Reviews
David Nice
Psychological depths in the myth of the water nymph who yearns for the human world, with disastrous results, have led to some unusual settings for Dvořák’s operatic masterpiece on the theme: a nursery, a hotel room (both successful), a brothel (not so much). What, though, when a production returns to the fairy-tale, developing at the same time the ecological devastation implied in the opera?Well, Melly Still at Glyndebourne did just that - and without featuring what looks here like the filthy underside of a toilet seat in the deracinated setting of the third act. It’s difficult for those of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the fast-approaching anniversary of the latest war in Europe, our culture’s continued fascination with World War Two gets a contemporary boost from Trouble in Butetown at the Donmar Warehouse.Written by Diana Nneka Atuona, this follow-up to Liberian Girl, her 2015 debut, won the 2019 George Devine Award for most promising playwright. Although it revisits familiar territory, and adopts a deliberately traditional theatre form, it includes an interesting slant on race, multiculturalism and the Special Relationship between the UK and the USA.Set in Butetown, or Tiger Bay, a port area in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This recital was a welcome opportunity to hear songs by a panoply of black composers – many of them women – ranging from Amanda Aldridge (1866-1956) to Ella Jarman-Pinto (b.1989), performed with extrovert glee by Nadine Benjamin, accompanied by Caroline Jaya-Ratnam, with readings by Michael Harper.This programme would make the ideal basis for a recording project, as this repertoire is not only underrepresented in the concert hall, but also on disc. And yet it deserves to be heard, and drew a notably more diverse audience to Milton Court than would perhaps normally be the case for a vocal Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Michael John O’Neill’s first full-length play, premiering at the Hampstead's studio space downstairs, is a puzzler. There’s the title, to start with, a Hebrew word that means “binding” and is a reference to the story of Abraham preparing his son Isaac, at God’s command, to be sacrificed.Spotting the reworking of this biblical theme in the text can be a challenge, even though O’Neill usefully has one of the characters treasure her toy lamb, Deadsheep, as a clue. The religion that features here, too, isn’t Judaism but a cultish kind of Pentecostalism, including speaking in tongues, led by a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet mischievously described interpreting Haydn’s piano sonatas as “putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton… You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Certainly the French pianist is well positioned to talk about exhuming not just Haydn’s music but key aspects of his reputation following his release last year of an acclaimed recording of all 62 of his too often neglected piano sonatas.For his lunchtime recital at the Wigmore, Bavouzet opened with a version of Haydn’s 1773 Sonata No. 24 in D Read more ...
Mert Dilek
What is one to do with Greek tragedy on the contemporary stage? For Simon Stone, whose Phaedra is currently playing at the National Theatre, the answer is a kind of radical adaptation that retains the myth’s backbone but revises all else.For an alternative response, London theatregoers could do worse than head to @sohoplace, where Dominic Cooke’s production of Euripides’s Medea, in a version by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, does something far less unorthodox but is duly searching.A lot hinges here on the heavy-lifting done by Cooke’s lead cast: an unsurprisingly commanding Sophie Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The most striking thing at the London Palladium for the last night of “Weird Al” Yankovic's mini-tour of the UK was the number of youngsters in the audience. I don't mean young adults, but children, who were there with their parents and even grandparents. Surely they would be far too young to appreciate the American parodist's material? They wouldn't have been born when he came to fame in the 1980s with his parodies of pop hits such as “Eat It” (instead of Michael Jackson's “Beat It”), or “Like a Surgeon” for Madonna's “Like a Virgin”. Maybe their parents or grandparents had introduced Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Buildings can hold memories, the three dimensions of space supplemented by the fourth of time. Ten years ago, I started every working week with a meeting in a room that, for decades, had been used to conduct autopsies – I felt a little chill occasionally, as we dissected figures rather than bodies, ghosts lingering, as they do. Of course, Brutalism would shun such foolishly romantic notions, one of its key practitioners, Le Corbusier, famously remarking, “Architecture or revolution”. And with the white heat of technology still burning bright, he provided the template for the Park Hill Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
This 1981 two-hander was opened out for a film in 1986, starring Julie Andrews no less, with all its offstage characters given screen life. Thankfully it has been shrunk back to its original dimensions, with added modern ornamentation for this latest revival of it at the Orange Tree Theatre. Therapist Dr Feldmann has become a woman (Maureen Beattie), who emails her clients when appointments are missed and uses an iPad at one of the sessions; her patient, Stephanie Abrahams (Tara Fitzgerald), though, is the same devastated soul as in the original, a concert violinist who is six years into Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There is an endearing awkwardness with Dry Cleaning, despite steady success over the past three years. “Does anyone else want a wave?” asked their frontwoman Florence Shaw at one point, almost shyly, before proceeding to do just that in various directions.It was an intriguing contrast, between a group who seemed slightly taken aback by the size of venue they were playing, and the manner in which they emphatically delivered their material in that setting during this gig.Shaw herself rarely moved, instead pitching herself centre stage and providing her cut glass spoken word vocals from there, Read more ...
David Nice
All that glitters, titular treasure included, is dangerous childsplay in Richard Jones’s third UK staging of what Wagner called the “preliminary evening” to the three main operas of The Ring of the Nibelung. It’s nothing like the previous two, for the Royal and Scottish Operas, in some ways disconcertingly minimal and occasionally ugly to look at. Yet everything adds up and unlike the cast for his Valkyrie, this team has the perfect mix of vocal and acting gold.If there’s a snag, it comes early: Martyn Brabbins simply lets Wagner's music for the Rhine and its Daughters drift along without Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the first theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2023 and it’s another whopper, over 8000 words and a range of musical styles that defies genre or categorization, from the most cutting edge sounds to boxsets of golden vintage pop. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHJimmy Edgar Liquids Heaven (Innovative Leisure)Detroit technoid art maverick Jimmy Edgar’s latest indulges in pure, welcome electronic ear-fritzing, a place where R&B has it out with Aphex Twin or Sam Gellaitry’s most twisted constructions, and, most entertainingly, more than half an ear on pop. Edgar's latest album is mostly a series of Read more ...