Reviews
Gary Naylor
Shakespeare gives Iago over 1000 lines to implant the jealous rage in Othello, so there’s plenty to of raw material to work with. The director Sinéad Rushe has had the idea to split these weaselly words between three actors, a device that seems so natural, so revealing, so obvious that one wonders why it hasn’t been done before (or, perhaps, more often).Cut to 100 minutes all-through, this production does not just re-invent the wicked ensign, but forces us to reconsider the Iagos we have met in the past and the Othellos he has driven to dreadful murder. Michael C Fox, Orlando James and Read more ...
David Nice
Promising on paper, dazzling in practice: with a superlative soloist and conductor, this programme just soared on wings of philosophy-into-music. The spotlighting of NSO co-leader Elaine Clark provided another thread, from the opening chant of Linda Buckley‘s Fall Approaches through the keen dialogues with collegial Baiba Skride in Bernstein’s dazzling Serenade to the Viennese-waltz Dance Song of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.Clark's fellow strings joined her – the violinist pictured below – in a flight brilliantly marshalled and focused by Diego Matheuz, due to conduct next Friday's Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
If there’s a better name for a vocal group than Roomful of Teeth I have yet to come across it. But if it conjures up images of brash, in-your-face showbiz the reality couldn’t be more different.This hip Grammy-winning American ensemble bill themselves as a “band” and their pieces as “tunes” – although there are precious few conventional tunes in their repertoire – and present themselves in a low-key, un-histrionic manner, setting out to “mine the expressive potential of the human voice” through largely self-commissioned music.At Milton Court on Saturday their repertoire included music by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In an interview following the release of Pale Saints’ March 1992 second album In Ribbons, the band’s Ian Masters expressed his admiration for Eyeless in Gaza, Laura Nyro and Television. He told Option magazine “I find it incredible how much I am moved by Laura Nyro’s songs and how much of the emotional input that she has translates. I find it quite disturbing – it’s uplifting and depressing and really has the full spectrum of feelings.”Of Television, he revealed “I’ve just been buying up old copies of [their debut LP] Marquee Moon and stacking them in my living room. Sooner or later, I’ll Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like theatre itself, the law finds its voice in stories, performance and spectacle. Any law student will, from that very first induction lecture, become suffused in a culture that is informed by and in turn informs theatre, some classes more like an evening at the Old Vic than an afternoon at the Old Bailey.A Voyage Round My Father mines that lucrative seam of inspiration, John Mortimer (creator of Horace Rumpole, unforgettably given life on screen by Leo McKern) writing a kind of love letter to his blind barrister father. In its latest manifestation, this touring production casts Rupert Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In a fusion of musical traditions both eastern and western, old and new, Scottish Ensemble were joined by virtuoso sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun for an evocative performance of Degun’s own work plus reimagined music by Terry Riley and Hildegard von Bingen at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall.Opening with Veer, from Degun’s 2022 album Anomaly, Degun’s sitar playing is instantly arresting, against a pulsating pedal from the lower strings. As the piece progresses, pizzicato strings create unexpected harmonies and the work progresses through interesting tonal shifts. The musical metamorphosis Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Kristy Matheson won the job of BFI London Film Festival director, she spoke of the chance afforded by festivals for filmmakers, artists and audiences “to commune on a grand scale – to experience ideas, ask big questions and celebrate together.”Just three days into her first LFF, it’s clear that Matheson and her team are delivering on that vision. There is definitely a sense of provocation, celebration and film-buzzing community in the air. As ever, themes seem to have been percolated through the programming process, which reflect both current societal concerns and that unconscious Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Early on in this arena gig by New Order, a youthful, enthusiastic voice could be heard to say gleefully, “They’re just so 80s!”. That statement was both accurate and yet also misleading, for as this near two-hour performance showcased New Order’s music is both of that decade and yet above it. Take the throbbing “Vanishing Point”, which swirled majestically for several minutes with a driving groove, lights shooting over the crowd. It was a hypnotic, rich tune to lose yourself in, and going by the number of flailing limbs that is exactly what the all ages crowd, from 80s clubbers to Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, which won the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance this year, is an emotionally devastating account of the inhumanity of war.The Ukrainian videographer and his team – stills photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko – were trapped inside the eastern port city when it was besieged and shelled by the Russians last year. A brave and innovative visual storyteller, Chernov unblinkingly placed himself in harm’s way in order to capture the human stories behind the news footage of which, ironically, he was also Read more ...
Robert Beale
Continuing the retrospective aspect of his final season as music director of the Hallé, Sir Mark Elder returned last night to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, the work with which he opened the orchestra’s 2014-15 Manchester series to such memorable effect.That was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition, he said at the time, and, with the Hallé Choir joining the orchestra for the performance of this “choreographic symphony”, it was no doubt equally satisfying to bring it back in all its glory.But the invigorating exploration of orchestral repertoire that has marked his time with the Hallé was present Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This wasn’t a film to go and see with my 94-year-old father and hope I’d come out with my critical faculties intact and my handkerchief dry. The Great Escaper is an old fashioned, old school weepie about ageing, guilt and the horrors of war. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as well written or directed as its stars deserved. Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson have had better scripts in their long careers, but they both do a magnificent job with what they’ve been given and tears will flow.The Great Escaper is based on the story of Bernard/Bernie Jordan (Michael Caine below Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was Carlos Acosta’s new production of Don Quixote that launched the Royal Ballet season in the autumn of 2013, and as it does so again 10 years on, its sunny dynamism is just what the doctor ordered.Don Q, as it’s known to ballet fans, can be an old warhorse. Russian productions and their variants, all of them drawn from a revised text of 1900, go big on technique and little else: for them it’s all about the backbending jetés and one-handed lifts, the speed of her fouettées and his circling leaps. Careless of dramatic continuity, dancers step out of character every few minutes to take Read more ...