Reviews
Veronica Lee
Teenagers David and Emily are inseparable friends, who live year-round on a crummy seaside caravan park on the East Anglian coast. They play games of chase among the caravans, scare sheep in surrounding fields and steal from the sweet shop on site. The friends, although the same age, are at different stages of their development; he still looks boyish, she is already flirting with Steve, the much older security guard on site. But the pair are equally emotionally inarticulate and struggling to understand their nascent lust; as the increasingly dark story unfolds, we understand that The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the most common genres of contemporary Brit drama is the "me and my mates" play – usually stories about flatsharing twentysomethings. Although, over the past decade, this type of drama has been somewhat overtaken by the return of the family play, you can still spot the genre in new writing venues all over the country. So Penelope Skinner’s new 90-minute piece, which opened last night at the Bush Theatre, is – despite its evocative name (which means the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness) – at first sight as familiar as an old sofa.Set in two flats at opposite ends of London, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rarely has a TV series been so easy to like and so tricky to define. If you shoved High School Musical, American Idol and The Breakfast Club in a blender, you'd be in the right ballpark, though you still wouldn't quite have captured Glee's unique tone of sweetness, campness, tragic teenage confusion and satire.On the face of it, the setup is simple. McKinley High School’s earnest, optimistic Spanish teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) seeks to revive the school’s after-hours glee club, partly out of nostalgia for his own glory days in the high school choir. But the cool Read more ...
David Nice
It's amazing how much you can tell of what lies ahead from the way a conductor handles a master composer's first chord. Katya Kabanova's opening sigh of muted violas and cellos underpinned by double basses should tell us that the Volga into which the self-persecuted heroine will eventually throw herself is a river, real or metaphorical, of infinite breadth and depth. And that was exactly what Mark Wigglesworth conjured from ENO strings in a performance more alert to the value of every note and colour in Janáček's lightning-flash score than any I've heard. David Alden's production and a Read more ...
doro.globus
From Floor to Sky looks at a relatively little known, but pivotal, moment in the development of British sculpture: the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when tutors and students at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College worked together in challenging traditional attitudes to the medium. New ways of teaching and thinking about sculpture were evolved, and new materials such as fibreglass and plastic introduced. This exhibition focuses on the students of one particular tutor, Peter Kardia, whose radical teaching methods brought politics, theory, perception and perspex into the Read more ...
sue.steward
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants Read more ...
alice.vincent
The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the guitarist from drone doom band Sunn O))), expectations were hard to form. The organisers must have realised the mystery - four sheets of A4 were thrust into our hands last night by ushers upon entry as a means of explanation, although the itinerary was hardly kept to.
Geordies like few things more than to be told how great their locality is by Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I had been trying to secure a ticket for Mumford & Sons’ sold-out-yonks-ago tour for most of last week. Ten minutes before they were due to go onstage for their final gig, I'd given up hope. It was a case of go home and console myself with YouTube tribute band Sonford & Mums or succumb to the touts, and who wants to give them money? Luckily a kind-hearted Samaritan with a spare pass took pity on me. Which was a huge relief, even if from my late-arrival vantage point the band was so obscured by the packed crowd that Lady Gaga might have been on banjo for all I could see.Yet better the Read more ...
David Nice
This is what Chopin anniversary year ought to be all about; not some celebrity showcase of plums and cornerstones in too large a hall before a restless audience, but a thoughtfully planned adventure zigzagging through the complete works on which the listener feels privileged to eavesdrop, and where the chameleonic genius of the composer always comes first. This eighth concert in the enterprising Kings Place "Chopin Unwrapped" series was the first I've been able to catch, and I realised what I'd been missing. Both of Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo's two halves offered a demanding but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The only time I've ever been to Detroit was in 2004, in pursuit of assorted rock stars on the Vote for Change tour. Reader, it was weird. The atmosphere in the deserted streets was deathly, as if an invading army had swarmed into town, committed hideous atrocities and then moved on. The decaying architecture from America's golden industrial age looked unsettlingly like the set for The Omega Man, in which Charlton Heston fought a solitary war against an army of nocturnal psychopaths.These feelings returned vividly as I watched Julien Temple's stupendous Requiem for Detroit?, a thrilling piece Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen to his prolifically combustible music, the million and one ideas hurtling about with the energy of a school playground and the intensity of a burning sun, and you soon realise that all that cranial space is probably quite necessary.
But for composition you need more than just head space for musical ideas to smash into one another. You need form. Read more ...
howard.male
What do you imagine a Swiss Cajun/Zydeco trio would sound like? It’s not a question that’s easy to navigate without slipping into the politically incorrect quicksand of racial or cultural stereotyping. So it gives me great pleasure to report that any narrow-minded assumptions I may have had in that department were instantly confounded by the reality of the life-affirming racket made by these three young men from Geneva as they rocked the basement bar of the St Moritz Club in Wardour Street.The first clue that this was my kind of band was the cover of their second and most recent album, Brule Read more ...