Reviews
Sarah Kent
Robin Rhode’s animations are pure pleasure; there’s perfection in their simplicity. They are so perfectly tuned, so light on their feet, that one simply wants to enjoy them; but because they are multilayered, they offer more than momentary pleasure. Rhode was born in South Africa and, in many ways, he is the Banksy of Johannesburg. In the late 1990s he began using the scruffy walls of the city as a canvas on which to make drawings which he describes as a “dreamscape to the impossible”.But whereas stealth is crucial to Banksy’s modus operandi – he disappears into the night, leaving his images Read more ...
David Nice
Public feuding, private sorrows: the elemental passions of Verdi's Ligurian power struggle haven't had a vivid London staging since the Alden-Fielding ENO classic gave it a guiding (or, according to taste, hindering) giant hand in the late 1980s. Dmitri Tcherniakov, the most disciplined opera director to have come out of Russia, was a clever choice for the company to invite to the Coliseum. But would his Boccanegra more resemble the thought-through revelations of his Bolshoi Eugene Onegin or the fits-and-starts family carry-on of his Aix Don Giovanni?In the end, it occupies a grey zone Read more ...
howard.male
Sometimes you hear something new and your perspective on music shifts seismically, making everything you were listening to previously sound safe and predictable by comparison. Inevitably, as one gets older and more musically knowledgeable, such moments are fewer and further between; either the shock of the new isn’t as high-voltage as it used to be, or it just irritates rather than stimulates. And so it was a pleasant surprise when, one morning – heralded by a storm of tape hiss and an enthusiastically bashed tribal drum – a new band called tUnE-yArDs (aka Merrill Garbus) came at me from the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Dickens wasn’t wrong – hard times they were. Around 1300 men, women and children worked at the Murrays’ Mills complex in the Ancoats area of Manchester in its mid-19th-century heyday (if you can call it that). Arrive a minute later than 7am and you were locked out, without pay. Now that actors are treading those same worn and oil-stained boards with an imaginative new version of Hard Times, you won’t get in after 7pm (and you’re the one paying, of course).In wide bays, where the machines (Dickens’s “mad elephants”) used to clatter and spew out cotton like confetti, on a mill floor 100 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Michael Clark brings dancers into Tate Modern in a long shadow cast by some memorable events from choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Now the ground on which Ai Weiwei’s poignant porcelain seeds were piled is swept clean and laid with a striking white-and-black dance floor, with audience seats arrayed on three sides and the massive height of the Turbine Hall politely decked with spotlights. It’s as if Clark wanted to turn the gallery into a dance studio, rather than insinuate dance into a gallery, which may partly explain the unrisen soufflé of th, his world premiere last night. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond. In American Trade, a new play from the immensely talented American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, which opened last night, we revisit this familiar territory.Things start well. Pharus, a gay Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all make mistakes. I was absent for the start of Ingrid Fliter's Tempest sonata at her Queen Elizabeth Hall debut. Fliter was absent (mentally speaking) for much of the final movement of the Appassionata. The parts of Fliter's recital that we were both wholly present for, however, suggested she may well be as good a Beethovenian as she is a Chopinist.
Chopinists don't always make great Beethovenians (or vice versa). Fliter showed she had all the essential tools to be both: an engineer's feel of logistics, a circus entertainer's eye for variety, a bombardier's sense of timing. In the final Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Nothing says summer opera quite like the skittish melodies and Neapolitan oom-pah-pah of a Donizetti overture. It doesn’t get much cheekier or more playful than this, the kind of music that makes you long for a pea shooter to pelt opera-goers with a stealthy fire of peanuts, or daub the bald head of the concert-goer in front of you during his Act II siesta. When set against the greenery and obbligato peacocks of Holland Park, a work like Don Pasquale makes sense in a way it scarcely can in the corseted confines of a traditional opera house. Add a witty staging by Stephen Barlow, and Richard Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Lilley may not be a household name, but he is well known to comedy connoisseurs. The Australian's work, which he writes, produces and appears in - in several roles, male and female, adult and teenager - is exceptional, and is by turns funny and challenging, offensive and poignant. You may have seen We Can Be Heroes, about teenage identical twins Daniel and Nathan (played by Lilley), and Summer Heights High, set in a secondary school where the egregious fool Mr G taught drama to the self-obsessed Ja’mie (both played by Lilley); now comes Angry Boys, about young men in modern society. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other starting point. There's talk later in Wesker's three acts (taken here with only one interval) of seeing people in the round, which is exactly what the writing, not to mention Cooke's superlative ensemble, manages to do: the political and the personal conjoined in a compassion that one might describe as clear-eyed if only it didn't prompt from an audience Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tosca-at-Covent-Garden is a commodity, like bacon-for-breakfast - a pricier commodity, to be true, at officially up to £229.50 a seat, but in both cases people want to get what they expect. For the final performances next month in this summer revival, with the megastars Angela Gheorghiu, Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel, all seats are sold, with touts on eBay offering a pair of amphitheatre seats at bids over £300. Clearly Tosca ain’t art so much as the Royal Opera House's ATM, and therefore I have to suspend my disappointment as an opera lover in the opening of the run last night, with a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The appeal of fat, foolish, good-hearted panda Po (Jack Black) as a cartoon action hero is predictably diluted in this sequel. A fully trained and socially accepted martial arts master by the original’s end, he offers Kung Fu Panda 2 less pathos and originality. It compensates with spectacular 3D set pieces, cute and ferocious animals and gentle humour finely tuned to children’s tastes.Po is this time stunned to discover the kindly goose who raised him isn’t his real dad. Jack Black bravely resists the temptation to reprise Steve Martin’s similarly naïve adoptee in The Jerk (“You mean… I’m Read more ...