Reviews
aleks.sierz
Nick Grosso is a good example of the “now you see him, now you don’t” playwright. In the mid-1990s, he was feted as a lads’ writer for his funny plays about masculinity, such as Peaches, Sweetheart and Real Classy Affair. Then he dropped out of view. He resurfaced briefly in 2002 with the deliciously surrealistic Kosher Harry. Then nothing. Until now. As his new comedy, which opened last night in a production which stars Lesley Sharp, takes to the Royal Court studio stage, we have a chance to enjoy again Grosso’s knack for words.The first surprise is that this is a girls’ play. Just as the Read more ...
howard.male
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly have a good bash at it. On the plus side, many of Amis’s original words, dialogue and set-pieces were left intact. On the minus side, where do I start? The first problem is that Nick Frost was miscast. Not woefully miscast - physically he fits the bill – but Simon Pegg’s comic sidekick is more cuddly koala than dead-eyed grizzly, as Amis’s morally Read more ...
edward.seckerson
We might have expected that the rising young bel canto tenor Lawrence Brownlee would include “Ah! Mes amis… Pour mon âme” from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment (that’s the number with the nine top Cs) in his Rosenblatt recital at St John’s, Smith Square – but what we might not have anticipated, after so taxing a programme as this, was that he would sing it again. That’s 18 top Cs (and the rest), which isn’t just cheeky, it’s a message: start looking over your shoulder, Juan Diego Florez - Brownlee’s breathing down your neck.The extraordinary thing about the young African-American’s voice is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything. “My love affair with Wagner”, he began, “began when I was a child.” Of course it did, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
After Wolf Hall and The Tudors, Shakespeare's Globe is arriving rather late at this particular historical party, especially given that the Bankside venue brings with it a closer connection to the period than most. Can this theatre animate a rarely performed Shakespeare play - well, make that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, in accordance with scholars' assessments - that is rarely performed, presumably, for a reason? (The last prominent London sighting was Gregory Doran's glittering but soulless staging for the RSC in 1996.) The short answer: and how. Indeed, Henry VIII is so unexpectedly Read more ...
david.cheal
When I last saw Paul Weller at the Royal Albert Hall he was becalmed in the doldrums of his career – between the demise of the Style Council and the release of his “wake up and smell the coffee” album, Stanley Road. On stage, Weller was a sheepish figure who only sporadically sparked with enthusiasm for his music; it wasn’t much fun. What a difference nearly 20 years can make: this time around he was confident, assertive, vigorous, alive – an elder statesman of rock who has reached the point where he can fill up a five-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall (of which this was the second Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her company went into something of a creative abeyance to focus on producing a new dance community centre, this was one of Davies’s many gems of dance poetry that I feared we might never be able to bask in again.Fortunately last night Rambert turned up, under Mark Baldwin’s sensitive direction, picking up this 1995 beauty and one of Merce Cunningham’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always liked that line in the 1960 Spartacus movie when Spartacus's lover Varinia (Jean Simmons) is bidding a silent farewell to the crucified rebel gladiator. "Tell da lady no loidering," growls the Roman sentry standing guard nearby. I can't tell you whether the line will appear in this new and lurid rehash of the Spartacus legend, though if it does it won't have quite the same Bronx ambience about it since most of the accents are from the Antipodes, the series having been shot in New Zealand. It also arrives tooled up with all available digital technology, and whatever it lacks in Read more ...
David Nice
The backlash begins here with the first of Flavia Rittner's three documentaries: not an operatic wannabe or a gushing celebrity outsider to present, only a conductor who knows and loves his job inside out and a parade of gorgeous, energetic singers all at the very top of their hard-working game in state-of-the-art productions.It was a tall order for irresistible Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano to whizz his way through Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart and Rossini in one hour, but by going straight to the heart of each matter, choosing a scene from a key opera and working on it in the most Read more ...
howard.male
I love a world music gig where there’s hardly a single world music fan present - or for that matter, a world music journalist. By this I mean that it’s a joy to be at a concert where the audience seems to mainly consist of people from the band’s country of origin, who are just thrilled to be getting a taste of home. From the off last night these fans of Colombia’s latest musical export seemed to know every taught, funky song and its sing-along chorus, and they bounced around with the kind of enthusiasm one rarely sees in a London world music audience (at least not until the encore informs Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the least lamented (by me at least) genres that has fallen foul of social changes in the past two decades is the 1980s gay drama. You know the kind of thing: right-on coming-out speeches, painful but ridiculous instances of homophobia, and the compulsory dying-of-AIDS scene. The irony is that Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 classic Beautiful Thing did so much to pull the gay play out of its ghetto, has now returned to this 1980s genre. His latest play, which opened last night and marks his long-overdue return to the stage, revisits gay culture between the 1960s and today. Okay, it’s retro Read more ...
fisun.guner
Picasso the genius, the sensualist, the womaniser, the priapic beast. This much we think we know of the great Spanish artist. But how about Picasso the political activist? Picasso the supporter of women’s causes? Picasso the… feminist? Oh, yes, that Picasso. In a landmark Liverpool exhibition focusing on the years 1944 to his death in 1973, and bringing together 150 works from around the globe, Picasso becomes all of these things. And having meticulously gone through the Picasso archives, curator Lynda Morris reveals an interpretative layer that has previously been ignored – or rather, the Read more ...