Reviews
Graham Fuller
The monumental documentary Sweetgrass captures the back-breaking final sheep drives by the herders of the Raisland-Allestad Ranch, Montana, into the vertiginous heights of the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, which lie north of the Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies. These herders’ purpose was to bring the huge flock to pasture on public land, a 19th-century tradition that became economically unviable in the 2000s. Lawrence Allestad and his wife Elaine ended up selling the ranch, which had been in business for 104 years, to a non-rancher in 2004 and their federal grazing rights to an Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright, film-maker and polymath Philip Ridley has had a great couple of years. All over the place, there have been powerful and revealing revivals of his 1990s classics, such as The Fastest Clock in the Universe. His 2000 play, Vincent River, enjoyed an outing in the West End and his 2005 shocker, Mercury Fur, got a new and exciting site-specific production. Now, his first new play in three years, which opened last night, breaks fresh ground and represents an imaginative leap of the gleaming dark of his wild, wild imagination.Like Vincent River, Tender Napalm - the oxymoron is typical of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Today we’ve Easter-themed music from Haydn and a rare chance to hear some delectable Grieg played by an old master. A kitsch Russian classic is given a new slant, and two Italians have serious fun with Gershwin.Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, Catfish Row, Gewandhausorchester/Riccardo Chailly, with Stefan Bollani, piano (Decca)
No performance of the jazz-band version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is likely to surpass that issued last year by Lincoln Mayorga, but there’s plenty to enjoy here. Several moments have had other critics fuming, notably when pianist Stefan Bollani Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Manon, Manon, the little minx. Here she comes again - for the 223rd time, last night - and like the legendary ladies of her trade, scrubs up fresh and newly captivating, as if she’d only just skipped off the carriage from the convent. MacMillan’s irresistible bad girl and her gullible, innocent lover have become two of the classic roles in all ballet since the 1974 premiere, when reception was far from friendly, and it’s a sign of what a game-changer its choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was that when you go to Manon, what you come out talking about is how well the character drama was spun Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everybody knows One Thousand and One Nights, even if they don’t know they do. Ever been to the panto to see Aladdin? Watched Sinbad the Sailor on stage, or Sheherazade at the opera or ballet, or perhaps watched one the many film versions of The Thief of Baghdad? Yes to any of those and you’re a fan of possibly one of the greatest series of stories ever told.Richard E Grant, a rather pleasing actor and a thoroughly nice chap, presented this documentary because, he said, he wanted to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination. Of course any idiot could answer Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Space is a great subject for theatre. I’m not sure why but it might be something to do with the contrast between the irreducible groundedness of live performance and the imaginary flights of fancy that the audience yearns to take. Whatever the reason, memorable past explorations of this subject, from the Soviet side of the space race, include Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon and David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. Now Rona Munro, whose new play opened last night, once again boldly goes deep into the history behind the first Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the lager-carpeted sweat box that is the KCL student union it was hard to fault The Mummers. There are some concerts where band and audience seem so lost in a private world that you can almost forget that the humdrum, everyday world even exists. Last night was one. It was no surprise that Raissa Khan-Panni and her gang were there to transport us. What did come as a revelation, however, was just how big it sounded. The musicianship was just the half of it, though. The expansiveness The Mummers created came from the fact that their music is loaded with imagination and astonishment.This Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Back in 2004, Russell Brand performed Russell Brand's Better Now at the Edinburgh Fringe, one of the best shows I have ever seen. In it he described his recovery from addictions to alcohol and drugs and how he had lost his job as an MTV presenter after one too many, er, misjudgments - coming into work dressed as Osama Bin Laden the day after 9/11, for instance.Only Brand made it sound a lot funnier than that, and his descriptions of his life were phrased in the most fantastical and florid language. But he didn't even get a look-in for any awards, which was shameful, and ever since has Read more ...
judith.flanders
Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass.In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Bustamante (b 1952) made his name with a long-running photographic cycle of C-prints, including the overarching Tableaux (Pictures). These were images taken on the margins, generally Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pina Bausch decided: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things - that’s where dance comes in.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Only if they’re bad words and good dance - bad writhing instead of, say, Shakespeare’s words isn’t much of a swap. But with Bausch, people tended to hang on every word, probably because so much of her dance was indeed pretty damn good, and it’s so difficult to put into words just why that was.Part of it was that it was a theatrical expression of adult instincts that we all share, rather than a school of dance that you had to know standards to access. Wim Wenders Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!" Mélisande's jittery first words could be the motto for the whole of Pelléas et Mélisande. How to touch, what to touch, when to and when not to touch, more specifically, how to mark without bruising, are the subjects and challenges thrown up by Debussy's delicate piece of operatic symbolism. Ones that all the artists in last night's concert performance at the Barbican Hall tackled with incredible levels of musicality.There wasn't just an extraordinary sensitivity to the delicacies of this miraculous score. There was an honouring of the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
John Cage, the focus of an adventurous three-day mini-festival in Bristol, is possibly one of the most influential figures in 20th-century culture. As much a practical philosopher as a composer of note, he made artists, writers and musicians think about the nature of chance, our place in nature and the role of the subject in the creative process.Cage has often been dismissed as a latter-day Dadaist, intent on taking the piss out of the establishment. There are links with Dada – not least a friendship with Marcel Duchamp, who shares with Cage the reputation for being a conceptual radical Read more ...