Reviews
Nick Hasted
The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?When director Carol Morley read a Sun headline announcing the macabre discovery in 2006, she pined for those answers, putting ads in the London press, the internet and even a black cab, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Will the app clicker replace the page turner?” asked Alan Yentob’s state-of-play rumination on the book. It’s a cutely phrased question and, as everyone reading this will be familiar with the digital world – this is theartsdesk, after all – a fair one. Will zeroes and ones make the book redundant, a sort of totem, or will it adapt, taking on the new forms presented by the digital world? The programme didn’t answer the questions, but at least it did show the possibilities.A hunt around the BBC’s various websites revealed that Books – the Last Chapter? was known as Books –the End of the Affair Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The play-within-a-play device has honourable antecedents - playwrights from Thomas Kyd and Anton Chekhov through to Bertolt Brecht and Tennessee Williams have flirted with it, while Shakespeare loved it so much that he used it in several of his plays, most famously in Hamlet. Michael Frayn had the idea for Noises Off, which he wrote in 1982, when he was standing in the wings at a performance of Chinamen (a one-act farce performed as part of The Two of Us), which he had written for the late Lynn Redgrave, and thought that the backstage goings-on were even funnier than the onstage action.In Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two.As you walk around them, the threads visually overlap to produce shimmering moiré patterns. The structure is extremely simple, but rather than diminishing its impact, figuring out how it is done only enhances its mesmeric effect. The installation is titled Web and weaving threads of light through Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, the joys of eccentricity. Welcome to the Vanderhof family of misfits. The head of the household, Grandpa Martin, refuses to pay any taxes, preferring to keep snakes on a hatstand. Good for frightening off the tax inspector, who unexpectedly drops by.Other members of the three-generational New York family variously make fireworks in the attic, bake strange candy, play Beethoven on the xylophone, produce unrecognisable masks and write unsuccessful melodramas. Daughter Essie moves around the place as a hopeful hopeless ballerina, aided by an explosive Russian teacher, Olga (Maggie O'Brien, Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken. It left Kiefer and his fellow New Imagers overshadowed and, in a paradox that is absolutely typical of the art Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This was the television equivalent of the slaves in ancient Rome, who used to run alongside their imperial masters whispering in their ear, "Remember, you are mortal." Long before the tantrums, bombast and megalomania of The X Factor, there was New Faces, ITV's Birmingham-based talent show. Its theme tune was Carl Wayne's "You're a Star!" Alf Lawrie's film revisited the 1986 finalists of New Faces to find out how the last 25 years had treated them, and it proved to be an unassuming gem of observational film-making.None of the finalists went on to become the next David Bowie, some Read more ...
graeme.thomson
This year's seasonal production from the Lyceum is one of those shows that feels more like an uninspired stocking filler than a big, beautiful, beribboned gift. Neither magically Christmassy (it begins on Halloween, and the only substance falling from the heavens is gold dust), nor a gung-ho pantomime (though some slightly stilted call-and-response mischief creeps through the cracks in the fourth wall), in the end it seems content simply to entertain rather than enthral.Stuart Paterson’s revamped version of the original La belle et la bête was written over two decades ago and retains the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's quite a bit to admire in DR Hood's debut feature. There's the cast for a start, headed by nascent superstar Benedict Cumberbatch alongside Brit-dram It-girl Claire Foy. Beguiling, too, is the piece's setting in the fenlands of East Anglia (quite near Mildenhall airbase, one would guess, judging by the eerie shots of American aircraft drifting overhead). It's countryside which never quite makes its mind up whether it's starkly beautiful or menacingly primitive.The same fault line of doubt runs down the middle of the marriage of Dawn and David (Foy and Cumberbatch). The opening Read more ...
joe.muggs
And we're done. As you'd expect for a grand final, everything was pumped up yet further. A guest spot by Coldplay came over like a Nazi rally styled by kindergarten teachers who once took an E, all rainbow squiggles and brain-obliterating strobes. The fact that the TV sound mix revealed Chris Martin's vocal weaknesses and the flimsiness of the songs beneath the band's bombast couldn't ruin the gloriously dumb spectacle.And talking of gloriously dumb, the “roving reporters in the crowd” Caroline Flack and previous X Factor runner-up Olly Murs really pushed the boat out to make Dermot O'Leary Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
That a tale confronting society’s most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexpected: testimony either to the moral deviance of the general public, or alternatively to Charles Dickens’s peerless skill as a writer. Personally I’m inclined toward the latter, and judging by the massed hordes at the Arts Theatre on Saturday for Simon Callow’s new staging of A Christmas Carol, I’m not alone.Dickens didn’t write his story with performance in mind, but when he started his public readings (the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Rhythm Method by Nicky Forbes dives into the working, gigging, cash-free underbelly of real rock’n’roll life. Whereas most music biographies are written by or about those who’ve made it, who live in the gilded cage of pop stardom and all that entails, The Rhythm Method is about Forbes’s life as drummer in The Revillos, a cartoonish post-punk outfit born from the ashes of the more successful Rezillos. It is a chattily told saga of bad decisions, misfortune, dissolution and a persistent inability to realise when the game is over.One example of The Revillos’ bad luck is when their rising ( Read more ...