Reviews
Matt Wolf
How to encapsulate the theatre year just gone, one in which the critics - not always to the benefit of an increasingly imperilled profession - made headlines of their own, whether for being drunk (as if!) or fat? (Well, how many critics do you know who resemble Olympic rowers?) Amidst such a kerfuffle, one might have thought life offstage was more interesting than it was on - until one pitched up virtually any night across the year in either of the Royal Court's two auditoria or at a rejuvenated Almeida or at a National capable of Alan Bennett's deliciousThe Habit of Art or at a spate of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Since before Christmas theartsdesk has been reviewing the past decade and previewing the year to come in the arts. As an extra we offer this special edition of The Seckerson Tapes, in which Edward Seckerson and Igor Toronyi-Lalic discuss the year in music, which, in the concert hall, saw the triumph of the new romantics in conductors Riccardo Chailly and Yannick Nezet-Seguin and, operatically, saw the arrival of three penetrating new productions of operatic classics: the English National Opera's Peter Grimes, Covent Garden's Tristan und Isolde and Glyndebourne's Rusalka.Listen here.
gerard.gilbert
Television doesn’t do eroticism at all well. Perhaps, rather like a truly horrifying horror film being unwatchable, a properly erotic drama would never pass TV’s internal censors. Dennis Potter tried it with his 1989 love letter to Gina Bellman, Blackeyes, but ended up dubbed “Dirty Den” for his troubles. And what is erotic anyway – just a glimpse of stocking, or the full-on and (for me, anyway) embarrassing sight of Billie Piper in fishnets and suspender belt? It's a question of taste, I guess.It’s a problem that Sandy Welch introduced unnecessarily to her adaptation of Henry James’s much Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Noughts were a bonanza time for builders, scientists and bureaucrats in the dance arena, throwing up numerous fine dance venues and bases, collaborating intellectually with modern choreographers, or targeting social minorities, but the blazing new trend that captured public imagination dodged all of those - it came up from the street. As if to show that dance doesn’t need all these people to organise it into existence, hip hop was the powerful new physical force in the land, providing all the things that the contemporary dance movement of the Nineties seemed increasingly to ignore. The Read more ...
David Nice
It seemed as if the usually sober Wigmore Hall was trying to shower us with as many pianistic notes as possible before the midnight bell rings in the New Year. More could hardly have been accommodated In two recitals on Monday and Wednesday evenings, when modest British virtuoso Daniel Grimwood was followed by 2007 Tchaikovsky Competition winner Miroslav Kultyshev in tackling a gaggle of densely-packed baggy monsters. It wasn't just the name of Felix Blumenfeld which was unfamiliar; I suspect musical trainspotters had a field day collecting two major but long-retired opuses by Tchaikovsky and Read more ...
fisun.guner
2009 hasn’t been a vintage year for art, exactly - no queue-round-the-block showstoppers, if that’s your type of thing. Nonetheless the year was nicely topped and tailed by some memorable, and quietly seductive shows. My top five are Picasso, Mark Wallinger, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Calle and The Sacred Made Real.Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London (February-June)
Originally shown in Paris, where Picasso’s paintings featured alongside works that had directly inspired them, this became a much tighter, more focused exhibition by the time it arrived in London. It was all the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The first movie in my experience to feature a Sarah Palin joke lends a glimmer of distinction to Did You Hear About the Morgans?, an otherwise excruciating romcom that finds Hugh Grant in tic-laden overdrive, his genuine charm jettisoned somewhere in the onscreen journey from New York to points west. Sarah Jessica Parker is on hand to trundle out her mightily-aggrieved-lover routine that she long ago patented on Sex and the City, but Marc Lawrence's film is probably best saved for those airplane trips that are now upon us where one isn't allowed to do anything but look at the screen. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Saving the planet from ecological disaster is all very laudable, but be careful what you wish for. In this two-part Anglo-Canadian production of John Wyndham's 1951 sci-fi novel, the voracious man-eating plants called triffids had been artificially cultivated as a fuel source, so successfully that triffid oil had enabled the world to wean itself off fossil fuels and thus curtail global warming. The story didn’t bother itself with those pesky climate change deniers.However, nobody had foreseen the freakish intervention of dazzling solar flares which struck most of the global population blind. Read more ...
sheila.johnston
In 2009 Hollywood sank deeper into the trough that it has busily been colonising over the last decade. The year's twin peaks, the most keenly analysed awards, each seen as a bellwether of international cinema, were firstly Danny Boyle's Britpic-meets-Bollywood fable, Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar laureate; and secondly a paradigm of European art cinema at its most austere, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which took the Palme D'Or in Cannes. In America, by contrast, horror - notably torture porn - lame action franchises and lamer comedies held sway, as the marketing of movies eclipsed the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was something very postmodern about the resumption of Quentin Crisp’s story. To recap, in case you missed episode one back in 1975, The Naked Civil Servant has been turned into a successful television drama, and its subject into a celebrity. The script doesn’t go quite so far as to name the actor who impersonates Crisp, but here is John Hurt playing Quentin Crisp being interviewed on television the night after a drama is broadcast in which Quentin Crisp is played by John Hurt.Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Hurt returned to a role which, more than any other, crystallised his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of the South Bank Show? Surely some mistake. But there was Melvyn, looking into the camera with a resigned air, telling us that this film about the Royal Shakespeare Company (“possibly the greatest theatre company in the world”) was indeed the end of the line, give or take the occasional retrospective special. There must have been a temptation to attempt something extravagant and all-encompassing, but instead director Naomi Wright’s film was distinguished by its discipline and focus, as if to exemplify what the South Bank Show was always supposed to be about.The piece homed in on the Read more ...
David Nice
Even for a narratorless animation of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf like Suzie Templeton's obsessively detailed gem of a film, you probably only need 14 words before you can get on with the business of screening and playing. Peter: strings; bird: flute; duck: oboe; cat: clarinet; grandfather: bassoon; wolf: horns; hunters: timps. The savvy middle-class children gathered with their parents in the Royal Festival Hall yesterday afternoon had only two for actor/presenter Burn Gorman's manic clot on a bike, wheeling in to set up the background. The longer he shillyshallyed affecting to remember a Read more ...