Reviews
Russ Coffey
Of all the unlikely musical pairings in recent times, Jesca Hoop and Guy Garvey deserve special mention. The genial Elbow frontman, all northern charm and indie anthems, is like a favourite bitter. Hoop, on the other hand, former nanny to Tom Waits's children, is more like something Lewis Carroll's Alice might have drunk. Since she moved from California to Manchester, Garvey has been mentoring Hoop, and appeared on her best-known song. But last night’s gig was all her, with a little help from four friends.And the packed London bar was also shown why, in a scene saturated with high-quality Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I reviewed excerpts of Will Gregory's new opera, Piccard in Space, last year. His funky, plushly Moog-ed, concerto-like suite struck me as rather tasty. I even said that I couldn't wait for last night's fully worked-out operatic world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. How wrong I was.I've seen plenty of bad opera in my time. I've seen things that have offended my ears. Things that have offended my eyes. Things so nauseatingly rubbishy they panzer-attacked my nasal cavities and asphyxiated my soul. But nothing has made me want to pick out my cochlea with a blunt 50-page electronica guide Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to her website, Martina Cole is "the person who tells it like it really is". If it's really like this dramatisation of her 1997 novel The Runaway, it's unrelentingly brutal, squalid and frightening, a televisual blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Perhaps the fact that the series was shot on a giant set in South Africa helps to account for its strange atmosphere of reality assembled from an Ikea-style flatpack.The Runaway of the title is, or is going to be in episode two, Cathy Connor (Joanna Vanderham). It's the early Sixties, and Cathy has been brought up in London's East Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Love is no solution to life,” declares a line from Clifford Odets’s 1938 drama; and in straitened times, then and now, it’s a sentiment that carries considerable doleful weight. And yet every character here is in desperate search of that elusive something to elevate the banal business of day-to-day existence – a personal rocket to the moon. Without it, they are trapped in endless Monday mornings, soul-destroying work that doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills, and relationships in which they turn into “two machines, counting up the petty cash”.The piece is rarely performed, and it’s not Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night Murray Perahia played Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin, and we heard, quite simply, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin. Nothing more need be said, if one follows the Cordelia principle to love, and be silent.Still, as you insist, I will add that it was an ideally private experience between him and me, and I dare say, private between him and every other individual sitting in the Barbican Hall. Perahia, now 63, has always had an inclination towards translucency, for making himself the finest possible veil through which to show you the composers, and yet what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With his debut film, Moon, Duncan Jones demonstrated that a sci-fi movie doesn't have to depend for its success on fleets of warring spacecraft or flesh-eating alien monstrosities. He's done it again with Source Code, a cool and clever thriller in which futuristic anxiety and mind-bending scientific theory are firmly anchored in almost mundane reality.Indeed, what could be a more ordinary setting than a commuter train shunting its load of commuters from the suburbs towards their metropolitan destination (in this case, Chicago). This is where we first meet Jake Gyllenhaal's protagonist, who Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sexual intercourse, according to Larkin, began in 1963. By 1974 it had had a free-thinking, free-loving decade to become comfortable and frankly rather routine. It was the year the Ramones formed, when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was in cinemas and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying on bookshelves. Over at the Royal Court the “angry young men” might still be angry, but weren’t exactly young any more. The sexual revolution had been fought and won, and the cultural battlefield was now overgrown with a riotous tangle of attitudes and influences, each more liberal than the last. It was against this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Birmingham is the fount of beauty and magic when it comes to ballet design. Covent Garden - forget it, too much money, too little taste. What illustrates that truism is the comparison that can be made between the Royal Ballet’s cartoony Cinderella production returning to WC2 next week and the magical visual experience that is John Macfarlane’s vision for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new Cinderella, having its London premiere at the Coliseum this week.Bintley, BRB’s director, is a canny man - he wanted to replace Macfarlane’s stunning Nutcracker for the Birmingham Christmas entertainment. Shock, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Will Silk make it to series two, or will it feel the wrath of BBC One's mad axeman, Danny Cohen? The former, we fervently hope. Despite some implausible incidents and occasionally silly plotlines, Peter Moffat's battling-barristers drama reached the end of its first series looking stronger than when it started.Much credit for this must go to Maxine Peake's superb portrayal of Martha Costello, the pugnacious girl from the north country pitted against Rupert Penry-Jones's smooth and superior Clive Reader, as both of them strive for that coveted elevation to QC. It was difficult not to feel Read more ...
David Nice
I have no problem at all with updating Beethoven's early-19th-century paean to love and liberty: there are any number of tyrants and prisoners of conscience to whom its universal message could apply. But in this revival staged by Daniel Dooner, Flimm's prison - where and when, I'm not quite sure, though the ladies' print dresses and hairdos suggest the 1950s - has no meaningful relationships, moves and gestures to fill it which couldn't be set in any period, the odd pointed revolver excepted.It also means that Nina Stemme as Leonore, in male disguise to discover the whereabouts of her Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if you’re going to headline yourself in the title of your show "the talent", you’d better have some: audiences aren’t forgiving. William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, ex-Royal Ballet dancers headlining their own company for the last decade, have a history of these pre-emptive strikes – an earlier show was called Critics’ Choice – and they also have a history of living up to them. Fortunately for all, The Talent does too.Trevitt and Nunn, now in their early forties, have retired from dancing and are planning their future as dance master impresarios. They began by holding an open audition Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Whatever you think of Friends, you have to concede it was good in the sack. If there were jokes to be had about sexual fantasy, sexual abandon and sexual incontinence, they were had. The one with free porn, the one with Rachel dressing as Princess Leia for Ross etc. The one area they avoided was sexual inhibition. It was all very refreshing, all very welcome, unless you happened to be watching with addicted youngish daughters. I was appalled at all the sex. No doubt this was a case of conditioning: in the sitcoms I grew up with sex was a dirty word. Naturally they were all British.The British Read more ...