Reviews
aleks.sierz
Wow! James Norton naked! Wow! New play by Ivo van Hove. Wow! It’s four hours long. Wow! Wow! Wow! The much anticipated play of the year, an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s 700-page bestselling novel of 2015, comes to the West End in a huge blaze of publicity.It’s been hyped as the must-see show of the season, and its superstar is the heartthrob Norton, an actor who can make a psycho interesting (Happy Valley) and an international criminal attractive (McMafia). But can the equally well-regarded van Hove – whose theatre work in Britain has garnered praise from all quarters for more than a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two drummers are drumming. One held the beat on ABBA’s “Super Trouper”. He is Sweden’s Per Lindvall, more usually associated with jazz. The other is Norway’s Rune Arnesen, whose recording credits are also stylistically varied. Locked-in tight together, their groove provides the backbone for a band led by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, whose 1996 album Khmer was his first for the ECM label. This is a live revisitation of the album.Also in the seven-piece outfit on stage is guitarist Eivind Aarset, who was on the album. Though there are solos, the groove binds together a hard-hitting, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
This is a Hamlet for fans of speed-dating. It comes in at just over the two-hour mark, which is standard for a feature film. But considering the uncut text runs to four hours, as it did in the 1996 Kenneth Branagh film (and his earlier stage production), big chunks of text have clearly gone missing.Only those fascinated with the Fortinbras sub-plot that snakes through the action, a counterpoint to the dynastic struggle at Elsinore, will mind most of the cuts, however. John Haidar, the stage director of the 2022 Bristol Old Vic production filmed here by Tom Morris, has rightly calculated Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Facade Ensemble is an interesting chamber group of young players dedicated to exploring 20th repertoire, in this case John Cage, Arvo Pärt and Gavin Bryars, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year. The programme, put together by founder and conductor Benedict Collins Rice was contemplative in tone, and an interesting opportunity to hear these experimental and minimal works in a pared-down scoring.I had not come across John Cage as a choral composer until this year, when I reviewed the Latvian Radio Choir’s disc for theartsdesk. It is, unsurprisingly, not like most other choral music – Read more ...
David Nice
This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.You’ll perhaps have noticed that the choir is without a name. Clearly the Irish Baroque Orchestra needs one of its own, and these 12 would be the dream team – perhaps eight Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Diana Evans specialises in houses, their baleful quirks and the meaning of home. In her acclaimed third novel, Ordinary People (2018), formerly happy, black couple Melissa and Michael live in a crooked, malevolent Victorian terraced house in south London – the address is Paradise Row – where Melissa, struggling to cope after the birth of her second child, feels that the “floorboards were like a demon presence”.It comes as a relief in some ways to find, in this equally compelling sequel, that they’re no longer in that haunted house. But they’re separated, even though they’re still deeply Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For a show that comes with a trigger warning about the themes of racism, gang violence, toxic relationships, sexual abuse, child abuse, domestic violence and suicide it will tackle, For Black Boys… is unexpectedly joyful.Its thorny subjects are packaged into an exhilarating whirl of music, dance moves and punchy dialogue, performed by a gifted cast of six. But at its heart is a solemn shout-out for a better understanding of Black boys with blighted lives, “miseducated and misunderstood”. As we watch, they learn, crucially, what it would take to love themselves.Ryan Calais Cameron, who also Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Kiefer Sutherland has proved to be a hardy perennial over the decades, from movies like Young Guns and Flatliners to TV shows including Designated Survivor and especially the much-lauded 24. And he seems to have picked another winner with Rabbit Hole.This time, Sutherland stars as John Weir. He works for a New York company called DBA Advisors and calls himself a financial consultant, but that barely tells a fragment of the story. Agent Jo Madi (Enid Graham) from the FBI’s Financial Crimes Unit suspects him of corporate espionage and manipulating the markets on behalf of his clients, though Read more ...
Robert Beale
An evening of “scenic orchestral works”, according to the programme booklet, was on offer from the BBC Philharmonic on Saturday. Scenic was certainly true of the Seven Early Songs of Alban Berg and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. But Tom Coult’s Three Pieces That Disappear was something else.The high romantic word setting and vivid orchestral picture painting of Berg and Strauss are in familiar aesthetic modes: the music (and the words of nature poetry, in the Berg) animate your imagination, and something visual may well pop into your head, aided of course by the composer’s own descriptive Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the Middle profiles 10 football officials who referee and run the line of lower-league games in south-west London and north-east Surrey. Pondering what drives these apparently sane individuals to do such an onerous job, director-producer Greg Cruttwell's documentary is a vibrant study in diversity and concomitant prejudice that benefits from his light touch.As a film actor, Cruttwell made his debut as the sexually predatory gym bunny and landlord Jeremy/Sebastian, a correlative to David Thewlis’s Johnny, in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). Like Leigh, Cruttwell has a powerful radar for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An original pressing of 1979’s Thrust fetches at least £1000. Its 1980 follow-up Thrust Too can be a relative bargain at around £400. The prices are partly explained by J Dilla having sampled Thrust Too’s “Survival of the Funkiest” and Thrust’s “Summer Fun” being sampled by Daphni. Both funk-soul albums – the first credited to McNeal and Niles, the second to Wilbur Niles and Thrust – were barely circulated and barely sold. Text-book collector’s items.But without the music, potential buyers’ wallets would stay in their pockets (though the attraction rarity brings can, of course, sometimes Read more ...