Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
No work gives its listeners such pleasure on the way to hell (and back) as Berlioz’s rule-busting “dramatic legend”, The Damnation of Faust. It delivers not just flamboyant thrills, but low comedy, high drama, pathos, terror, nostalgia, pastoral lyricism and crazy episodes of sheer delirium.The musical and formal prodigality the composer drew in 1846 from a beloved French translation (by Gerald de Nerval) of Goethe’s Faust: Part 1 dooms every effort to refit the piece as a conventional opera to tepid compromise. Given a $200m. Hollywood budget, with Peter Jackson or Guillermo el Toro at the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saint Omer is a psychological and sociological mystery, unpicking the enigma of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a French Senegalese woman who drowned her 15-month-old daughter in the ocean.Director Alice Diop recognised her own Senegalese heritage and circumstance in the case of Fabienne Kabou, the murderer of a mixed-race child much like her own, who was racially pathologised in the French media. A prize-winning documentarian, Diop’s first feature adapts Kabou’s trial transcripts, and was filmed next-door to her courtroom in the depressed northern town of Saint-Omer.We glimpse the Paris life of Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s good to think that there are some opera productions – not just compositions – that in themselves can have the status of classics. David Pountney’s 1980 interpretation of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen must be high on a list of contenders for that accolade. It was first seen at the Edinburgh Festival that year, performed by Scottish Opera in a co-production between them and Welsh National Opera.Now Opera North have revived it for their audiences, and it’s lost none of its inspirational magic. That comes both from Pountney’s English translation of the text and from the wonderful Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece, Miss Julie. Thankfully, that title was spiked and not just because it’s trite. Smoke gives us a key to unlock a complicated, clever and challenging play unafraid to treat its audience as grown-ups and all the more rewarding for that.Sami Fendall’s set comprises a square shallow pit filled with black sand with an upturned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The New York Dolls, The Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, The Dictators, The Heartbreakers, The Shirts, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. From 1974 onwards, New York buzzed with bands. There were also Tuff Darts, The Fast, Pure Hell, Von Lmo and others who didn’t quite grab the brass ring. Out of towners like The Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Devo and The Real Kids jostled for attention too.Despite the crowded market, The Senders were central to this mix. Formed in 1976 by ex-pat Frenchman Philippe Marcade, who had arrived in New York in 1974, they issued one single in 1978, a seven-track 12-inch EP Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Bald, barrel-shaped and pugnacious, Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz) could have been conceived as the anti-Bond or the un-Ethan Hunt. But as action heroes go, Doron can mix it with the finest as he tracks down terrorists with his comrades in Israel’s Mista’arvim Special Forces team.Raz is the star – or one of them – of Fauda, as well as its co-creator (along with Avi Issacharoff). As a real-life veteran of an Israeli counter-terrorism unit operating in the Palestinian territories, he’s been able to bring a raw edge of verisimilitude to the show, even if the action has obviously been shaped for a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Shrek universe expands a little more with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, another computer-animated family film from DreamWorks, with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek Pinnault reprising their roles as Puss and his frenemy Kitty Softclaws. Directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado serve up a treat, one worthy of its Oscar nod for best animated feature.As with all the Shrek Cinematic Universe output, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish subverts fairytales and nursery rhymes while telling its story, and part of the fun is seeing which the writers Paul Fisher, Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler plunder Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida have earned the sobriquet "‘problem plays", what price Titus Andronicus? Does a director seek out a Saw vibe for the horror? Do they go for a deadpan Spinal Tap’s disappearing drummers for the demises? Do you go hard and locate the murders within the atrocities being committed on European soil right now? In her radical interpretation, Jude Christian never quite finds the consistency of tone that the three-hour long evening requires – we get the discomfort intended, but it’s distracting not disturbing.We open on Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Yes, Brendan Fraser gives a fine, Oscar-nominated performance as a morbidly obese man in director Darren Aronfsky’s mawkish, voyeuristic The Whale. Best known for Gods and Monsters, George of the Jungle and the Mummy trilogy, and more recent TV roles in The Affair and Trust, it’s Fraser’s first lead in a film for 12 years. But one of The Whale’s many problems is the way the fat suit, or, to give it its correct term, weight-gain prosthetic, takes up so much mental as well as physical space. That’s hardly surprising – it’s been nominated for an Oscar too. When Fraser first saw it he Read more ...
David Nice
Salome was not to get her head on a silver platter: Jennifer Davis, due to sing the bloody final scene of Strauss’s opera, had been experiencing abdominal pains during her first pregnancy – mother and child are fine – and had to withdraw at a late stage. Yet Jakub Hrůša, witness to her potential in the Royal Opera revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin which led to his appointment as Pappano’s successor there, took the Philharmonia all the way in a still-dazzling programme.In fact this performance of the replacement work, Strauss’s Don Juan, a familiar test-piece of interpretative skills, would have Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The set of 2:22 A Ghost Story is open to the auditorium when we arrive and locates us at once in gentrification-land. We are in a slick kitchen with white chevron tiling, new units and an obligatory island; big skylights loom overhead and outsize glass doors lead to the back garden - and the foxes. Their mating screams will terrifyingly punctuate the action, at maximum decibels.Except… the more you look at this set (excellent design by Anna Fleischle), the more you start noticing strange details. The walls aren’t finished and layers of old wallpaper have been peeled off and left as they are; Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s been a good year for donkeys at the cinema. Not only did Martin McDonagh make a surprise star out of Jenny the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, but she’ll be competing at the Oscars with the title character of EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s paean to beautiful Sardinian donkeys. The veteran Polish director has crafted a film like no other, weaving together extraordinary images with a devastating score by Pawel Mykietyn. We first meet Eo performing with a travelling circus. He’s led through his tricks in the ring by his devoted trainer Kasandra ( Read more ...