Reviews
Veronica Lee
This award-winning series, created by Tom Kapinos in 2007, is groundbreaking television even by Showtime’s daring standards. Californication is a dark - very dark - comedy drama about Hank Moody (David Duchovny), a bad-boy writer who has lost his literary mojo, but absolutely not his mojo mojo, as it were; it has nudity a-gogo, frequent sex scenes, recreational drug-taking and frank discussion of sexual matters.
Some have accused it of being a male fantasy writ large - and Duchovny’s admission that he had been treated for that most modern of conditions, sex addiction, appeared to give Read more ...
David Nice
Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts? You wouldn't expect James I to dominate in Howard Brenton's new play ostensibly about a tragic-heroic vision of the Tudor queen. Yet Brenton may have started something: the bisexual transvestite intellectual Scot with Tourette's and epilepsy, as spellbindingly played by James Garnon, could become the new Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tired of the slick, pastiche world of the post-Lock, Stock... British crime movie? Then Down Terrace may be the address for you. Director Ben Wheatley’s micro-budget, naturalistic debut details the paranoid decline of a drug-dealing family in the back end of Brighton. They’re the Royle family with access to hand guns - a deadly and funny combination.Robin Hill (also editor, and co-writer with Wheatley) stars as Karl, with his screen dad Eric played by real dad Robert, whose terraced house is the main set. Both performers are excellent, as a fading patriarch who mixes menace and charm, and his Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
There may be many benefits to living at the top of the Erno Goldfinger-designed Trellick Tower in north Kensington – the extensive views across London, perhaps, or the knowledge that one is inhabiting an iconic example of Brutalist architecture. Less obvious is the chance to earn a quick 50 quid for allowing Dan Witchalls to jump off your balcony.
Mind you, you’d have to let him into your flat at 5am, for base jumping (or "base", as parachuting from the top of tall buildings is known to its practitioners) is a secretive pastime with unsociable hours. It also carries identical odds to Russian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last year’s Vid og Vid (an Icelandic colloquialism for "every now and then"), Ólöf Arnalds’ debut album, attracted some high-profile fans. Fellow Icelander Björk raised the flag on America’s National Public Radio, as did Jonathan Richman who requested that she open the shows during his San Francisco residency last week. Björk has contributed vocals to "Surrender", a cut from Arnalds’ forthcoming album Innundor Skinni (Within the Skin). Another track, one of three in English on Innundor Skinni, is titled "Jonathan" – although there’s no lyrical reference to Richman, it’s an obvious tip of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If the bust of Sir Henry Wood that watches over the stage of the Royal Albert Hall had come to life, Commendatore-like, during last night’s concert, I can’t help feel that he would have been smiling. Beethoven nights – once a popular Proms fixture – have lately fallen off the calendar, but alongside various nods to tradition have this year returned. Following Jiří Bělohlávek and Paul Lewis’s recent concerto-fest, Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen last night presented a second all-Beethoven programme. Between the heart-racing tempos and exuberant playfulness, any Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And first the bad news. The ABC network in the States has already declared Better Off Ted dead, after a paltry two seasons. Which is a pity, since acerbic, mildly surreal satires about the workings of corporate America don’t come along very often.One of Better Off Ted’s trademarks is its opening sequence, which takes the form of a commercial (new every episode) for Veridian Dynamics, the gargantuan conglomerate where the title character, Ted Crisp (Jay Harrington), heads the Research and Development department. Veridian’s ads are triumphs of PR gloss and technological triumphalism, with just Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This, Heinrich von Kleist’s last play, was completed not long before he committed suicide, aged 34, in 1811, when the map of Europe - and indeed that of his native Prussia - was changing with indecent frequency. It is loosely (very loosely) based on the real Prince of Homburg and events at the Battle of Fehrbellin in 1675, and with its leitmotif of honour, duty and loyalty to the Fatherland, it is no wonder that the play was appropriated (with suitable adjustments) by the National Socialists in the 1930s (it was a favourite of Hitler's apparently) and then fell out of favour in German Read more ...
sue.steward
“We all come from the same DNA, as Desmond Tutu is always reminding us, and we shouldn’t be surprised that these musical collaborations take place - and work so well.” That was Peter Gabriel's comment on the music at WOMAD last weekend, a festival he co-founded in 1981, now crammed with more and more bands revealing obvious genetic connections.“Gabriel could have been talking about the entire programme but was, in fact, standing on the Siam stage to present the Songlines Award for Cross-Cultural Collaborations to Justin Adams (UK) and Juldeh Camara (Gambia/UK, pictured below). They had Read more ...
Anonymous
Its acronymic moniker stands for World Of Music, Arts and Dance, but the line-up at this year’s WOMAD is, as usual, very much skewed towards the first of those artforms – hailing from anywhere and everywhere between Australia and Azerbaijan. The “arts” component is likewise fully evident; in the two different venues for film screenings, for instance, or in the four small wooden stages in construction throughout the weekend as a demonstration of sustainable architecture.
The dancing, by contrast, though covered in various workshops, seems to be left largely in the hands (and feet) of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Rupert Everett knows who he is: he is English, he’s a toff and he’s a poof, thank you very much. And that’s just about all you need to know to tell you that, as a breed, they’re pretty damned sure of themselves, these English toffs, poofs or not. But he’s also a pretty memorable actor. Yes, really. Let me try to convince you. I once saw him – and this must have been just before Another Country hit the big screen, for his name didn’t mean much to me then – on stage in Webster’s The White Devil. He looked cute enough in his period costume, but his energy was a thunderbolt. Not only did he Read more ...
carole.woddis
What makes a good piece of theatre? Is it the atmosphere generated? Is it the acting? Or is it the ability to communicate ideas clearly? I don’t mind if sometimes I can’t hear or understand words. In the past, I have been overwhelmed by Polish versions of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. I have watched open-mouthed at Kabuki without surtitles and when Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma was first seen in this country, in Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre seasons, back in the Sixties, you hardly needed to understand Spanish to be so desperately moved by the sense of yearning emanating from a production played Read more ...