Reviews
graham.rickson
Michael Finnissy: Second & Third String Quartets Kreutzer Quartet (NMC)Michael Finnissy, currently Professor of Composition at Southampton University, writes that his Second Quartet ”is based on a compact Haydn model”. The piece does pack a lot of event into 20 minutes, and there are sporadic flares of dry wit. Best is an extended passage near the close where cello and viola intone slowly moving consonant chords while the two violins screech about on top. It sounds as if we’re listening to two radically different compositions simultaneously. Or two duetting pairs recorded separately Read more ...
David Nice
Diamonds one day, stones the next: compulsive giver Timon’s swift descent into raving misanthropy would be better packed into a gritty pop ballad than a full-length play. Still, Shakespeare just about pulls it off: having had more of a hindering than a helping hand from Thomas Middleton in early scenes, he comes into his own with howling, Lear-like invective. Unfortunately this is the very point at which the Bremer Shakespeare Company, which last appeared here when Sam Wanamaker's dream of the Globe was still a building site, loses the sharp edge of a clearly-told narrative amid the laughter Read more ...
howard.male
“We didn’t have a real agenda. We just wanted to play some tunes and have a good time.” Thus spoke the immaculately suited but still mischievous-looking Mick Jones. And thank goodness he said it because, from the off - even before the off - I didn’t think anyone would. The interviewer (his ideological preconceptions crumbling) protested, so unfortunately Jones had to qualify his unguarded statement by saying he couldn’t of course speak for the other members of The Clash. But I wish he’d just left what he said as a big fat V-sign to all those set on creating a revisionist version of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Comedy of Errors may not be one of Shakespeare’s most notable plays, yet this production embodied the essence of the Globe to Globe season. While the play was lent new kinds of hilarity and colour when interpreted within a different culture, I can’t begin to imagine what appearing in The Globe must have meant to the troupe performing it.In 2005 Roy-e-Sabs performed Love’s Labour’s Lost in war-ravaged Kabul, presenting Shakespeare in Afghanistan for the first time since the Soviet invasion in 1978. Challenging the country’s repressive conventions, the production featured men and women Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The main problem with making a prequel to Alien is that the 1979 original was so shockingly successful. Even now, countless generations of CGI and special effects later, Ridley Scott's unstoppable monstrosity is surely the most hideous intergalactic threat ever burned onto celluloid.So, all credit to Sir Ridley (who wisely steered clear of the three Alien sequels) for making Prometheus almost worthy of the pre-match hype. One advantage of revisiting his notorious interstellar Frankenstein is that the creature is now so much part of movie-going folklore that its horrific qualities can be Read more ...
Daniel Ross
Right, notebooks out everyone. Michael Tilson Thomas began this Berg/Mahler double-header with a lengthy analysis of what we were about to hear in the former’s Chamber Concerto. Whether it was informative or not (and it was), it was a bit of a spoiler. It was nice to know exactly which themes are attributed to which dedicatee, but you couldn’t help but feel the surprises in the work have been somewhat spiked by this little lecture. Still, selected LSO folk and the effective duo of Yefim Bronfman on piano and Gil Shaham on violin were on hand to try and surprise us anyway.For most of it, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
According to Oscar Wilde’s Salome (and faithfully preserved in Hedwig Lachmann’s libretto), the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. That may be so, but neither comes close to equalling the baffling mystery that is still David McVicar’s production. Not trusting the simple reds, moons and veils of Wilde’s stylised original to conjure sufficient horror, McVicar takes his abused heroine to Nazi Germany by way of Pasolini and a backstory of physical and psychological trauma. Then he throws in an abattoir and plenty of blood.To take such abstraction, the allusive possibility Read more ...
aleks.sierz
They say that men, at whatever age, never leave the playground. We are told that boys will be boys. But what is this kind of infantile masculinity really like, and is there anything new to say about it? Ella Hickson’s latest play kicks open the door on a group of students and youngsters living in an overheated Edinburgh flatshare, and catches them at a crucial point in their lives. At the moment, they plan to party. But what will happen after they sober up?Let’s start with their accommodation. It’s not a bad flat: there are five rooms and only four boys. It’s a bit grubby, but you’ve seen Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“The angels' share” refers to the two percent of whisky that evaporates each year during its maturation process - which the romantically or religiously inclined would have us believe is siphoned off by cheeky celestial beings. With two Hollywood monoliths (Prometheus and Snow White and the Huntsman) slugging it out at the box office this week it seems unlikely that Ken Loach’s Glasgow-set latest - a tiny wee film by comparison - will be left with much more than the angels' share of business. However, this comedic and compassionate film – the winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Now here's a surprise. In English, Henry VIII gets dismissed as a Shakespearean dud (well, let's apportion the blame as well to the play's generally acknowledged co-author, John Fletcher), its karma not exactly enhanced by one's awareness that this was the play that was being performed when the original Globe burned down in June, 1613. Happily, the only fire in evidence in the Globe to Globe's contribution from Spain was that communicated by its brio-filled, impassioned cast, for whom a potential theatrical pageant fairly pulsated with life. The revelatory nature of the Madrid-based Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“You aren’t going to get another one of them, are you?” asks Alex Turner, rhetorically, with regard to John Cooper Clarke. He should know. The first explosion into the public eye by his band Arctic Monkeys, with their 2006 album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, owed a direct stylistic debt to the Mancunian poet. But it turns out that Turner’s far from the only one who wishes to announce their fealty to Clarke – from Bill Bailey to Pete Shelley (of Buzzcocks), poet Paul Farley to Steve Coogan, DJ Mark Radcliffe to actor Craig Charles, they all lined up to express admiration.As an Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although some contemporary plays — notably Posh and 13 — have accurately taken the temperature of the times, what about the timeless classics? Does Sophocles’s Antigone (dated about 441BC) have anything to say to us today? How can it be of our time too? As the National Theatre wheels out this play, with a cast led by Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker, onto its main stage, such questions hang in the air like the smoke from an ancient funeral pyre.The third of the Theban plays, Antigone is a perfect tragedy: everyone behaves in the right way, but with fatal results. It's a true tragedy Read more ...