Reviews
aleks.sierz
Spooky coincidences make good drama. Mike Bartlett’s epic follow-up to his highly successful 2010 play Earthquakes in London begins with a mind-bogglingly weird situation: every morning in the metropolis, dozens of people wake up and they’ve all had the same disturbing dream. The play, which opened last night, then goes on to examine what happens when citizens rise up to challenge the system in an era of foreign war and economic austerity.The story is set in a UK that's a bit like a parallel universe, where a Conservative government is led by a woman prime minister who seems bent on Read more ...
fisun.guner
The home, and women’s place within it, gained considerable importance for artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Artists such as Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Nicholaes Maes and Gerrit Dou are among those who placed women at the centre of the well-ordered domestic realm. They featured as servants and mistresses, nursing mothers and coquettish girls, or as serious young women dedicated to the pursuits of home-making and suitable leisure. After years of conflict and uncertainty, the Dutch Republic emerged in 1648 and the home, the retreat of the newly powerful middle class, seemed naturally to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The English National Opera were taking quite a gamble with last night's Rameau premiere. The daunting basics? A 250-year-old French opera that hasn't yet been properly adopted by its homeland, let alone by Britain; a mildly autistic mythological plot that eulogises the ordered loyalties of brotherly love over the messy complications of sexual desire; and a director, Barrie Kosky, Intendant at Berlin's Komische Oper, where you're not really allowed to break wind without the help of a dramaturg.Katrin Lea Tag's minimalist set took the gamble one step further. From start to finish, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy), the inaugural show is a special tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, who died in 2008. The subject matter of Ariel Dorfman’s play, which won an Olivier Award on its first outing in 1991, is a powerful reminder that Pinter was a human rights activist. He was also a friend of Dorfman so this revival, which stars Thandie Newton and opened last night, is an inspired choice of production.Dorfman, who was born in Argentina and grew up in Chile, wrote a university thesis on the plays of Pinter, so when he created this play Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a long time coming, and an extremely nervous wait for millions of fans who grew up on the boy reporter and his alliterating whisky-soaked maritime sidekick. Steven Spielberg first acquired the cinematic rights to The Adventures of Tintin in 1982, the year ET came out. In the interim he’s gone off on tangents featuring war and genocide, dinosaurs and sci-fi. They’ve all been thrillingly different, but all clearly bearing Spielberg’s kitemark. Spielberg may always be faithful to himself, but has a director only now making a habit of adapting from known sources (coming soon: War Horse Read more ...
howard.male
What a relief: Andrew Graham-Dixon got the job of presenting this documentary on one of my favourite British 20th-century artists. If it had been Waldemar Januszczak (sometimes interesting but too gimmick-laden and shouty) or Matthew Collings (sometimes interesting but too fond of the catchy sweeping statement) I would have thought twice about tuning in. But Graham-Dixon understands that the art documentary is not about him, it’s about the artist. And it’s not about trying desperately to come up with a new angle; it’s about bringing the artist alive in a new way to a new audience that isn’t Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Wallets have been emptied by the proliferation of outstanding dance evenings in the past month - Akram Khan’s Desh, Lucinda Childs, the Merce Cunningham farewell - but increase your overdraft, for here is a heart-lifting and ingeniously ingenuous Irish dance night from Michael Keegan-Dolan and Liam Ó Maonlaí that could beat all for pure delight. Rian brought Sadler’s Wells to its feet last night in full-throated roaring and you have only tonight to catch it this time (though I'd bet my dog that it’ll be back very soon, given that kind of reception).Rian is the title of Ó Maonlaí’s 2005 album Read more ...
David Nice
Who would have thought that in a comic opera by Donizetti, least orchestra-indulgent of Italian composers, the conductor could be paramount? While Mariame Clément's production frisks around the soft edges of the stock opera buffa plot - sometimes imaginatively, elsewhere a bit superfluously - and four classy singers ensure Glyndebourne pleasures at a high level, it's Enrique Mazzola down in the pit who sets a vital pace: culling any slack business from his cast, according elegantly with the backdate to the 18th century and razor-sharp enough to keep us interested when plot and music threaten Read more ...
Dylan Moore
As autumn turns to winter and we enter “the dark half of the year”, National Theatre Wales opens its second season with a 16-show tour of village halls around the Principality. This is a time when the portal between ordinary life and the spirit world is traditionally opened up but The Village Social, written and directed by Dafydd James and Ben Lewis, does not so much leave the door ajar as, for one night only, kick it down and allow the darkest imaginings of an entire community to run riot in this most innocuous of environments.In keeping with the admirable precedent NTW established during Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you were to play a game as to who should play former US President Bill Clinton in a fictionalised account of his life, then George Clooney – liberal, politically active and drop-dead gorgeous – would surely be your number-one choice. So he must have been a shoo-in for the role of Democratic presidential hopeful Governor Mike Morris - who is charming, decent, ironic and very attractive - in The Ides of March.The film, which has shades of All the President's Men, Nixon and Primary Colors (and indeed Julius Caesar), is adapted from Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, said to be based on Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Not only could Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon not have planned the success of his first album; if he’d known he probably wouldn’t have wanted it. The fragile bucolic sound he produced in his Wisconsin cabin became so iconic it must have been impossible to know where to go. After the next record came out some complained that it sounded just like the first album only played on a Casio keyboard. So when support act Kathleen Edwards announced last night that Bon Iver was “going to blow your panties off”, I was, frankly, sceptical. Boy, was I wrong.I doubt there’s ever been an album that’s evolved so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And now we faced the final curtain. Spooks responded with an inspired burst of hyperactivity and plots-within-plots, and even a micro-cameo from Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Quinn, the original head of Section D. Up to now this hadn't been the finest of seasons, partly because the death of Richard Armitage's Lucas North at the end of Series 9 left a void which was never successfully filled. Lara Pulver never seemed comfortable as Erin Watts, Section D's new head, because she looked as if she'd been seconded from a modelling agency, while promoting Dimitri (Max Brown) up the batting order merely Read more ...