Reviews
David Nice
Silence. Near-darkness. Oozy weeds of orchestral strings twist in the mind of Edward Fairfax Vere (John Mark Ainsley), remembering the tragic events of 1797 when he was Captain of the HMS Indomitable. From that awe-inspiring start through to one of the most upsetting of onstage murders, perhaps the greatest parade of major and minor chords in all opera and beyond to some kind of redemption, Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne production - his first in the operatic sphere - of Britten's grandest opera moves with a simplicity and grace which fit this tight little craft of an opera house very well Read more ...
fisun.guner
Forget about art “being about the idea” for a moment. Drawing from life is still considered by many to be the litmus test for proper artistic skill, or at least the foundation from which great art can arise. And so the enquiry, “But can he really draw?” is still one contemporary artists are confronted with by those not shy of asking what they consider an obvious question. And it has plagued abstract and modernist artists throughout the 20th century: the ability to draw figuratively as tradition dictates is so often seen as a benchmark from which everything else can be measured. When Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“Hey, it’s the UK street dance championships soon - we’re a crew, let’s show them what we can do,” cries the flawlessly pretty blonde to her black colleagues in the shopping mall. In quoting that line I deny any charge of offering a spoiler about what happens in StreetDance 3D. A collective intellectual regression seems to overtake the vast majority of Brits when confronted with the idea of dance - how else can one explain the demonstration of every dumbwitted social or racial cliché ever coined about dance that is this ludicrous movie?There are countless reasons to take offence. It is Read more ...
david.cheal
So anyway, when I told my three teenagers that I was off to see Randy Newman, there was a collective yawn and a mild snort of derision, which (and I think I know them well enough to interpret their snorts of derision) said, in effect, “Well, he’s just some crumbly guy who writes sweet songs for Toy Story. Why would anyone actually want to go and see him sing?” A response began to form in my head: that Randy Newman has been described by some as the greatest living American songwriter; that his songs cover some pretty big topics – racism, the slave trade, German child murderers of the 1930s, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dystopia is a genre that works like a rhetorical device. Take a government policy — let’s say the war in Afghanistan — then list the bad effects that this has had on the British people, exaggerate by a factor of ten, or more, add some obscure but sinister language, extrapolate by throwing in some nightmarish horrors, and then wrap it all up for a small cast. If you’re lucky, as Beth Steel has been with her debut play which opened last night at the Old Vic Tunnels, you’ll get a really atmospheric venue, and, in her case, Kevin Spacey sitting in the first-night audience.The Old Vic Tunnels are Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Rarely have I seen an opera where so much of the activity, so much of the detailed business of relating, loving, falling out and hating, has rung so true for so much of the time. And never do I remember this truthfulness coming from such simplicity. For, in terms of set, costume and conception, this is a very ordinary, recognisable, dependable, 19th-century Tosca. But what soprano-cum-director Catherine Malfitano (once a star Tosca herself) does with these familiar ingredients is quite extraordinary.We don't have to wait long for the first sign that Malfitano's handling of the drama will be Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Collaborations for dance, theatre and other things are coming thick and fast at Sadler’s Wells nowadays - these are not halcyon days for pure choreography. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has become a regular at Rosebery Avenue with his mixed-theatre works FOI, Myth, Zero Degrees and Sutra, with Antony Gormley, Akram Khan and the Shaolin Monks, and now here's his fifth, BABEL (words). This is definitely wordy, and certainly a Babel of languages, Japanese, French, Italian, Turkish, Dutch, German, daffy in places, an aimless drag in others, and a mystifying 100 minutes long (yet certainly no less Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The art of good sketch comedy is in the timing - not just in how gags are delivered, of course, but in realising that some jokes are best done as one-liners while others can be played out over several minutes before being punctuated with a killer punchline. The four-man sketch group Idiots of Ants are masters of knowing when to end one sketch and get on with another - and that, allied with smart writing and committed performances, makes them leaders in the field.The show is called This is War and does indeed start with a sketch set in an aeroplane above wartime Germany, but which doesn’t Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it. Those fortunate enough to move into these beautiful new homes are doing so of their own accord, of course, but many of those held in their previous incarnations would have preferred to be anywhere else at all.This documentary, made by Chris Boulding for the BBC’s Open University strand, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Quasi, Bye Bye Blackbird (Domino) The "Bye Bye Blackbird" on offer here is not the jazz stalwart favoured by everyone from Peggy Lee to Miles Davis. It is, instead, a garage guitar-pop concoction from perennial underdog trio Quasi from Portland, Oregon, that prolific centre of American indie guitar raucousness. At the core of the band, ex-husband and wife Sam Coombes and Janet Weiss have always appeared happy, throughout eight albums, to veer into wilful lo-fi messiness whenever their natural aptitude for a tasty melodic song threatens to interfere. This time, though, they've blown it.The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where were you? For those of us too young to experience Kennedy’s assassination, which realistically is anyone under the age of 55, the Royal Wedding is the next event along the chain of history that simultaneously impinged on much of the globe’s consciousness. In July 1981, I was on a French course in Clermont Ferrand and the whole group watched Lady Di get Prince Charles’s names in the wrong order on a TV in class. There must have been French commentary. Were you anywhere in particular?For the inhabitants of a Welsh pit village in Abi Morgan’s drama Royal Wedding, the nuptials up in London Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You can take the girl out of the barracks but you can’t take the barracks out of the girl would be one way to sum up Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (Daughter of the Regiment), which I can’t conceive could have a more ribtickling production, more brilliantly sung, than the delight that opened last night at Covent Garden. Kill, as they say, to get a ticket. It has Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Ann Murray and Dawn French, and in a starring supporting role comes one of the wittiest set of translating surtitles I’ve ever come across. “It’s raining soldiers,” complains the butler as the Read more ...