Reviews
David Nice
It's still not clear whether his clever, brilliantly orchestrated compositions are here to stay (though they're certainly having a good run at the moment). As a conductor, he's not yet nimble on his feet. Yet after yesterday evening's colossal recital, I doubt if anyone would deny that Thomas Adès is a pianist of the first order, a dramatic master of keyboard colour who pulls you into his edgy but often very beautiful sound world and sometimes casts you adrift from your critical moorings.It was a crazy programme for a night of the full moon. The tonal beauty was what I'd expected of Krystian Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The world is turned literally upside down in Revanche's long, eerie opening shot. We see trees reflected in a dark forest lake, hear animal and bird sounds - discordant, wild, somehow unsettling - and the faint boom of distant thunder. Then something (we can't see what) plummets into the water. This superlative psychodrama sends out ripples too, that last way beyond the tight parameters of its plot.A word about the title. The film, from Austria, is partly about revenge, but the common translation for that is Rache. Revanche, according to Götz Spielmann, its writer-director, involves much more Read more ...
fisun.guner
Judith Clark is a fashion curator, Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and writer. In collaboration with Artangel, that font of innovative artistic commissions (including Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Landy’s Break Down), they have produced what is perhaps best described as an intervention, rather than an art installation, in Blythe House, the Hammersmith outpost of the V&A.This fortress-like Victorian monolith was once the Post Office Savings Bank’s administrative offices: intangible "savings" were processed here. Now it holds more tangible assets: the reserve collections of the V&A Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s my habit as a music critic to take notes at shows such as this: nothing extensive, just words and phrases jotted down to jog the memory when it comes to writing the thing up afterwards. Looking back at my scraps of paper for this, the London leg of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s UK tour, I can see only a handful of scrawled words: “war”, “party”, and, er, “dum dum da dum dum dum”. I think I was having too much fun to bother with writing much down. It was that kind of night.The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are a bunch of eight brothers, joined on tour by a drummer, who play – well, Read more ...
howard.male
Fool’s Gold’s debut album brims over with the enthusiasm of a band who have discovered - primarily through African music - that there’s another way to play the electric guitar other than to just form workman-like bar-chords, stamp down hard on the distortion pedal, and then hit those six strings as hard as you can. And fortunately for them, there’s a young audience clearly thrilled to have this discovery passed onto them. By the end of their set at the jam-packed Bar Fly, there’s actually a substantial number of the audience pogo-ing! I never thought I’d see that occurring to music that owes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there such a thing as iPod theatre for a new digital generation? Given the enormous boom in site-specific performances and the growing use of electronic gadgets, the answer seems like yes, and this new show by non zero one - a group of recent graduates from Royal Holloway, University of London - is billed as an interrogation of the “new methods of communication that are designed to connect us over huge distances and in all scenarios”. An example of participant theatre, the 50-minute piece, which opened today, is a good illustration of both the highs and lows of experimental performance.At Read more ...
fisun.guner
Four podia occupy the Wellcome Collection’s temporary gallery space. Three are stage sets: a living room, a pub and a funeral parlour, all recognisable as “typical” working class - in fact, the living room might have been based on Pauline Fowler’s dog-eared front room. The fourth, placed further back, is where Billy Bragg will intercut the dramatic action with a new set of songs with his three-piece band, plus engage in a bit of ad-lib banter that will direct the audience back and forth across the promenade auditorium.Linking up all four sets is a thick, ragged, blood-red strip that runs the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Five Daughters is “based on the personal testimony of those most closely involved”: family, friends, the last people to see the women alive. What we are watching - the story of the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich - has the stamp of truth. When one girl missed her appointment at the methadone clinic, her mother tried to collect her prescription for her. The mother, played by Sarah Lancashire with the washed-out complexion of the terminally worried parent, would in effect have been a script consultant. The same went for the episode’s climactic scene, in which Anneli Alderton (Jaime Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’ve seen raping Popes, I’ve seen more naked guys dancing with waggling penises than I can count, I’ve seen naked breasts on dancing girls for what feels like all my adult life. But a man with a blood-stained prosthetic cock that looks like a baby’s bottle? A teacher munching a testicle off his pupil? Well, lor' love a duck.Daniel Kramer’s florid, lurid production of Pictures from an Exhibition, a collaboration with the Young Vic last year, made it to its partner theatre, Sadler’s Wells, this weekend, a creation where theatre, music and dance elaborately combine in a lustily gory trip into Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn has already displayed unsettling form as a filmmaker intimately acquainted with violence. His Pusher trilogy probed into the black heart of Denmark's criminal underworld, while Bronson surfed a monster wave of ultraviolence in its account of psychotic jailbird Charlie Bronson. With Valhalla Rising, Refn has thrown his gears into reverse and screeched backwards to Pagan-era Scotland, though the director may be intending his location to evoke an all-purpose Nordic wilderness. Mads Mikkelsen plays a mute, expressionless fighting slave, kept in a wooden Read more ...
paul.mcgee
One of the recurring themes in BBC4's recent documentary, Krautrock: The Rebirth Of Germany, was the importance placed by so many of its participants upon transcending Germany's then-recent past. Move on several decades, and you now have a country with a rich, varied and unique musical culture that not only has a global reach and influence, but which can also afford the luxury of being able to look back at itself and even have a little fun at its own expense.The Berlin Sounds evening at this year's Ether festival highlighted all this and more, bringing together both veteran and modern Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Several contributors alluded to this quality – he loved stories, was caught up in the drama of pirates and swashbuckling heroes (as Adam Ant used to his advantage when he hired Malcolm “for a thousand guineas” as an advisor. Malcolm then went off with his backing band and renamed them Bow Wow Wow). His partner Young Kim spoke touchingly of how he would often talk in his sleep, regressing to being a child, and she would talk to him while he was asleep, as though he was a five-year-old. The programme managed to show his mischievousness, a certain naivety, but also his “creating anti- Read more ...