Reviews
David Nice
Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab. On the psychological level, is it partly an evasion, an escape from telling the truth about oneself? The transition from fantasy to honesty in Conor McPherson’s first play of 1997, so much better than his latest, suggests as much.This new staging of a long-running hit, directed, like that well-acted disappointment The Brightening Air, by the playwright, sustains the atmosphere of curious meetings in a rural Irish pub saloon (perfectly designed by Read more ...
Robert Beale
Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26 season at the Bridgewater Hall. One was “Fountain of Youth” (the programme title and also that of Julia Wolfe’s nine-minute work that began its orchestral content) and the other “Grasping pain, embracing fate” (used as a kind of strapline).Given that the latter phrase must have been meant to reflect something in the music, I was wondering – and still am – where pain came into it. Perhaps it was actually a reference to the pre-concert show: Read more ...
Justine Elias
What's going wrong with teenage boys and young men? Like the lauded Netflix series Adolescence, Steve – the second film collaboration between star-producer Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants – takes a bold and intriguing approach in its search for answers.Adapted from Max Porter's novella Shy, the film focuses on teachers as well as students, and it's an apt vehicle for Murphy, whose parents are both veteran educators. Where Adolescence found fault with toxic social media and an education system that treats students like prisoners, Steve is set in pre-social media 1996 at the fictional Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The remarkable The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 represents the first-ever release of a previously unheard recording of a 26 March 1967 Sly and the Family Stone live show. It is the earliest document of Sly and Co. to surface.At this point, the band had not yet signed with Epic Records. The release of their debut album A Whole New Thing was just-over seven months away. "Dance to the Music" would – in its second wind, following its November 1967 release – became a US hit single in March 1968. After this: world-wide success, Woodstock and everything else. The First Family Read more ...
David Nice
35 years ago, persona-now-non-grata John Eliot Gardiner revealed how performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito allying period instruments with great voices could electrify in a new way. And here we were last night with Pablo Heras-Casado, a conductor as at home in Wagner at Bayreuth as he clearly is with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, stunning us with a consistently vigilant and alive Mozart Requiem.The programme was typically inventive. It started with the ultimate joyburst, Bach’s Singet dem Herrn – “singet" as in zing it – with Heras- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If a classic story is going to be told for the umpteenth time, there is a good bet it will come with a novel spin on it. So it proves with a new Dracula by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Emma Baggott. Here, the Count makes just one heavily disguised appearance, and the focal character is Mina (Umi Myers). After a predictable scary start – a sudden thunderclap and total darkness – Mina appears with a lantern. She is our narrator, sole survivor of the terrible events that she and her team of five helpers are going to re-enact. Fear, she tells us, will be her focus, the anxieties that Read more ...
David Nice
It was a hefty evening, as it needn't necessarily have been throughout, since Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony can conceal more darkness between the lines in a lighter take. In his second full concert of his second season as the wildly successful and popular Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano spared us none of the hard-hitting.Nor did the phenomenal pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Prokofiev’s colossal Second Piano Concerto, drawing as usual crowds of his fellow South Koreans. It was neither Pappano's nor Cho's fault if I’d recently heard interpretations of that and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hot on the heels of Goodnight, Oscar comes another fictional meeting of real entertainment giants in Los Angeles, this time over a decade earlier. Michael McKeever’s The Code is a period piece, but one with a resonating message for today’s equivalents of the Hayes Code and the House Un-American Activities Committee. It’s 1950, on the eve of the opening of a sword-and-sandals number starring Victor Mature as Samson, who, when not waving at Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah, will apparently be seen wrestling a taxidermied lion. At least, that’s the on-dit in Hollywood, gleefully relayed by one of its Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Some time in the not too distant future, there are only two films on offer: Duck Soup, and, if you order the DVD in advance, Zoolander. And you have to watch them in a museum.Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming’s unusual, semi-dystopian fantasy is shot by C Kim Miles in the gorgeous Powell River area of British Columbia. In spite of excellent performances from the two leads, Sandra Oh and Keira Jang, it fails to come to life and has a clunky, didactic feel, though it looks very pretty.Ellie (Oh) lives with her daughter Kiah (Jang) in a charming wooden house with a beautiful garden where she Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you ever wanted to know what a mash up of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, stirred (and there’s a lot of stirring in this play) with a soupçon of Chekhov, Ibsen and Williams looks like, The Kiln has your answer.Mark O’Rowe’s feuding family fallouts were a big hit at the Galway International Arts Festival last summer and the play has transferred seamlessly to London, fetching up in a house perfectly suited to its forced intimacy. It’s only after you see scaled up productions lose the run of what sent them on to greater things that you realise how much size matters. We’re on a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Like the lighting that crackles now and again to indicate an abrupt change of scene or mood, Simon Stone's version of The Lady from the Sea is illuminated by the sense of adventure and excitement one has come to expect from this singular artist. That's the case even if the cumulative effect falls short of his devastating achievements with the National Theatre's Phaedra or, before that, Billie Piper in Yerma. Moment by moment, the play arrestingly repurposes Ibsen's mystical 1888 play for today, and not only because the text makes reference to OnlyFans, Brooklyn Beckham, and Beyoncé Read more ...
How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons, Teaċ Daṁsa review - a riveting account of a life in dance
Jenny Gilbert
Anyone who has followed the trajectory of choreographer-director Michael Keegan-Dolan and his West Kerry-based company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance) will know by now to expect the unexpected. Such as a Swan Lake whose storyline, in part a searing attack on the abuses of the Catholic church, bore so little resemblance to the original that you might think you’d come to the wrong theatre until the spectacular finale seen through a blizzard of white feathers.His staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (a co-production with English National Opera) is up there with the finest, pitting Irish hare Read more ...