Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Benoit Jacquot’s handsome period production of Werther has been quietly putting in the miles for the Royal Opera. Since its premiere in 2004, this unexceptionable staging – “this wall, this fountain, this cool shade” all present and laboriously correct – has supplied a London star vehicle for everyone from Joyce DiDonato and Isabel Leonard to Juan Diego Florez, Rollando Villazon and Vittorio Grigolo. Now it’s the turn of Jonas Kaufmann – or, at least, it was supposed to be.No announcement was made, but it was evident from his opening “Je ne sais si je veille” – almost lost under Antonio Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Is everything loss?" the great Oliver Ford Davies once asked on the National's Olivier stage, in the closing moment of David Hare's masterful Racing Demon. That question informs another masterful play, James Graham's Dear England, newly opened in the same space.This stirring portrait of Gareth Southgate (the remarkable Joseph Fiennes) and the England squad that he continues to lead takes the national temperature and finds it wedded to defeat; what's most remarkable is that the three-hour drama then dares to go the distance and insist upon hope because, well, what other choice have Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall Hilary Hahn brought her residency to an end with a collaboration with the exciting Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, a notably youthful and ethnically diverse group, who brought with them a notably more youthful and ethnically diverse crowd than the hall usually entertains.The programme was American music, combining a couple of mid-20th century masterpieces with newer works by living composers. The older music largely came out ahead.Although I have known and loved the Samuel Barber String Quartet for 30 years I had never previously heard it live. I don’t Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Frederick Delius composed an opera called A Village Romeo and Juliet; Donizetti composed a sort of village Tristan and Isolde, but called it L’elisir d’amore – The Love Potion. The hero, Nemorino, inspired by the Tristan tale, buys an elixir off a passing quack, in the hope it will make the beautiful, capricious Adina fall for him.But, arguably like Wagner’s, the potion is fake (red wine, in this case, probably throat lotion in Wagner’s), and Nemorino gets his girl because he unknowingly inherits a fortune, the village girls fawn over him, and Adina becomes jealous.How much of this agreeable Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Standing just inside the door of the Whitechapel’s downstairs gallery is a luggage trolley laden with parcels (pictured below, right). This forlorn object looks as if it’s waiting to be collected, but the owner seems to have gone AWOL.The packages are labelled, not with names and addresses but descriptions of the contents, as if they had come from a museum archive.“Bima curtain,” reads one label. “Large, dark blue velvet cloth with heavy gilt ribbon trim and gilt fringing. Condition: torn in several places, much stained, creased and damp when found.” The items were retrieved from the gutter Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland temple to every anti-Elgarian current in post-war British music.With transformative daring and dash, they made it sound like a work that even the Aldeburgh Festival's founder-saint himself might have appreciated. (Benjamin Britten once confessed himself “absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes”.) Indeed, the middle weekend of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The alternative title of Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play School Girls, The African Mean Girls Play, might indicate that it’s a super-bitchy account of high-school rivalries, here with a west African accent. Which it is. But it’s much more besides. The school in question is an elite boarding establishment in Ghana’s Aburi Hills. Here two alpha females collide and slug it out for top-dog status. The year is 1986, almost 30 years on from Ghana becoming the first African nation to gain independence and 25 years before the event that inspired the play.In a programme note, Bioh states that what set Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pete Fij and Terry Bickers are bathed in muted red light. They are sat side-by-side, Fij with an acoustic guitar, Bickers with a vintage 1970s CMI hollow-bodied electric. Behind them, oil wheel lighting gloops and bubbles gently, bespattered with glowing green circles cast by the stationary disco ball hanging high above them. “It’s surprising to see how much life you can fit into the back of a van,” sings Fij, dolefully, then adds, “It only took two trips.”The line, from the song “Broken Heart Surgery”, sums up part of the duo’s appeal, combining, as it does, a world-weary mournfulness with Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Rebecca Frecknall’s Romeo and Juliet burns like ice, paring back and tightening the script so that love and death are constant bedfellows. She underscores her vision with a thrilling, furious physicality, interspersing explosive fight scenes with steely dance sequences heightened by Prokoviev’s immortal Montagues and Capulets.A Frecknall production these days arrives bearing the weight of high expectations; just whisper the words Summer and Smoke, Cabaret, or A Streetcar Named Desire, and most avid theatregoers will spontaneously combust. At her very best, this powerfully instinctive director Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
“I hope they do Mardy Bum,” a small boy squeaks longingly to his mother. She was probably his age when Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I’m Not came out almost two decades ago. This is very much a multi-generational affair incorporating those of us who were too old to like them when they started, their peers now also in their mid-30s, and lots and lots of kids. The transformation from lovable spotty teenagers to be-quiffed rockers and on to cuban-heel-and-aviator-sporting Lotharios is still quite remarkable despite the fact we’ve all changed beyond belief in those Read more ...
David Nice
Siobhán McSweeney is to be loved as a person for her speech when she received a BAFTA for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme earlier this year, bringing up the way Derry people had weathered the “indignities, ignorance and stupidity of your so-called leaders in Dublin, Stormont and Westminster” (typically, the BBC cut that bit).Still more is she to be admired as an actor, ranging most recently from said performance as Sister Michael in Derry Girls to the most vivacious of the sisters (secular sort) in Dancing at Lughnasa at the National Theatre. She’d already taken on the role Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.There was orchestral virtuosity in the form of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, pianistic virtuosity in the shape of Steven Osborne playing Britten’s Piano Concerto, and a kind of compositional virtuosity in an eight-minute burst of Ethel Smyth – “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” from her opera, The Wreckers.All this was delivered by conductor Ben Glassberg with an up-and-at-’em energy and determination that defied the heat and humidity of a summer evening in Read more ...