Reviews
Ismene Brown
The past is a hard card to play for a contemporary dance company, even harder than for a ballet company. A work that’s proved over time, whose quality emerges and re-emerges with revisiting, casts an imposing shadow over new works created in the ethos and fashions of the contemporary. Rambert’s director for the past decade, Mark Baldwin, has always turned with love to past works, and he must know that it’s Siobhan Davies’s 1995 The Art of Touch on this 10th anniversary programme that is by far its star, and shows just what richly refined and responsive individuals he now numbers in his elite Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a truism of modern television that a programme rarely gets made without a celebrity being attached, but in this case there was a very good reason for Felicity Kendal being on board. Her parents, Laura and Geoffrey Kendal, founded Shakespeareana, a travelling theatre troupe that performed Shakespeare in India in the postwar decades; many will know their story from Merchant Ivory's 1965 film about the company, Shakespeare Wallah.Like her parents, Kendal has a deep love of both Shakespeare and India, and this programme was shot through with that genuine affection. She still speaks some Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prunella Clough, 1919–1999, was one of the most idiosyncratic and original British artists of the postwar period. Her art is reticent, shy, subtle - yet in both life and aesthetics she was a free and generous spirit. Now there is a fine selection of works large and small, but all domestic in size, on view in the West End, marking the publication of a magisterial new biography by Frances Spalding.Although Clough has been widely exhibited her art remains curiously unknown and unappreciated on a wider scale. Her peer group, including the postwar Neo-Romantics, have been positively scrutinised Read more ...
Carmel Doohan
The two parts of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 are very macho plays. Men drink, tell rude jokes, strut and lie their way into power and influence. In Globe to Globe's Latin American takes on the Bard, some hijo de puta and de puta madre seem fitting additions. In these two productions, machismo, in the style of the gangster or the swagger of the outlaw, was never in short supply. There were also many opportunities for cultural stereotypes to be referenced: the idea that gossips and chantas rule the country was played with in the Argentinian production of Part 2, the arrogant grandeur of the powerful Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I didn't know whether to sigh or to yawn. Another opera. Another 50s set. At least it started well. In an obsessively wood-panelled hunting lodge, fat Falstaff (Ambrogio Maestri) lies in his bed in filthy long johns amid a sea of empty silver platters, working out a way to pay his bills and satisfy his lust. Not a 50s cliché in sight - yet. The banter between him and his helpers - Pistol and Bardolph - is focused and easy. And the singing from Maestri is effortless and clear and delivered in a parlando manner of exquisite style and grace. My, you could almost see beyond the grime and the gut Read more ...
David Benedict
The competition for best dramatic use of a coffee table is won hands down by the wagon-wheel one that prompts a major argument in When Harry Met Sally. Runner-up is the one that appears in Detroit. So deliciously hideous that it gets its own laugh, the symbolic table from Ben and Mary’s nice suburban home is given to new neighbours Sharon and Kenny whose total lack of furniture stems from the fact that they only recently met during a spell in major substance-abuse rehab. Their back yards may abut one another but you don’t have to be Robert Frost to realise that since good fences make good Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How delightful to welcome the return of Peter Moffat's skilful legal series. Yes alright, sceptics may contend that the law firm drama has already been road-tested to destruction via the likes of Rumpole of the Bailey, Kavanagh QC and many more - indeed, Kavanagh veteran Nicholas Jones popped up in tonight's opener as Judge Goodbrand - but Silk boasts a superb cast and a thoughtfully-drawn set of characters, whose already fraught personal relationships are being given some cunning new twists.Series one focused on the rivalry between barristers Clive Reader (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Martha Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Is this a sophisticated satire or a dumb, laugh-out-loud, nothing-is-sacred comedy? That is the question which pings around your head Sacha Baron Cohen's latest. The title is presumably a nod to Chaplin's The Great Dictator, but while that is still rated as a classic 72 years years after it was made, somehow you cannot see this piece of lightweight froth, in which Baron Cohen plays strutting but stupid North African potentate Admiral General Aladeen, being held in the same esteem for 72 weeks.Baron Cohen's fourth film marks a move away from the teasing and provoking of real people that made Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For most of us, life is what happens to you when you’re looking the other way. For the participants in 7 Up it’s what happens in seven-year segments between the visits of Michael Apted. First interviewed in 1964, they are all 56 now, and as usual the questions loom. Who is still turning up for these things? Who has thrown in the towel or, as will now become a more urgent issue, has anyone shuffled off their mortal coil?Television’s magnificent grand projet crops up every seven years to rebuke modern broadcasters with the accusation that they don't make documentaries the way they used to. The Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If action speaks louder than words, then The Raid is positively deafening. The third feature from Welshman Gareth Evans is ingeniously, almost absurdly exciting - for the most part it’s shorn of story and propelled not by plot but by peril. That it’s basically a series of imaginative smack-downs and shoot-outs will be off-putting to many but this Indonesian actioner is entirely engrossing and executed with gobsmacking gusto and precision. An unashamed proponent of the poetry of violence, it’s a superb showcase for the lesser seen martial art Pencak Silat and for the audacity of its helmsman. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was always going to be one Borat moment in this festival. And it came courtesy of the Albanians, who, for comic effect, in the middle of their Henry VI, Part 2 indulged in the gratuitous harassment of a mentally handicapped person. It got the biggest laugh of the show from the expats, suggesting it's still quite a rib-tickler, disabled-bashing, in Albanian culture. It was an instructive reminder that you invite the globe to the Globe at your moral peril.The other parts of the warring Henry VI trilogy were being presented by two other Balkan countries: a Serbian Part 1 and Macedonian Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature. Writing Britain goes one better (or worse): a tour of the whole island and its islands as seen through its writers, you can travel from Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall to Dr Johnson’s Hebrides entirely through the Read more ...