Reviews
David Nice
The 1968 film at least has Beryl Reid, who could even have lit up the kind of third-tier Carry On affair Frank Marcus’s flat script often resembles, as well as documentary-value scenes of the famous lesbian Gateways club in Chelsea. Without anything of its Sixties weirdness and with every sign of catastrophic casting, director Iqbal Khan’s attempt to drag the drama out of its swamp is doomed. Worst of all, the biggest charisma bypass of all is Meera Syal’s in the leading role.How odd that a comedienne should lack an inch of Reid's consummate timing. Neither sacred nor monstrous, stumbling Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside time, both echoing that modern jazz annus mirabilis 1959 and being futuristic at the same time.Shorter enjoys quoting his old cohort Miles Davis’s more enigmatic comments like, “Do you ever get fed up of making music that sounds like music?” What Shorter and his band do is at any rate not like anyone else’s music – they use a huge palette of colours Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Morning at the airfield: King Xerxes admires the new Spitfire, which he hopes will transform his continental campaign.” If the title – emphatically Xerxes rather than Serse – hadn’t already given the game away, the synopsis for English Touring Opera’s newest Handel production makes it quite clear that we’re not in Kansas (or Italy, or Persia for that matter) any more. The scene is the Battle of Britain and ruler Xerxes is doing his best impersonation of one of those dashing young men in his flying machine. The minute he slips off his goggles and delivers “Ombra mai fu” – reconceived as an Read more ...
ash.smyth
In the 19 years of his million-selling gangsta-bragging pimp-shizzling hip-hop-rapping career, the man born Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr has gone to some lengths to inform us that his name is, in fact, Snoop Dogg. He has appeared as himself - or a transparent alter ego - in several films, "starred" in a raft of low-grade at-home-with-Snoop TV shows, referred to himself endlessly during interviews in the third person (and in his own weird third tense), and has about a thousand lyrics, songs and album titles with all or part of his moniker Read more ...
David Nice
How can even a generously proportioned documentary do justice to one of the musical world’s greatest life forces? John Bridcut knows what to do: make sure all your interviewees have a close personal association with your chosen giant in one of his many spheres of influence, then get cellist-disciples from Rostropovich’s Class 19 in the Moscow Conservatoire – here Moray Welsh, Natalia Gutman, Karine Georgian and Elizabeth Wilson - to watch and listen to their mentor talking and playing. The result is a towering model of its kind.Even without that special dimension of on-the-spot reaction to Read more ...
mark.hudson
You might think that a sharp-talking, cross-dressing potter-artist with a teddy bear obsession would present a challenge to the British public. Not a bit of it. Grayson Perry is music hall, he’s pantomime – there’s even a touch of Brideshead in the teddy bear thing. One of Britain’s most intelligent and articulate artists, Perry was barely in the public eye before he was hived off into that comfort zone the British reserve for the loveable eccentric. And his articulacy is itself a problem: the fact that most of what he says makes perfect sense means he can’t hide behind waffling Read more ...
David Nice
In Italian opera, where lustrous Verdi mezzos are rare indeed, Olga Borodina tends to a first-the-music-then-the-words approach. In Russian song, the sole focus of last night's Barbican recital until the second encore, her classy, naturally inflected and beautifully coloured realisation of great as well as more generic native poets leaves you in no doubt what you're supposed to feel and think.That was true from the first phrase in the first Rimsky-Korsakov song, the ground well prepared by spacious thirds from her immaculate if - perhaps understandably - slightly obeisant pianist Dmitri Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Katie Mitchell’s production of what many regard as Janáček’s greatest opera began life 10 years ago on the stage of Cardiff’s New Theatre; and there are times in this revival when you feel its director Robin Tebbutt’s yearning to be back in that constricted environment, so much better suited to the stifling world which destroys the work’s repressed, self-loathing heroine.“Marvellous sight, the Volga,” sings the schoolteacher Kudryash, pointing and spreading his arms. But Mitchell walls them all up in what looks like a railway café without any train service (the programme synopsis calls it a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One has learned to approach high-profile BBC dramas with mild apprehension, since apparent promise and oodles of hype frequently turn out to be fig leaves for feeble plotting and a half-baked script (The Hour, this means you. And possibly you too, The Shadow Line). Too many recent series should have "promising idea, pitifully executed" chiselled into their neglected, overgrown headstones.After a single episode, is it too much to hope that Hidden may be the one that has triumphantly broken the mould? Probably, but let's enjoy the moment anyway. The first thing they got right was casting Phil Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Any newcomers to Merce Cunningham who visit the last performances ever in Britain of his modern dance company - renowned, even notorious, for its abstruse abstractness - will surely go away with an impression of laughter, playfulness, the lightness of being. On two more nights, tonight and tomorrow, this landmark company will perform his dances, and then - like the end of his piece Ocean, which you can see on film tomorrow - when the clock runs out, the last dancer will leave the stage, and that will be the end of it.Few choreographers plan their finale as exactly as Cunningham did before he Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This November, experimental theatre company Hydrocracker will bring The New World Order – a site-specific cycle of five Pinter plays – to a former government building in Hackney. Doubtless the immersive impact will add disquieting emphasis to Pinter’s dark tales of totalitarian power and abuse of authority, but if you prefer your Pinter a served a little straighter, briefer and with greater intimacy, then the Young Vic’s miniature double-bill One For The Road/Victoria Station offers a fairly devastating warm-up act.Not seen out in public together since Pinter himself directed their London Read more ...
fisun.guner
In recent years it seems we have seen an awful lot of Gerhard Richter. There have been three major exhibitions in London well within the last seven or eight years. One is hardly complaining, since there is always a demand to see “the world’s most influential living painter”, as he is often claimed to be (and not without some reason). But in each case these have, and with varied success, focused on one particular, narrow aspect of Richter’s output: portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, colour charts at the Serpentine, intimate “scrapbook” photos, many obscured with paint, at the Read more ...