Reviews
Sarah Kent
Rose Wylie’s paintings are a blast of fresh air. Direct, anarchic, exuberant and determinedly daft, they make a mockery of the self-importance that so often infects the art world.Now in her nineties, she had to wait a long time before being able to spend time in the studio. Having studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, she married the artist Roy Oxlade, had three children with him and stopped painting in order to bring them up. In those days, it was normal practice for the man to be the Artist and the woman the Housekeeper while often also being his model, muse an assistant. Then Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Backstories of famous writers are fascinating: where did they come from? What were their inspirations? What obstacles did they overcome? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new historical family drama, Bird Grove, looks at the early years of Mary Ann Evans, long before she became a novelist who published under the name of George Eliot. Yes, time to dust down your copies of Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda and so on. Produced on Hampstead Theatre’s main stage, the play stars Elizabeth Dulau, best known as Kleya Marki in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, alongside Owen Teale, Ser Alliser Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. The launch concert for Kuusisto and Amidon’s new album Willows, on the Platoon label, it featured a string quartet arrangement (by Martin Gerigk) of Vaughan Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I don’t remember yesterday, but I remember when I was eight years old.” The opening lyrics of “Sure & Steady,” Gained / Lost’s second track, underline a core concern of UK indie stalwarts The Wave Pictures’ 20th (!) album: the passage of time, what can and cannot be remembered, what may or may not have a bearing on the here and now. A look at the images collected for the Exile On Main Street-style sleeve of Gained / Lost confirms what’s going on.Thematic considerations aside, The Wave Pictures have a fondness for American musical archetypes. Despite guitarist and singer David Tattersall’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Amstell says this show is a departure from his previous ones, which were full of angsty introspection. And true, in I Love It Here he appears less wired, but fans fear not; this is more of the same, albeit wrapped up in positivity and some knowing self-deprecation.The show is a description of a Hollywood party he attended last year while living in Los Angeles with his partner of 14 years, and the comic seems to be in a happy place – or at least a contented one. He was relieved, he says, not being expected to “be” Simon Amstell, away from the level of fame that hosting Channel 4’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHWest Virginia Snake Handler Revival They Shall Take Up the Serpents (Sublime Frequencies)
Image
Californian producer Ian Brennan walks, loosely speaking, in the footsteps of groundbreaking (and controversial) father and son song collectors, John and Alan Lomax, who, between them, gathered an essential storehouse of American folk music in the early-to-mid-20th Century. Like them, he’s interested in the cultural context of roots music and he’s ranged across the world, from Rwanda to Azerbaijan. His recent 2023 Parchman Prison Read more ...
David Nice
Janáček's Vixen Sharpears has been making streamlined runs between eight Irish cities and towns, no doubt winning new admirers for this singular take on man, nature and the cycle of life. The chamber concept has some problems, but the 13-piece orchestra still makes beautiful work of a ravishing score under Charlotte Corderoy, the voices all project perfectly over it and the basic set design by Maree Kearns is impressive given its need to fit into diverse smaller theatres. It's always a tricky work to bring off in all its aspects: not really a children's opera, despite the picturebook Read more ...
Robert Beale
Valentine’s Day was only a week gone when the BBC Philharmonic gave us a programme on the theme of love. And the most haunting memory of it all was the gentle, song-inspired and highly original Viola Concerto by Cassandra Miller. It’s subtitled "I cannot love without trembling" and was played by this orchestra at the Proms under John Storgårds on 31 July 2024, by all accounts leaving everyone mesmerized. This time it was conducted by Ludovic Morlot, the orchestra’s Associate Artist, and again the soloist was Lawrence Power, who commissioned it (through his Viola Commissioning Circle, along Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Settling into my seat in this most intimate of houses, I realised that I had never seen a play written by Nobel Laureate and Academy Award winner, George Bernard Shaw. Nor did I know what his very own adjective, Shavian, connoted with any certainty. Nor did I know why an actress chose to go by the distracting stage name, Mrs Patrick Campbell.Partly that speaks to the limitations of my own experience (though when lines were read from the proto-script of Pygmalion, I was word-perfect, albeit from My Fair Lady) but it also speaks to the fact that Shaw has long fallen out of favour. His outspoken Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s semi-satirical new thriller looks back with sorrow and ambiguous nostalgia at the Wild West that Brazil became during the 1964-85 military dictatorship. Mendonça set The Secret Agent during 1977, when he was eight, and he has filtered his memories into its world of casual killings and endemic corruption.Fatalistic in tone, despite its leisurely pace and a gonzo horror interlude, it follows the progress of a fugitive from injustice. Widowed former university professor Armando, a passive protagonist, is portrayed with disarming equanimity but an undertow of sorrow by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Never mind the Sex Pistols, here's the rotting corpse of Johnny Rotten, stinking to high heaven like some maggot brain from the Bryan Ferry School of Design. Rotten has dubbed his new band Public Image Ltd. PiL's first single ‘Public Image’ sounds like a powerful Pistols' reject. And for making a nyah-nyah statement, the single is sufficient...but an entire album of catcalls is pure self-indulgence. Hearing Rotten make music now is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to understand.”The US music magazine Creem’s April 1979 review Read more ...