Reviews
aleks.sierz
Looking at posters outside the Apollo Theatre, where the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth’s award-heavy Royal Court success opened last night, you might be tempted to start humming: “And did those feet in ancient time…” But such nostalgic sentiments are unlikely to survive the opening scene of this phenomenal play. Soon after the curtain, a symbolically faded flag of St George, rises, we see a familiar rural scene: under-aged kids stoned out of their minds, dancing in a thumping rave. It’s a nocturnal bacchanalia of house music, gyrating girls and drug-addled wildness.Yes, we are Chez Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Zinc ft Ms Dynamite, Wile Out (Zinc)It takes a lot for an artist to admit they've taken a wrong turn and return to what they do best. So kudos to Ms Dynamite for ditching the dreary, wholemeal attempts to become a British Lauryn Hill and taking her rightful place again as one of this country's best rave MCs. With the irresistible electro-house beats and bouncing bass of DJ Zinc, she's turned up the attitude and created a very British twist on dancehall that almost, but not quite, betters her 2001 debut "Booo!".In slang terms, "wile" means "wild", thus "wile out" means "go wild"; the intimate Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Hoxton area of Shoreditch is a strange place for gigs by bands with general appeal. Specialist acts bring specialist crowds who know what they're going to get, but any like Music Go Music – whose records show a huge pop sensibility – will attract a fair few curious local scenesters, which sadly in Shoreditch means a load of drunk posh twits and Peaches Geldof clones falling over themselves to photograph one another every three seconds and show how fabulously bored they are with everything. These were out in force last night and it didn't, frankly, set up a celebratory atmosphere for the Read more ...
sue.steward
Ballet was never meant to be like this: the London production of Havana Rakatan at the Peacock Theatre last night shattered all definitions and formalities and left the audience uttering squeals and sighs of delight (and sexual ecstasy) in response to the Cuban dancers’ remake of classical poses and lifts and pelvic-thrusting salsa moves.Havana Rakatan is a journey through Cuban music and history, opening on a silent scene where a lone dancer stares out to sea – facing Miami, 90 miles away. That brief reflective, solitary moment is unique in a show lasting over two hours and exploding with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was down to technological error that Spielberg couldn’t show you much shark. The mechanised rubber fish wasn’t working properly on set, but the studio told the director to carry on shooting anyway. Result: a genuinely terrifying film. Filmmakers have always known that the thing unseen is exponentially more unsettling that the unveiled object, there for all to gawp at. Filmmakers don’t always go by what they know. Hence Benicio Del Toro’s werewolf with its remarkable physical likeness to Dave Lee Travis.It’s a sign of real power in Hollywood when actors are given the money to pursue a pet Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may know the actor, drag artist and gay activist Bette Bourne from his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in the theatre, or perhaps his Lady Bracknell for English Touring Theatre (a role he was surely born to play) but outside the gay/theatrical London loop, he is less well known. That’s a shame because this charming and rather unorthodox piece of theatre shows that his life story - from an East End childhood, through early gay liberation, the scourge of Aids and the advent of queer theatre to present-day stately homo status - deserves a broader audience.A Life in Three Acts started with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Do the words “British film comedy” cause your heart to sink as deeply as they do mine? Thought so. I wish I could say Beyond the Pole, which is perhaps the first eco-comedy and was made with the intention of raising awareness about polar melting while making us laugh, was worth the effort. Sadly, it wasn’t. It may throw up the odd chuckle, but mostly it’s predictable and unoriginal. The scenery, however, is stunning.Beyond the Pole was originally a Radio 4 series and its co-writer Neil Warhurst wrote the screenplay. The film's co-writer and director David L Williams, who filmed it on the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a number of years I used to live opposite Abu Hamza. You didn’t see him much. I remember a Mercedes spilling devoutly robed football fans who had come to watch the game round his place when Iran played the USA in the 1998 World Cup. After 9/11, the street would occasionally fill with swooping fleets of police vehicles. Once they decanted a squad of space-suited forensics looking, presumably, for incendiary devices. His family is still there, living next door to John Hutton, until the other day the Minister of Defence. Try putting that into a script.Britain has a bit of history in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhod GIlbert is, I suppose, what one would call a contrarian. Much that he comes up against in life appears to confound him and, perhaps as a consequence, a lot of things seem to go wrong (often at the same time), which causes him yet more rilement. Even the title of this show, Rhod Gilbert & The Cat That Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst, which I saw at the Leicester Comedy Festival, is in response to an annoying fan who brings the comic gifts of things that have been mentioned in previous show titles, such as grapes and mince pies. “I thought, I’ll show him,” says Gilbert. “There’s no way Read more ...
edward.seckerson
18th-century manners, 21st-century instruments - the best of both worlds or a clear conflict of purpose? One would hardly expect a period specialist of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s calibre and London’s most dynamic orchestra, the LSO, to be citing irreconcilable differences – and last night they didn’t. Their accounts of Beethoven’s first and last symphonies were, to say the least, explosive. But they were a good deal more, too, and the Ninth Symphony might well have startled, certainly thrilled, even Beethoven.It’s strange, even unsettling, now to hear a modern violin section find beauty in Read more ...
fisun.guner
Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Seeking to overturn 1,000 years of Western civilisation with a universal aesthetic utopia of brightly coloured squares and boldly delineated lines, a confident Theo van Doesburg, founding member and chief theorist of the Dutch movement De Stijl, wrote, “What the Cross represented to the early Christians, the square represents to us all. The square will Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
To find a single completely successful piece in a contemporary music programme is rare enough. The sieve of time has yet to separate the wheat from the chaff. But to find complete satisfaction in all five pieces programmed, and for all five pieces programmed to be by the same composer, is a testament to one thing: that George Benjamin is a total genius. I am not the first to have noticed this. The six-year-old Benjamin was Messiaen's favourite pupil. They are pictured above; a white-haired Messiaen is sat in the middle next to a bashfully bushy-haired Benjamin.At 20, while still a student, he Read more ...