Reviews
Nick Hasted
My highlight was the sudden, last-gasp chance to see Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, on its unexpected return to the West End. A cheap weekday matinee ticket found me in the front row, Rylance looming over me from the high stage, spewing alcohol; an unsteady, limping Lord of Misrule and, if he only could pull himself together, of a new Peasant’s Revolt against the unjust times we’re suffering. It seemed unbelievable he’d go through the whole thing again that night. Like Dominic West as McNulty in The Wire, I don’t want to spoil the spell by seeing him as anyone Read more ...
emma.simmonds
One of film’s most inspiring artists, Walt Disney, once said, “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” With the seemingly anachronistic The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius proves this to be as true as ever - even in this technologically adventurous age with its all too frequent bombastic sound. Hazanavicius boldly strips cinema back to its wordless, monochrome days and, boy, does the end result sparkle.More than 50 years after the French New Wave both celebrated and defied the Hollywood filmic formula, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
We have, thankfully, long since moved beyond the point where there's any need to delineate or categorise works of art according to gender. However, looking back at 2011 it's hard to escape the conclusion that the most compelling music emerged from the mouths and minds of women.Mara Carlyle’s Floreat is simply a triumph. Her songs depart from points as varied as John Dowland and Hot Chip to encompass music hall, jazz, classical and peppy electronic pop, all strung together to create something unified and entirely her own. There’s nothing clever-clever about any of it, and while at times deeply Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Although now a major figure on the world stage, Aung San Suu Kyi began as a reluctant dissident and figure of protest against the military regime of her native Burma. Recent months have seen her finally released from house arrest and set to play a considerable role in the future politics of her benighted country. Such latest developments are beyond the scope of Luc Besson’s film The Lady.Instead we see her path from Oxford housewife through to leadership of the National League for Democracy opposition party that won a huge victory in the 1990 elections, only for it to be overturned by the Read more ...
David Nice
Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Elizabethan wood to 1960s school block was to opera what Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was to film: audience-sundering, often alienating, sometimes enticing, but very much its own consistent world. Its splendid cast and conductor Leo Hussain worked as one to enhance the paradoxes of its terrible beauty.ENO’s newcomer on the schoolboy front, Nico Muhly’s Two Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going experience, for others an empty whimsy. It's a show of mime, clowning and coups de théâtre, stunningly conceived on the twin themes of snow and the gruelling Russian winters outdoors, where street cleaners live out their lives, vagrants of an outcast kind of peculiarity and optimistic imagination, where brooms and bins are constants in their lives, where Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben Miller exists in a cloud of brainy abstraction, convinced that his serial bungling failures are merely the prelude to roaring success.Yet, just as their own series offer nuggets of mini-genius lying around on a carpet of dross, so this new offering (penned by Simon Nye) sizzled with a potential which one despaired of them ever attaining. Miller plays Read more ...
alice.vincent
In a year when eyes turned to London for the riots, the budget cuts and the hacked phones, there seemed to be a fair amount of middle England portrayed by British creatives. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National retold 2006’s Ipswich murders as a darkly comical contemporary musical, with middle-aged gardening competitions and dull community-centre realism success. Tracey Emin’s retrospective, Love is What You Want brought Margate’s grey, salty waters to the South Bank through giant blankets and explosive short films. Later on in the year, Paddy Considine’s writing/ Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Living and working 150 miles from London, one either clutches at local straws or gets on a train. I’ve done both in 2011, as usual, but in a way the local is more stimulating, not because it’s better (ha!) but because there’s so much less of it. For instance, I got much more of a kick from Siegfried at Longborough in Gloucestershire than from anything at Bayreuth, where everything is in the directors’ favour and they dispense huge sums year in year out on bizarre allegorisations of Wagner’s dramas.Besides being a brilliant piece of music theatre, Weinberg’s Passenger at ENO was superbly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip in 1998 when Alfonso Cuarón transplanted the novel to present-day New York. On television Tony Marchant had a go a year later. Theatre was there even more recently with Declan Donnellan's staging for the RSC in 2005 and Watford Palace's Asian version earlier this year. And looming over them all there’s always David Lean’s still definitive adaptation Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It would always be a risk putting such a gossamer Christmas charmer as The Nutcracker into a gargantuan Mammonite cavern like the O2 Arena, where magic only counts if it rings loudly in the coffers - car park £25! programmes £10! As with the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet last June, Birmingham Royal Ballet have put up a cinema screen to enable thousands of viewers far away to catch what looks dolls-house-sized in real view. But where that other ballet is all about action and plot, this is a ballet about atmospheres and dreams, needing most delicate weaving into its setting.If you sit in a £ Read more ...
james.woodall
The Barbican has always led the way in London in international theatre programming. The year there ended on a high, with Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet from the Schaubühne laying down new markers for transgressive commitment. I was sceptical about it when I saw the Berlin première in 2008, and our own critic was not, commendably enough, in a mood to be fooled around with. Yet a production which stages, so stylistically, terror, insanity and loathing (all in Shakespeare) with six actors straining every sinew without entirely ridiculing the play has to be respected.From the Bard to a big blast: Read more ...