Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Welcome back to Guy Ritchie’s Geezerworld, familiar from such slices of lurid villainhood as Lock, Stock…, RocknRolla and The Gentlemen (the movie). The Gentlemen (the TV series) takes some cues from the similarly-named big-screen event from 2019, but becomes its own distinctive self as it unwinds across eight episodes.Mind you, it does display signs of mild schizophrenia. The first two episodes punch the clock at just over an hour, but then the running times throttle back to around the 40-minute mark. It’s as if Ritchie and his collaborators, who include co-writer Matthew Read and several Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Yihao is a disaffected 20 year old living in Chengdu, capital of Sichaun Province. A thriving centre for business and commerce, Chengdu looks like any other modern city. You could mistake it for downtown Chicago except that, apart from the Walmart logo, the signage is in Chinese.Yihao isn’t interested in making money, though. Having dropped out of school, he performs as a drag queen at Funky Town, a gay bar that welcomes young people who feel alienated from society. But the venue is earmarked for demolition to make way for a new subway station and Ben Mullinkosson’s documentary is a loving Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oppenheimer as expected dominated the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven trophies whilst runner-up Poor Things took four prizes, including Emma Stone in the hotly contested category of best actress.There was a pro forma feeling to the roll call of winners under host Jimmy Kimmel's eye that saw, across nearly 3.5 hours, Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, and Robert Downey Jr win as best director, actor, and supporting actor, respectively – all prizes they had been expected to take.The same was true of Da'Vine Joy Randolph's supporting actress nod as Mary Lamb, the grieving cafeteria manager in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Just a few days after the Hallé’s Bruckner 8, the BBC Philharmonic weighed in with his Seventh Symphony for its Manchester audience. We’re all getting a lot of Bruckner in his 200th anniversary year, and this was a wise choice, being one of his shorter creations in the genre – only about an hour and 10 minutes in playing time – and containing some of his best melodic ideas and rhythmic inventions.It also benefits from the tonal qualities of an orchestra at the top of its game to realise the richness of the textures he created, and this was amply fulfilled in the sound of the Philharmonic, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"We all live here in peace and friendship," notes Telegin (David Ahmad), otherwise known as Waffles, early in Uncle Vanya, to which one is tempted to respond, "yeah, right."As casually bruising a play as I know, Chekhov's wounding yet also brutally funny masterwork exists to explode Telegin's remark across four acts, and adaptor-director Trevor Nunn's terrific in-the-round production for west London's Orange Tree Theatre sees all the characters in the round: you're aware of their dual ability to be fantasists one minute, ruthless about themselves the next.By way of example, barely has Astrov Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Continuing the relationship with choreographer Örjan Andersson – who choreographed their landmark project Goldberg Variations – Scottish Ensemble gave the first of their latest movement-inspired performance, Impulse: Music in Motion in Glasgow on Friday evening.Their programme comprised Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, with these chamber works sandwiching an unannounced and stunningly articulated solo, Alia Fantasia by Nicola Matteis, played by Artistic Director Jonathan Morton. Everything was performed from memory, which frees the players up in a very Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A few records changed music. One such was “The Love I Lost (Part 1)” by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes. Issued as a single by the Philadelphia International label in August 1973, its release introduced what would become a major characteristic of disco music. This was the first time a particular groove was heard; the percussive use of the drum kit’s cymbals with an emphasis on the hi-hat.The inventor of this soon-to-be ubiquitous signifier was Earl Young, a studio-based drummer who since around Autumn 1971 was regularly booked by Philadelphia International producers and songwriters Kenny Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
When For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy first moved to the West End in 2023, it felt like a risky venture. It had started in the tiny New Diorama, and later packed out the Royal Royal Court, but was a transfer to Shaftesbury Avenue a crazy step too far?Not a bit of it. The run was a triumph, and now it confidently returns to yet a fourth theatre, with a new cast and all the trappings of a starry first night. It takes its place in a West End that is hosting a particularly adventurous season this spring and is trying to reach out to new audiences. Yes, I Read more ...
David Nice
Abandon hope of the human comedy so precisely charted in Hilary Mantel’s related historical fiction The Giant, O’Brien, prepare for a vision of outsized body and soul revealed in sleep, and your patience will be rewarded. Sarah Angliss’s haunting Giant, premiered at last year's Aldeburgh Festival, is perfectly served by her own soundscape, a dedicated team of musicians and Sarah Fahie’s pitch-perfect production.Its stated intention is to avoid making too much of a God out of Irish giant Charles Byrne and too much of a Satan of Scottish surgeon, scientist and collector John Hunter, who may Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart opens by telling us that we're seeing her at the beginning of a long tour – before her energy flags, she says. It's difficult to believe, however, that the Irishwoman ever performs at anything less than full throttle, and so it proves here with Again, With Feelings, a show about where her life is at the moment.She's 35 and very definitely not where she thought she would be – and certainly not where her parents might have hoped; married, with kids and owning a house. Instead Bohart is unmarried, child-free and her living arrangements... Well she fills us in on those, as she Read more ...
Simon Thompson
While it is an incontrovertibly good thing that the classical music world has set about rediscovering the work of neglected female composers, not all rediscoveries are equally worthy of being found. Particularly on a day like International Women’s Day (IWD), concert programmers run the risk of unearthing work that tends towards the mediocre, and which can end up being tokenistic.Not on this IWD concert, however. I’d never heard of Mel Bonis (pictured below) until this Royal Scottish National Orchestra concert, but her Trois femmes de légende proved a delight. She studied with Franck in Paris Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Fashion has a very short memory. Maybe that’s part of its charm,” says Robin Givhan of The Washington Post in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary. Whether anyone can forget John Galliano’s drunken anti-Semitic and racist outpourings at La Perle, his local café in the Marais in Paris in 2011, followed by his sacking by Dior, where he’d reigned as creative director for 14 years, is doubtful.But will people, or rather the fashion world, forgive him? It seems, judging by the acclaim for his recent Maison Margiela show in Paris, a spectacular, strange event (lots of corsets and cinched waists - on the Read more ...