Reviews
Liz Thomson
It’s almost 40 years, but I still vividly remember the excitement of hearing Suzanne Vega for the first time. Singer-songwriters had always mattered to me, even though I grew up in the vacuous era of glamrock and insipid teen idols such as David and Donny. Nor did much of what followed speak to me. Suddenly, a new voice was getting airplay. I still have all the old vinyl.“Queen of the bedsit blues” she was inevitably dubbed, but Vega opened the door for a new generation of young guitar-playing women, American and English, many of them now largely forgotten. She emerged, as many of her Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
The years since slowthai’s Mercury Prize nominated debut have been patchy. There was the public reckoning after his oafish behaviour at the NME awards, but then he scored his first number one album a year later. He’s become a father but also struggled with his mental health. UGLY is slowthai's third album and he continues to grapple with who he is and his hedonistic impulses. What’s noticeable with UGLY is how he now firmly draws more from rock than grime. Despite the new sound, slowthai is still best when he is rapping. Slowthai has flirted with rock music since “Doorman” off his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Vive l’entente cordiale! “Despite Brexit” (as the BBC likes to say), Apple TV+ has successfully bridged the Channel to create this lurid Anglo-French thriller, in which Euro-skulduggery rubs shoulders with bribery, corruption and high treason.At centre stage in Westminster we find Alison Rowdy (Eva Green) – slightly confusingly, Green is French, but plays an English character with a dollop of French in her background. She's employed as a civil servant who answers to the British government’s security minister, Richard Banks (a rough, gruff Peter Mullan). Rowdy will soon find herself entangled Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Has theatre’s time passed? In Tim Crouch’s latest 70-minute show, first staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh last year and now at Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) in south London, the nature of live performance is interrogated by this innovative and imaginative theatre-maker, with a little help from a virtual reality headset and William Shakespeare.Taking its title from one of the Fool’s comments in King Lear, this intriguing and entertaining event looks at how the metaphorical dog of truth has been whipped, while the hounds of post-truth deception are given too many treats.We are in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As films and television series based in New York City tend to do, Fleishman Is in Trouble opens with an aerial shot of Manhattan – except, significantly, this sequence is presented upside down. To the celestial sound of tinkling arpeggios, the slim skyscrapers of the Upper East Side hang down from the sky into a blue cloudless ocean like futuristic stalactites, the camera moving gently through them before dipping, Psycho-style, through a window. There, the man whose life has similarly been upended is lying on a bed in an austere room, with a buzzing phone beside him. Its screensaver is a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is, perhaps, important to note that this production was first staged in London at the Young Vic, a venue noted for shows possessed of a rather harder edge than that usually connoted by the description "West End musical".On leaving the theatre after an unnecessarily gruelling evening in just about the most uncomfortable seat in which I’ve ever sat (and competition is very fierce in that category), I heard an old boy who had not clocked that provenance remark, “It was very… modern.” Quite.And why not? The old warhorse has seen 80 years of beautiful mornings, sitting in the canon of Read more ...
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons, Hayward Gallery review - spooky installations by a master of detail
Sarah Kent
Entry to Mike Nelson’s Hayward Gallery exhibition is through what feels like the store room of a reclamation yard. Row upon row of Dexion shelving is piled high with salvaged building materials including old doors, ancient floorboards and wrought iron gates, while even more gates and doors are leant against the walls.It’s all a bit too neat and tidy for a real junk yard, though; and my heart sank. Please don’t let this retrospective be a sanitised version of Nelson’s installations, because without the right degree of tackiness, they simply wouldn’t work. I needn’t have worried, though; from Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After full orchestral performances of Brahms’s Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra shone a more intimate light on the composer’s oeuvre with a recital of chamber works in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall on Sunday.Having made his SCO debut as the soloist in the Violin Concerto on Thursday and Friday, Russian violinist Aylen Pritchin joined a few members of the orchestra, as well as Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (pictured below by Christine Kernohan) at the keyboard, for some smaller scale works. Pritchin gave a calm sensitivity to Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ricky Gervais tells us at the top of the show that there was a backlash to his 2022 Netflix special SuperNature. So big, he says, that it’s become the most watched comedy special of the year. “So I’ve learnt my lesson,” he says with a side-eye to the audience.This show, Armageddon, is going to push the boundaries a bit further, he continues, because he's road-testing material for the next Netflix special, to work out what's acceptable to include. It's a canny conceit; we're now complicit if we laugh at any “unacceptable” material, while Gervais can chide us for enjoying something he suggests Read more ...
David Nice
The farce in question is fast and furious, but not often hilariously funny; that’s because it’s the invention of a scary Irish dad who forces his sons to act it out with him every day in their seedy Walworth Road flat. Go with conventional expectations and you’ll be wrong-footed, or downright disappointed; Enda Walsh pushes boundaries, pulls the dirty rug from under our feet. Vividly acted, directed and designed, this revival of his 2006 two-acter suggests it’s a masterpiece.It helps not to know what lies in store, which heightens the thriller aspect of the play; I was a nervy virgin Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
English Touring Opera opened its spring season with Handel's Giulio Cesare – not a new production, but in a new guise. Typically for Baroque opera, the version of the work premiered in 1724 was very long. ETO previously took up the challenge by staging it in full over two nights. They then cut it down to a more manageable three hours (including interval), but that tour was interrupted by Covid, so now it's back for a full run.Most of Handel's recitative is gone (thankfully), and the distribution of arias among the lead roles seems a little arbitrary, but a good sense of pace is retained. For Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Although We Are Scientists onstage chat is always delivered with a light touch, there is truth running through it as well. Early on at this set their singer and guitarist Keith Murray quipped that he wouldn’t be needing his lucky charm for the evening, and in a way he was right.If the UK has always been the New Yorkers' adopted home, then Glasgow in particular is a welcoming host, and by the end of this 90-minute performance the crowd was a bouncing, singing congregation, eagerly taking a trip down memory lane.However that doesn’t mean the actual show was a resounding success, even if Murray Read more ...