Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Bayard Rustin is a fascinating but little-known figure in US history: a civil rights organiser who worked behind the scenes on both the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as campaigning for pacifism (he was on the British anti-nuclear Aldermaston March in 1958) and gay rights. He was also an accomplished singer and lutenist, and advocate for Elizabethan song repertoire. An unlikely but intriguing combination, and one that was at the heart of yesterday’s Night Shift concert by personnel from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Blues Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Emerald Fennell’s latest film begins with a sly joke. As the production company credits roll, the sound of distinctive creaking overlays them, increasing in frequency and intensity, and joined by male groans that reach a climax. She's at it again, we are being led to think, the gratuitous graphic sex.Well, yes and no. When she cuts to the visuals of the scene we have been hearing, it’s a raucous public hanging, where, as an excitable youth informs the crowd, the rope wasn’t properly placed to break the man’s neck and his slow suffocation has produced “a stiffie” instead. (Close-up of man’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
MILES., a two-hander with Benjamin (Benji) Akintuyosi as Miles Davis and trumpeter Jay Phelps in a host of roles, including himself – is a show which works remarkably well.Remarkably, yes. Akintuyosi only made his professional acting debut in this role in a run of the show in Edinburgh last summer. Jay Phelps is above all known as a fine trumpet player and a music producer rather than as an actor. And the subject, Miles Davis – this show is carefully placed just ahead of the centenary of his birth in late May – was a complex and in many ways a disputed figure.One reason why the show is so Read more ...
David Nice
Perfectly at one in matching tone and response, this phenomenal duo who are both formidable solo personalities in their own right also took us through a range of colours and approaches in a cornucopia of masterpieces for both four hands at one piano and two instruments placed side by side, from Bach to Lutoslawski, Debussy to Tailleferre.The first half was typical of their thoughtfulness. The grounding was in Bach, Bartlett providing the spiritual pulse at the start of the Sonatina from the cantata "Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit" in Kurtág's transcription (you always know a true Bach Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The jury was out when Ballet Nights first made its pitch to the dance-curious – a potential audience, the thinking went, that might be nervous about signing up to the full three-act deal in an opera house but could be tempted by something more akin to a variety show, a curated mix of classical and contemporary with a compère to schmooze them through it. With no item lasting longer than 10 minutes and some as little as three, Ballet Nights would be a tasting menu, in effect, and each would be a one-off event. A nice idea, but is it sustainable? Apparently, yes. Three years on, Ballet Nights Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are always a few drawbacks to being a support act. For Allie X, the biggest issue was simply finding space to stand onstage, with so much ground already filled with covered up props for the night’s headliners. Still, she made a good effort with what she had, working the crowd well, and the clattering electro-pop of “Super Duper Party People” and a wickedly noisy “Off With Her Tits” carried enough verve by themselves that no stage craft was needed.Magdalena Bay had plenty of those songs too, but accompanied them with a stage décor that appeared to be aiming for the stars, or the moons. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
An evening in the company of the smiley Russell Howard always lifts one’s spirits and his latest show, Don’t Tell the Algorithm, proves no exception.But first he’s going to get a few things off his chest as he bounces around the stage – namely, the state of the world. “What a wonderful time to be alive,” he says drily, as in just the first 10 minutes he manages to mention Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Bonnie Blue, ICE agents, Iran and Brooklyn Beckham. It’s a breathless performance and gag-heavy, and sets the tone for the evening – silliness laced with seriousness in a trademark Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was not a bad man. Nowhere near it. But they said I was anyway.”Makenna Goodman’s second novel (her first, The Shame, a brilliant exploration of motherhood, came out in 2020) is, on the surface, an account of a cancellation, though there’s nothing straightforwardly black or white about any of it. In fact Goodman seems to shy away from binary thought, which is refreshing, if sometimes confusing.It’s also about love, class, nature and the way we relate to it. It is structured like a six-act play, with monologues by four rather abstract protagonists: Man, Realtor, Helen and Wife. Its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the lacerating spats of Albee’s Martha and George, and the circular kvetching of Beckett’s characters, there were August Strindberg’s pioneering excursions into dark psychological truths. Only a handful of his 60 plays are staged here regularly, but thankfully Dance of Death (1900) is one of them.This rendition of a moribund marriage can be a gift to its male lead, as Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen have shown. Edgar, a pugnacious army captain, is a prototype of the bullied child who matures into a bully, as he himself recognises. He can also be scathingly funny, a trait that Will Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sexual abuse and violence, self-harm and sadomasochism, piss and postpartum blood – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water doesn’t flinch from showing the indignities, the messiness, and the trauma-induced choices made by its everywoman protagonist during her rocky journey.A rewarding experimental art house indie adapted from the novelist Lidia Yuknavich’s transgressively visceral non-linear memoir, Stewart's first full-length feature as writer-director is filtered through the stream-of-consciousness of Imogen Poots’s Lidia.The mosaicked narrative moves forward from an unfixed perspective Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Richard Hawley, a “little banger” is a top-notch single, one condensing everything about the performance and performer into what can he held on one side of a seven-incher. A flab-free, power-packed record. And it’s a mark of his discrimination that anything fitting the bill is a grade-A killer.Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox Volume Two follows-up a correspondingly styled comp issued in 2023. As before, 28 tracks are selected: indeed, the first collection was titled 28 Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox. For a second time, Link Wray crops up. This time, well-known Read more ...
David Nice
Star attractions for this revival of ENO/Improbable's Coney-Island-in-the-1950s Così were sopranos Lucy Crowe and Ailish Tynan, and conductor Dinis Sousa. All three excelled, but so did the other four principals. More fool me for having stayed away previously out of concern that the usual six characters in search of real feelings would be swamped by fairground business. Once or twice, perhaps, they did (start of the Act One finale especially) but the singing and acted projected perfectly from downstage and, let's face it, the "skills ensemble" of circus people were fun, a good idea as it Read more ...