Reviews
Matt Wolf
The Vaudeville Theatre is turning into London's de facto playground for female icons from American TV. A few weeks ago, the venue hosted the misbegotten local cabaret debut of Will and Grace star Megan Mullally, who had scarcely set foot on stage before announcing that she had left her star-making role of Karen at home. (That's not all that was absent from the evening.) Now, along comes Kim Cattrall, in her third London stage appearance since becoming everyone's favourite glamour puss from Sex and the City, and guess what? Her Amanda in Private Lives brings with it more than a whiff of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although our culture is obsessed with youth, very few adults can connect directly with teenagers. Instead teens have become the object of our fears — there’s even a posh word for this: ephebiphobia. In drama, teens are often portrayed as a problem to be solved, and deprived of their own voices. By welcome contrast, Philip Ridley’s Moonfleece, which opened last night in London and will tour the north of England, is unforgettably teenage in every way — it is young, young, young!Set in Ridley’s beloved East End, the scene is a derelict flat in an all-but-abandoned high-rise. This used to be home Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than he. Breakfast on Pluto found Cillian Murphy’s girly boy swishing around working-class Dublin in frocks and furs. And now comes Ondine, Jordan’s reimagining of the watery fable transplanted to the rugged shores of Cork. In this mystic Celtic wilderness a creature with wavy tresses spun as if from luxuriant silk wanders lost among the secret coves. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tim Henman - brilliant and unfairly treated, or... not? Even when John McEnroe passionately enumerates Henman’s qualities, do you both nod hopefully and realistically shake your head? Because, yes, our lad may be a rare craftsman of the grass court game, but if the point is giving us the shock of unexplained genius that is, say, Federer's (or McEnroe's) habit, then no chance, mate. And so to Richard Alston, whose court is dance, and the point of dance is to make you feel exultant, shuffle off your mortal coil, thrill to music and movement, feel the out-of-body tug of that other world which is Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Must rush, have to hurry: like the fretful White Rabbit with his pocket watch, fans have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice, which finally arrives in cinemas this week, albeit for a limited period following the controversial decision to push the film out quickly on DVD. Mindful of this, I hastened to the IMAX, Waterloo to catch it in 3D, larger than life and twice as natural, on the very biggest screen available. 30,000 people have already pre-booked tickets for Alice at the London IMAX. Is it worth the wait?The action is set within a framing story. Alice, now aged 19 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“I guess I’ve always been pretty good with words,” says the eponymous character in the opening, voiceover line of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe - and with that clunker we know the Canadian director's move into the mainstream isn't going to be as gripping or original as any of his previous indie efforts. With a join-the-dots script by Erin Cressida Wilson and overwrought music, it is, unusually for Egoyan, a linear movie and one that ultimately goes nowhere. That’s not to dismiss it entirely - it is beautifully shot and acted, and certainly engages one’s attention, but it can’t quite decide whether it Read more ...
mark.hudson
Who gives a **** about Henry Moore? The standing of the craggy-faced Yorkshire miner’s son who dominated British art for half a century has declined massively since his death in 1986. Where once Moore was British art, most people in this country have now probably never heard of him. Those pin-headed, slab-like forms that once seemed universal in their embodiment of utopian modernity now feel so of their time you expect to see Muffin the Mule come clopping round the corner at any moment.If the watchword of contemporary culture has become "difference" – the compunction to accommodate the "other Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In every partnership there is a leader, and it’s not always the featured name. While the hall was packed with Ma followers for this rare cello-and-piano recital, what emerged was a richly sensitising foretaste of what the Emanuel Ax residency is going to offer over the next fortnight. This is one marvellous pianist.But then Yo-Yo Ma is an excellent cellist too, and their programme of Schumann and Chopin either side of a new commission for them by Peter Lieberson displayed Ma's very amiable personality and light touch, and indeed what appears to be an uncommonly warm and smiling relationship Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been here before. In the first week of theartsdesk’s existence, the BBC began screening a daily drama by the name of The Cut. Daily drama has never been the BBC’s thing, unless you happen to speak Welsh and follow Pobol y Cwm, and so it proved with this online soap dished out in bite-size five-minute pieces. It was my solemn duty to issue daily reports for the first five days of The Cut's life. And now here comes Five Days, which will run eponymously till the end of the week: five episodes, one a night, till we find out whodunwhat. Will it keep you hanging on? For this second outing of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When I last met Nitin Sawhney, I’d heard that he was a whizz at mental arithmetic. I asked him, perhaps impertinently, what was 91 times 94? “8,827,” he relied, quick as a flash. Several hours later, I worked out he was probably right. “Vedic mathematics,” he said. What I can say about last night’s performance was there was some interesting mathematics going on. Some time signatures rubbed friskily against others in certain scenes in ways a mathematician would love. The score had an enormous facility. But a question we have to confront is - imagine this said in the voice of Carrie from Sex Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Was it Chopin’s birthday or wasn’t it? To be honest, no one at last night’s Royal Festival Hall concert probably gave a damn, so wrapped up were they in Maurizio Pollini’s playing. And what playing it was too. The man just sits down and gets on with it – there’s none of that airy-fairy flamboyance and arm waving that certain younger pianists seem unable to perform without. This was an unapologetically old-school concert. Pollini shuffled on in his tails (who wears those any more?), plonked himself at the piano, and had finished the first of Chopin’s 24 Preludes before most of the audience had Read more ...
David Nice
A fervent believer, James MacMillan has no time for what he's called the "instant spiritual highs" of composer-gurus like Glass, Gorecki or John Tavener. His own attempts to grapple with the depth and breadth of his convictions have given us several ambitious works which smack, to me at any rate, of forced rhetoric - the Third Symphony and the childbirth cantata Quickening - but others, too, like the Calvary procession of The World's Ransoming and his violent operatic masterpiece The Sacrifice, which hit home with poleaxing force. That his St John Passion, premiered nearly two years ago by Read more ...