Reviews
Robert Beale
Maybe he thought it was a relaxing way to celebrate his recent 75th birthday – maybe he just fancied a trip to Manchester to play with the BBC Philharmonic – either way there was something very special to hear in Garrick Ohlsson’s Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto on Saturday.It's often considered one of the greatest challenges for any virtuoso pianist, not least because it’s a 40-minute score in which the soloist is hardly ever silent. There are constant torrents, cascades and armfuls of notes, so that it’s simply a marathon before any question of interpretation or approach arises. But Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London. Anthony Lau’s co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, ETT and Sheffield Theatres also catches a ride on the cultural zeitgeist, since it shares elements of its aesthetic with the multi-Academy Award winning movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Rather like that film, I suspect this show will divide audiences.We open on Georgia Lowe’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paranoia seeps into paradise in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, a scathing critique of French colonialism on the Polynesian island of Tahiti. Acting on rumours that his overlords are about to resume nuclear testing in the region and fearing his elimination, the urbane High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) is forced to turn detective to learn their veracity. It’s not his fault that Inspector Clouseau might do a better job.Serra’s film isn’t a comedy, however, but a political thriller simultaneously languid and chilling. The languor emanates from its haziness, a quality paradoxically Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sick of Myself is being marketed as one of those oh so clever satirical comedies about privileged but fucked-up people. Think Worst Person in the World, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and you’ll get the genre.Set in Oslo and Gothenburg, it’s the story of 20-something Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who works in a trendy coffee shop and feels side-lined by her installation artist boyfriend, Thomas. She’s also jealous of her friends who have more interesting jobs and craves respect from them and from Thomas. A cool art gallery has just put on an exhibition Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
March 1960’s I Hear A New World EP was British pop at its most extraordinary. As its liner notes put it, it was “a strange record”: one seeking to aurally reflect life on the moon and in outer space. Musique concrète, pop and studio-only sonic manipulation were rolled into one. Its creator was producer Joe Meek.However, barely anyone heard the EP. There was a low pressing run of maybe just 99 copies as fewer-than 100 avoided purchase tax. An album was planned and around 25 test pressings were made. It never came out. A second EP went no further than the printing of some sleeves. The EP which Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
It's fair to say that Pamfir, Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk's first feature, has been slightly overtaken by events.Set in the Carpathian mountains, on Ukraine's border with Romania, and filmed in the days and weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, this stylish movie captures the parochialism of life in the far west of the country, a thousand miles from the war, in a territory called Bukovina that was part of Hungary until World War II. Strangely enough, I watched Pamfir last week only hours after travelling through Bukovina, on the way out of Ukraine, and was struck by the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Ain’t Too Proud? Ain’t too good either, I’m afraid. Which is a shame as there’s plenty of the raw material here that powers juggernaut jukebox musicals around the world, but this production has the feel of a cruise ship show with a much tighter band and better singers. We follow the rise of the Motown megaband, The Temptations, from the dark alleyways of Detroit to the top of the charts, supercharged by hits like “My Girl”, “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”. Their stock-in-trade comprised power ballads sung in close harmony and stage shows that sold the songs Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes to wed his widow and bring a kind of peace to the conquered land.Meanwhile, another local leader has thrown in his lot with the invaders – to the dismay of his rebel children. You can see why the action of Arminio, which Handel saw premiered at Covent Garden in 1737, might appeal to a director with an eye on recent history – or on today’s headlines Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. Music will indeed be a strong presence in this piece, but it is crafted around the songs of West Africa, lovingly supported by the playing of a djeli n'goni (a traditional Griot stringed instrument) by Sidiki Dembele. He is playing a drum when the audience enters and soon involves us in mirroring his rhythms with our clapping. This is the tenor of what follows: it’s theatre as an Read more ...
Saskia Baron
AV Rockwell well deserved the Grand Jury award at Sundance in January for her debut feature film, A Thousand and One.It’s hard to believe that this subtle portrait of a troubled young woman trying to raise a child is the work of a first time writer-director, or that Inez, its gritty protagonist, is played with no vanity by the glamorous choreographer, singer, and reality TV star Teyana Taylor.We first meet Inez in prison where she’s doing her cellmate’s hair. It’s 1994 and she’s about to be released after a year inside. Back in her old Brooklyn neighbourhood, she is determined to get her Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We hear a lot about political and economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s, winters of discontent and all the rest of it, the predictable if not predicted remote outcome of what Jacques Maritain called the “immense intellectual disarray inherited from the 19th century.”Music suffered its own version of this protracted trauma, as composers began to fall out of love with the disagreeable but seemingly inevitable impenetrability of modern music, including their own, since the turn of the century and Arnold Schoenberg. A sort of half-baked neo-romanticism was born in the Seventies, but it threw up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“This was an act of self defence,” is the last message we hear as How To Blow Up a Pipeline approaches the end of its 104-minute span. The speaker, a revolutionary environmental activist called Xochitl, has been arrested for her involvement in the demolition of oil pipelines in Texas, but in her view her arrest and the media frenzy surrounding it is all grist to her mill of shaking the world out of its climate-crisis apathy.Based on the book of the same name by Swedish academic Andreas Malm and directed by Daniel Goldhaber, How To Blow Up a Pipeline offers various instructive pieces of Read more ...