Reviews
graeme.thomson
The next time you find yourself mumbling unkind words about the apathetic youth of today, or else deriding the muddle-headed protests of twonkish Charlie Gilmour types, stop and think about the Nashi. A right-wing Russian youth organisation bankrolled by Vladimir Putin’s shady regime and various big business interests, they practically make you want to raise a statue to any teenager who chooses to spend their daylight hours idling beneath a duvet or playing Robin Hood in the City.The astonishing opening scene of this latest instalment in the ever excellent Unreported World series showed Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Journalism is often used to create compelling true-life plays. This drama, written by award-winning actor Nichola McAuliffe, has both a journalistic writing style and a journalist - actually the playwright’s husband - as a central character in a tale about rough justice set in Pakistan. Having wowed audiences in Edinburgh and New York, what kind of impression does this piece, which opened in London last night, make in the metropolis?First the facts. In 1988, Mirza Tahir Hussain - an 18-year-old British subject - was visiting Islamabad. Shortly after his arrival, he got into a dispute with a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Honegger's gaudy 1935 meditation on the life of Joan of Arc - which we witnessed in concert last night at the Barbican - is an untidy flea market of meretricious musical ideas. The work's only value lies in it being able to make one understand why the likes of Pierre Boulez felt forced to make their postwar musical revolutions so sweeping and so violent. The sort of musical slime that the interwar French Neo-Classicists like Honegger left behind - one of the worst examples of which is his Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) - required an industrial-strength Read more ...
william.ward
World cinema – like its cousin world music – is an awkward generic term that we generally apply to the output of those far-off countries or cultures about which we know (and perhaps if we are really honest, care) little. Watching movies with subtitles which attempt to parse actions and customs that are alien to our Western mores may give us a cosy, self-righteous glow inside, but we are also relieved to know that we don’t have to live those deprived (though perhaps somewhat colourful and picturesque) lives.But over the past few years, as we have watched our hemisphere’s economic security Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.There was a “set” - a grey-walled shell and a pendulous shard-like mobile whose mere presence had one fearing the worst. And so the first Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists. It starts with a disparate mix of recent works by a few better-knowns – neatly beginning at the end, as it were (Jason Rhoades’s neon-sign euphemisms for the female sex, Luc Tuymans’ dreamy Wonderland), but by the end proper we are left befuddled by the impression that any artist whose work features feeble wordplay, has some passing reference to burgeoning female sexuality, or simply contains a passing reference to a “looking glass” has Read more ...
matilda.battersby
“Rude boy! Rude boy! Ruuuude boooyyyy!!” The chanting from the crowd began soon after the booing subsided. The boos were in response to a picture of Margaret Thatcher which was flashed on a big screen as part of a short filmed history lesson about the late-Seventies malcontent that gave birth to the joyfully irreverent early British ska bands of which The Specials are surely kings.The crowd was made up of (and I hope they forgive me for saying this) rather sizeable blokes in their early forties, with shaved heads, a handful of whom were wearing pork pie hats. Original rude boys. The booze was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having blazed a trail through choral music, Simon Russell Beale now focuses his attentions on the symphony in this new four-part series. At last able to put aside the mind-games and chicanery of his role as Home Secretary William Towers in Spooks (RIP), Beale emerged as an engaging and enthusiastic host in this opening episode. He wore his erudition with an ironic twinkle as he toured the garrets and palaces of Europe on the trail of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He seemed especially to relish being able to bob about in a yacht off Dover, in emulation of Haydn's queasy cross-Channel voyage to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oslo, August 31st and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) share more than a release date. One is a melancholic existential meditation and the other ostensibly a horror film, but both openly draw from earlier films, focus on an outsider unable to connect with society and use capital cities as background noise rather than window dressing. One is wilfully unpleasant.But first, Oslo, August 31st, an elegiac reflection on coming to the end of the line. It reconfigures Louis Malle’s 1963 film The Fire Within (Le feu follet), itself based on La Rochelle’s novel. In the book and the earlier Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a rare but delightful thing when a venue and an artist prove perfect partners for each other, as was the case last night with young French singer Camille and old English music-hall theatre the Hackney Empire. From up in the cosy darkness of the circle, it was clear from the moment that a ghost-like Camille stepped onto the sepia-lit stage to whisper/sing “Aujourd’hui” that there was something going on that was both steeped in vaudevillian tradition and wholly 21st century.But of course Camille has always relished attention-grabbing theatrics. When I first saw her live at the Jazz Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Imagine what John Cleese might have done with the tale of a slutty sleepwalker who finds herself staying at a packed provincial guest house? Bellini doesn't even touch on farce, let alone psychological investigation. He instead follows the archetypal bel canto formula: dramatic thinness and vocal display. That La sonnambula doesn't even for one second pretend that it is anything other than a vehicle for showy pyrotechnics (something that was underlined in last night's overly literal Royal Opera House revival) means that one sits through the dramatic torpor with remarkable good Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One striking fact about Ronan Bennett's punishing four-part East End gang drama is that, so far, there hasn't been any sign of a policeman. No scruffy, down-at-heel detective with a chip on his shoulder, no thuggish Flying Squad heavies, and certainly no Wagner-loving aesthete who goes around quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning.Instead, Top Boy exists exclusively in its own sealed environment of violence, fear and dog-eat-dog ambition, where being sucked into gangland drug-dealing is the only option that bears any resemblance to a career ladder. Let's face it, how many kids can hope to get Read more ...