tietjens at the climax of last week's penultimate Parade's End, echoing his own line from the series' first episode as he struggled to justify his fidelity to adulterous wife Sylvia (Rebecca Hall).In the kind of verbally shrewd reversal that has defined Tom Stoppard's meticulous, occasionally magnificent script, a frustrated General Campion told him "there are no more parades for that regiment". Tietjens was the last Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The prospect of a new concerto from a largely unknown composer who, it’s safe to say, had never been performed previously in Liverpool may have seemed a little daunting. By the end of the 22-minute world premiere, however, rapturous applause greeted this approachable, tuneful, understated and, above all, gentle work. This was so much the case that it will no doubt be heard again soon.Soloist Cormac Henry, the principal flute of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, continued the long-established tradition of commissioning major works which showcase the RLPO's principals. So it was that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kalkadungu: Music for didjeridu and orchestra William Barton (didjeridu) (ABC Classics)We all think that we know what a didjeridu sounds like. Mere words can’t begin to describe the noise made by William Barton in full flow. It’s a sonorous, low roar that sets your stomach wobbling, made more startling by the array of harmonics and overtones which buzz around over the top. There’s also Barton’s sheer technique, circular breathing allowing him to sustain notes for improbable lengths. Martin Buzacott’s notes refer to the didgeridu as “the sound of the Australian earth, the ochre-coloured Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The popular image of the state-of-the-nation play is that of a large-scale, big-cast drama that has an epic time span and lots of highly articulate speeches that analyse the way we are. But sometimes a small-cast play with a much more modest range can be equally successful in saying something worth hearing not only about a handful of characters, but also about contemporary Britain. Such a play is Vickie Donoghue’s powerful debut, which was first seen at the HighTide Festival in May.Set on a tidal Thames wasteland, a secluded stretch wryly called “The Beach”, the story ebbs and flows around Read more ...