Reviews
Adam Sweeting
As far as Elizabeth Taylor was concerned, it was the movies that got small as her brand of sumptuous diva-ishness became almost more than even Hollywood could support. Her jewellery collection, however, grew ever more grandiose, and when it was auctioned last year it fetched a record-breaking $135m. One piece alone, the historic La Peregrina Pearl (which had been worn by a string of Spanish queens and by Mary Tudor), sold for more than 11 million bucks.Michael Waldman's shrewd and witty film craftily used this parade of Taylor's priceless baubles as an index of her triumphs and affections. Read more ...
josh.spero
I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself. The shame is that it's all a hoax, and not in the manner of Shovlin's earlier projects concerned with fictional people: the maths is cod, the belief absent - even the pauses for thought are artificial.The original covers of the Fontana series are distinctive - Vasarely-ish geometrical designs in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Religious mania is bad for your love life. In Enda Walsh’s revamped 1999 play — which has already been seen in Galway and New York, and opened in London last night — a 33-year-old man (played with immense conviction and enormous presence by Cillian Murphy) invites us inside his mind to explore the dark and dangerous caverns of religious enthusiasm and psychological collapse. Be warned: it is a strange, tormented and rather weird trip.Set in Inishfree, which the programme reminds us is an Irish town celebrated in WB Yeats’s 1892 peace-yearning poem, the play is a monologue which tells a Read more ...
ash.smyth
“I’m a doctor of psychology,” Pamela Stephenson began her Fame Report last night, the better to establish her intellectual credentials while taking our minds off her orange face and massive boobs. She said this from a balcony somewhere that looked very much like it might be in LA (tossing her platinum hair in the wind as she spoke), then she hopped in a cab to the West End – because you can do that if you’re famous – where, in between letting slip that she’d once been a fêted comedian and, more recently, a third-place finisher on Strictly Come Dancing, she giggled a lot about whatever red- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown. Then comes a phone call which, when he hears the name, the director refuses to take. The caller, we learn, is Tinseltown’s hottest hotshot producer, now fallen on lean times. A director needs a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Forget opera-glasses, the must-have accessory for the contemporary opera-goer in London is fast becoming a sturdy pair of wellingtons. No sooner had we all dried off from our voyage into The Heart of Darkness at the Royal Opera House (where Edward Dick’s watery set lapped dangerously close to the orchestra pit) than we find ourselves up to our knees in the boggy marshlands and treacherous pools of Sam Brown’s Jakob Lenz. The mire of psychological collapse has rarely been so vividly rendered, even on the opera stage (surely madness’s truest artistic home), but while visuals were striking, they Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Funny how things turn out. As Damon Albarn has morphed from Blur’s Fred Perry-sporting jackanapes into the thinking man’s musical adventurer, flitting from opera to Malian music to cartoon conceptualist, Graham Coxon has opted to pursue the low key and lo-fi, seemingly happier hanging out on the margins than infiltrating the mainstream.Coxon is currently touring his eighth solo album, A+E. It isn‘t a bad place to start: A+E is a tremendous record, easily the best thing he has done as a solo artist and up there with his best work full stop. A harsh, furiously inventive collection of 10 noisy Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year. It wasn't immediately certain that we weren't going to get Barenboim the splashy ringmaster again. The first Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits through doors, no footlights. And so on.I imagine that he didn’t envisage theatre-in-the-round, but he longed for some way of breaking the custom of formal staging (“nothing left to the imagination”) and tidy dialogue. He wanted actors playing “for the audience, not with it”, sometimes even having their backs to the audience whilst speaking. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't have many feelings about the Titanic (any more than I do about any tragedies of the distant past). I know few of the facts, I can remember nothing of the film and I have been left almost completely untouched by the centenary. Yet I am enormously grateful to have caught a Barbican performance of The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars' beautiful musical meditation on the event. The reason why this hour-long rumination works so well is that it does not rely on the emotional power of the catastrophe to generate its own emotional power. The debris of sounds that Read more ...
geoff brown
Looking at John Wilson conduct, it’s possible to think that you’re watching an incarnation of that Proms favourite of decades past, Sir Malcolm Sargent. The immaculate tailcoat, shining white cuffs, the florid gestures with a baton as long as a magic wand: the only missing visual ingredient is Sargent’s self-regarding air. On Sunday afternoon at the Festival Hall, Wilson, Britain’s golden maestro of light music, garnished the impression by venturing into some of Sargent’s own territory with The Yeomen of the Guard: the only quasi-serious piece among Gilbert and Sullivan’s corpus, and the only Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Getting on for three decades ago Lasse Hallström was introduced to audiences outside his native Sweden with My Life As a Dog. An emotionally continent, directorially restrained picture of the pains and pleasures of a rural childhood, it was Hallström’s ticket to Hollywood. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, featuring a coltish young Leonardo di Caprio, retained some of Hallström’s snappy weirdness when he moved into English, since when he has wandered into the mainstream and can’t seem to locate the exit. His signature is to take a popular work of fiction and coat it in a thin film of simplifying Read more ...