Reviews
joe.muggs
A good measure of the passion felt for an act is how much of their crowd dresses like them. And though Leslie Feist is hardly Lady Gaga in the image stakes, it's gratifying that even in a rush to get to our seats I'm able to count at least five “Feist fringes” on audience members that I pass. It's a subtle tribute to a subtle artist, one who has come to major success without fanfare or grandstanding and attracts a discerning and knowledgeable fanbase.However passionate a crowd is, though, theatre shows have their own set of issues that can stifle even the best performers. Sitting down in rows Read more ...
josh.spero
I was possibly not the right person to review this programme. I didn't do biology beyond GCSE, can't bear David Attenborough's Natural World programmes and laugh anytime someone says "homo erectus". Nevertheless, Alice Roberts, an anatomist and a woman who clearly knows all the words to "Dry Bones", made Origins of Us on BBC Two last night subtly enthralling, even if it did suffer from a certain amount of documentaryese.I've always wanted to know where I come from - saying "Edgware" or even, more distantly, "Poland" just doesn't quite capture it. So, watching Alice talk through skeletons laid Read more ...
sheila.johnston
So it's back, then. Garlanded with awards, lionised in London and on Broadway, Jerusalem starring Mark Rylance returns to the West End for a limited run, in the same production and with many members of the earlier cast(s). Is this an opportunistic, irrelevant, premature revival? On the contrary.First produced at the Royal Court in 2009, the new Jerusalem appears to have been lightly dusted with a top-dressing of topical references but, in an England that's even greyer and more unpleasant than it was two years ago, the play barely needs touching up to retain its urgency.There's a big, bawdy Read more ...
David Nice
Russia’s Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, has enjoyed imaginative treatment on the British stage and screen. Brighton Theatre’s now-legendary Vanity conjured the world of the verse-novel Eugene Onegin vividly with three actors and minimal props. More folk will remember the cinematic Queen of Spades, with Anton Walbrook’s crazed gambler terrorising the ancient Countess of Edith Evans to death for her secret of three winning cards. Could this sparest of tales, zooming between irony and fright, work equally well on a small stage?Well, yes, but only by forgetting the special qualities of Pushkin's Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Armed American soldiers stand in the stone window frames of a ruined building in Berlin, curious and disturbing echoes of those classical statues that so often were used to add portentous significance to a facade; but here in a 1961 photograph by Don McCullin, they are overlooking, with some intensity, the East German military on the other side. The Wall has just been built.Chronicling another painful divide in 1964, McCullin photographed a distraught, silently screaming widow, a Turkish Cypriot victim of that civil war, as she is restrained and held by other women, in an oddly dignified Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What goes around, well, goes around in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which manages the dual feat of being at once scare-mongering (hypochondriacs should stay well clear) and stultifyingly dull. A variant on the we're-all-essentially-connected school of cinema that includes Babel and the recent London Film Festival opener, 360, the film charts a virus's progression from a seemingly inoffensive cough to a pandemic capable of felling one in 12 people on the planet, in which case I assume Hollywood itself might have to call it quits.That would be no bad thing if this represents the best that Read more ...
carole.woddis
Sometimes theatre people do mad things. Like stay up all night and the following day to “celebrate” the King James Bible and a theatre’s house-move to new premises. Its 400th year has been a good year for that collection of stories currently being advertised elsewhere as “the book that changed the world”. And for the Bush Theatre's outgoing artistic director Josie Rourke, having moved into John Passmore Edwards’s elegant Victorian Library round the corner from its old Shepherds Bush Green stamping ground this weekend, “There’s no finer act than to open a new theatre - it’s the single most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you probably can.Though Downton is an original story, you get more déja vu moments than in the 27th televised version of Pride and Prejudice, and the way the speeding narrative seems to fling out another major dramatic development in between each ad break - and we know there are far too many of those - is like being trapped in a carriage being driven Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the interference of aid organisations? Are the motives of those drawn to troubled countries purely altruistic? And what real hope have they of making a difference, after the media has lost interest in a conflict and left?Feehily’s drama is painstakingly researched and it asks some big, discomfiting questions about the West’s relationship with nations it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We first see Lucy (Emily Browning) as a receptacle, letting a medical tube snake painfully deep down her throat. Australian novelist Julia Leigh characterises such behaviour as “radical passivity”, and her Jane Campion-mentored debut as director makes Lucy find its degrading limit.Browning made her name as a juvenile lead in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), going the familiar route to adult stardom as a scantily clad assassin in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. Often nude here but rarely erotic, she plays a student whose sex life functions like bulimia, giving control Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Five Keyboard Concertos Ramin Bahrami, Gewandhausorchester, Riccardo Chailly (Decca)We’re spoilt for choice in these concertos; Perahia, Schiff and Hewitt have given us excellent versions, and another new one by Alexandre Tharaud has just been released by Virgin Classics. I prefer Bach’s solo keyboard music played on piano, but I’m willing to concede that period instruments can suit the keyboard concertos better, given the delicious contrast in timbre between harpsichord and bowed strings. These readings, played by the Iranian-born pianist Ramin Bahrami, are good enough to make me never Read more ...
graeme.thomson
As this rampant return to our screens repeatedly underlined, one of the great joys of watching The Comic Strip throughout its 30-year frenzy of frantic - if intermittent - silliness has been never knowing what precise manifestation of oddness lurks around each corner. Where else, after all, would you find "Babs" Windsor popping up – utterly gratuitously – to give Tony Blair a meaty snog? Or Ross Noble ambling into frame as a socialist tramp, shortly to be throttled and thrown from a moving train? Or Margaret Thatcher giving full vent to her inner Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson, smeared over Read more ...