Reviews
Tom Birchenough
You might have wondered if, when Armenia was offered King John as part of the Globe to Globe season, they felt they’d drawn the short straw. Not a bit of it. Shakespeare’s early history play, the action of which pre-dates those for which he is better known by a century, may be rarely performed, but here, in what I suspect is a judiciously trimmed version, it brings out so much that genuinely crosses international lines, speaking Shakespeare’s story with the local accent of the producing nation.And Armenia and the Caucasus in general provide such fertile ground for pondering the same kinds of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No 9 (with Finale completed by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca) Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle(EMI)Anton Bruckner’s last symphony is near perfect in its three-movement form. The realisation that the Finale was left almost complete after Bruckner’s death in 1896 is something you’d rather not confront. The vast Adagio closes in a mood of such otherworldly serenity that it’s difficult to imagine anything following it. We’ll get to that last movement later; programme your CD player to play the first three tracks alone and you’ve a very decent conventional Bruckner Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Post-classical” the FatCat label call it, and well they might. All three of the acts who played at the Barbican last night in one way or another used the instrumentation of the classical concert hall but in a way that was completely dislodged from tradition – not raging against it, nor fighting to escape it in the sense of high modernism, nor reviving it, but rather looking back on it as something other, something of a different era.Dustin O'Halloran's music is lyrical, strange and very pretty. It has something of the TV soundtrack about it, but as Noël Coward so rightly put it, it's Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Often it can seem the sheer struggle of early reggae gets lost in all that happy, spliff-smoking Rastafarianism of Bob Marley's Legend. For one-time label-mate Jimmy Cliff, however, there was never any sense of “every little thing's going to be alright”. In the 1972 film The Harder They Come, he played a musician forced into crime and eventually shot by the police. And as a singer-songwriter, over a 50-year career, he has sung of injustice and hope. Last night, in front of a rambunctious indigO2, a 64-year-old Cliff showed he has absolutely no intention of mellowing.This concert was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Clothes are shed, sensibilities skewered and political correctness defiantly ignored in this latest London revival of Joe Orton's wonderful play (the fourth, for what it's worth, in the capital during my time). But what most distinguishes Sean Foley's take on Orton's posthumously produced, gallopingly rude farce is the noise level of a show that is here played at a near frenzy throughout. The laughs remain, don't get me wrong, but they sometimes get lost in the mounting decibel level that, at this rate, may find one or two of the performers sidelined by laryngitis before too long.What's the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
She Monkeys comes with a “note of intent” from its Swedish director Lisa Aschan. “She Monkeys plays with rules that surround human behaviour. I want to explore society’s contradictions by allowing young women to perform brutal actions. To show these taboos in contrast to the innocent and what seems to be naïve. The story’s focus is a power play between two teenage girls and the world around them. They’re in constant competition.”Aschan continues, but that about sums up this dispassionate, spare and disquieting Gothenburg-filmed examination of teenage interaction. The note of intent Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s impossible to think of a contemporary British director or writer-director team making six consecutive masterpieces as did Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger when they followed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) with A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Not only does the industry no longer have the means to support such an iconoclastic partnership – there has never been a writer working in the mainstream national cinema as imaginative or as fertile as Pressburger and a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Perhaps it’s not a strange coincidence that this week brings two films about the precious commodity that is water. (The other is The Source.) More than oil, more than land, certainly more than ideology, one day the thing mankind will fight over is access to the element without which life is unsustainable. Written by Ken Loach's sometime scriptwriter Paul Laverty, Even the Rain is an impeccably liberal study of ownership of the water supply that doubles as a parable about modern imperialism. Two morality tales for the price of one, it also wags its finger at big-budget film-makers who visit Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Being in a comedy double act is like being in a marriage. Except, as half of a humorous twosome once told me, with less sex. There are ups and downs and the chances of splitting are high. The push-pull tensions of the double act are explored in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, first seen on Broadway in 1972, then famously on film in 1975 with Walter Matthau and George Burns. Thirty years on from its premiere, is the magic still there?Well, the star casting certainly is. Danny DeVito, making his West End debut, has the dominant role as cantankerous clown Willie Clark, while Richard Griffiths is Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
“It’s like Big Ben. It’s like the Houses of Parliament. It’s like St Paul’s,” observed Susan Hampshire, reflecting on the iconic properties of Television Centre, the BBC’s 52-year-old nerve centre. Steady on, Susan, you thought, let’s not overdo it. But that was before we’d seen some of its most long-serving and frankly terrifying employees, Paxman, Attenborough and Bakewell among them, getting all misty-eyed over this unprepossessing lump of concrete and glass, and mourning its imminent demise.The much-loved doughnut-shaped “TV factory” that gave us Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, The Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Scissor Sisters’ breakout cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” was so downright preposterous it looked likely to doom the New Yorkers to one-hit wonder status; it’s the kind of balls-out release that comes along only very infrequently. Thankfully for everyone, however, they’ve gone on to become one of our most treasured pop acts - headlining arena tours in the UK, enjoying life at the top of the charts and attracting fans from across the board.That gaiety, slink and uncompromised cultural slant have remained consistent throughout their nine-year reign in the mainstream. On the verge of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Aridity and comedy are not words you expect to read, or write, in the same sentence. Yet they capture some of the many attractions of Radu Mihaileanu’s new film The Source. The director came to considerable public attention two years ago with his Russian-themed burlesque The Concert. This time he has journeyed to the Arab world, and the results are considerably deeper, and more emotionally engaging.Based loosely somewhere in North Africa, it was filmed in the stunning visual locations of Morocco, and feels just right for that country (arid locations aplenty); the language is the Moroccan Read more ...