Reviews
Jasper Rees
Dan, a tall ginger streak of entitlement, had an issue with the hygiene. Channel 4 were about to lift him out of a five-star hotel in the Gambia and send him off to see how the other half lives. “They’re not going to be as clean as us,” he predicted nervously. Dan worried that he might have to survive sans moisturiser and hair gel. He hadn’t been warned about the lack of cutlery. And of loo roll. Nor that you approached each problem with the same manual solution.Who volunteers to make themselves look like utter tits for these films? Luxury-loving Londoners is who, said Tamsin Greig, slumming Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Few bands maintain their early fanbase for 20 years by barely changing their sound, their dress sense, haircuts even, and yet manage to mature like Gouda cheese, gaining depth of flavour and punch over time. But Portishead have. The crowd in Alexandra Palace in north London was largely made up of people who would have bought Dummy, Portishead’s Mercury Prize-winning debut, when it came out in the mid-Nineties. I even spotted three people wearing combat jeans.This cusp-of-vintage style was perfect for the sticky floor and blackout-fabric-draped interior of the people’s palace, where even the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If much of the Austro-German repertoire is about hiking to a spiritual peak, the Franco-Spanish is about diving down to the orchestral depths. The music of Ravel, Debussy and Falla has beefy shoulders and powerful legs. But the vast watery expanse of the Royal Albert Hall is hard-going even for these expert paddlers. I've never seen anything by these composers that hasn't drowned in this space. So I came to last night's concert hoping that the BBC Philharmonic's new Spanish conductor, Juanjo Mena (he takes over officially next season), would show us all how to ride out these waters.He Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
By the end of the first half an hour, the burly Egyptian journalist next to me was in tears. By the end of the show, the entire Barbican audience was on its feet. It was a memorable evening – even if the august Barbican Hall was nothing like the teeming masses of the Tahrir Square at the height of the protests against Mubarak. One thing was clear though – those who think popular music has lost the power to change things and mutated into mere consumerist spectacle will have to eat their words. Especially if they understand Arabic.Which was a slight problem for half of the audience who didn’t Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An obsession with sex and death underlies many of the immortal works of 19th-century classical ballet. Giselle is seduced, La Sylphide does the seducing, the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by sex, the Swan Queen is an apparition of death to Prince Siegfried who is easily waylaid by her doppelgänger, Odile of the 32 fouettées. Roland Petit brought it all out in the open with his ballets in the next century. As one observer said in 1949 of the premiere in London of his ballet Carmen, you could see the men’s trouser buttons popping.In the three of his famous works on parade last night at the London Read more ...
David Nice
It was partly as penance for having missed the previous evening's Czech festival that I arena-prommed for last night's Moravian finale, to be happily strafed by the nine extra trumpets of Janáček's Sinfonietta. I hadn't quite expected to be so on the edge of my first-half seat in wonder at the little miracles of Sibelius's Op 66 Scènes historiques, genius personality more apparent in the first two chords than in all but the last minute or so of Havergal Brian's two-hour Gothic Symphony (but let's not go there again). In between, Sir Mark Elder's conducting didn't always keep his Mancunians on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
What would loving Gilda Farrell be like? I do mean Gilda, and not Rita Hayworth, who was 27 when she portrayed her. The flamboyantly seductive persona Gilda has adopted to drive men crazy obscures the true nature of a woman who learns it brings out the worst in them and that it's a heavy burden to carry. As the actress ruefully remarked of her husbands, “They all married Gilda, but they woke up with me” - a telling putdown of the erotic artifice in which she herself was draped. The “clothed” striptease Gilda electrifyingly performs in Charles Vidor’s perverse and sophisticated film Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Imaginative plays that explore the expanses of inner space are all the rage at the Soho Theatre this summer. First there was a superb revival of Anthony Neilson’s Realism, which puts on stage the thoughts of one man during a solitary Saturday, then there was Lou Ramsden’s Hundreds and Thousands, which used a horror-film aesthetic to explore female longing. Now Mongrel Island, which opened last night, looks at the thoughts and emotions of one woman who has a boring office job.Using the same cast as Neilson's Realism, Ed Harris's 90-minute play focuses on Marie, a young woman who is on Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One should never pass up an opportunity to revisit an Ealing comedy. Invariably arch, ingenious and wonderfully played, these dozen or so films made between 1947 and 1957 offer a lovely snapshot of a Britain long gone, while the films themselves still feel remarkably fresh. The Lavender Hill Mob isn’t quite there with the very best of them, but a digital restoration on its 60th anniversary is still irresistible.An Oscar-winning script by TEB Clarke offers a variation on a regular Ealing theme, of a common man (though not an Everyman) pitted against the Establishment. Alec Guinness is Henry Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s no denying that the French have a way with a thriller. Whether it’s the sleek noir of L’appartement, the corner-of-the-eye tension of 2006’s La tourneuse de pages or the altogether more brutal thrills of Cavayé’s recent Pour elle, there’s a quality to the films that sets them apart from even our finest English-language attempts. That French directors should increasingly be looking to American novels for their material seems a rather perverse trend, and one that proved fatal for Guillaume Canet’s Ne le dis à personne. Based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel of the same name, The Big Picture Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East. It is also based on experiences much nearer to home: she is married to Jonathan Powell, who was Prime Minister Tony Blair’s close personal adviser during the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.Certainly, after 9/11, Helm was in the thick of things Read more ...
Russ Coffey
They’ve called the tour "The Hits - Stripped Back". But they weren’t all hits. More importantly, they weren’t merely stripped back either. They’d evolved. The band’s ability to write quality anthemic indie rock is undeniable. But so is the fact that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish them from a slew of other bands with awkward names and characterful voices, like Feeder or Embrace. Or Elbow. And Elbow have stolen the market share. So where does this leave Athlete? It leaves them taking a step back from the pop game, and getting excited about the sonic possibilities of making music together. Read more ...