Reviews
David Nice
Rome, 14/15 June 1800: the specifics of the original Sardou melodrama are preserved in Puccini’s thriller mixing love, lust, religion and tyranny. Many productions move forward in time, and sometimes change the place, with ease: after all, feudalist power-abusers remain with us. Director Christof Loy decides that police chief Scarpia and his allies should be of the era following the French revolution, while artist Cavaradossi is a “timeless” freedom fighter.The results, first seen at Finnish National Opera, weaken the immediacy of this brilliant music-drama, while keeping much of the action Read more ...
Mert Dilek
How can this beauty arise from such ugliness? The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692, is rife with unwavering prejudices, selfish slander, and sickening motives. But under Lyndsey Turner’s aesthetically vigorous direction on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, the play’s infected air becomes a breeding ground for visually arresting tableaux possessed of rampant emotional intensity. Painterly but unfussy, Turner’s staging fixes our gaze on those electric moments in Miller’s allegorical tale where unreason and blind faith lock horns with integrity. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, based on Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel, is preposterous. But it’s as pretty as a pink cloud. The director, Anthony Fabian, knows that in these grim times, escapism is good box office.But still, would it hurt to get some things right? Why have a British charlady in 1957 saying, “You go, girl”? Never mind. It’s a mix of Mary Poppins and Emily in Paris (one of its stars, Lucas Bravo, plays a bespectacled, quasi-intellectual accountant here). You almost expect Dick Van Dyke to appear, bicycling through the smog. It’s sanitised and sweet, an Instagram dream, without a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Remote is Mika Rottenberg’s first feature film. The New York-based artist was commissioned by Artangel, an organisation renowned for its promotion of interesting projects. Support also comes from art institutions across the world – Beijing, Denmark, Korea, Louisiana, Montreal and Stockholm. And to cap it all, the film is being premiered at Tate Modern during the week of Frieze, London’s major international art fair.With this level of global support, expectations are bound to be high – which makes it all the more shocking that Remote is irredeemably silly. Conceived during lockdown with writer Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an atrocity – a ghoulish biopic of Marilyn Monroe that luxuriates in her maltreatment and misery, culminating in protracted images of the star’s lonely death from barbiturate pills distractedly swallowed like candies and washed down with Scotch in her Los Angeles bungalow.Ana de Armas’s expressions too often make Monroe a rabbit in the headlights, but that’s writer-director Dominik's fault. Whether the movie’s Monroe is on or off camera, De Armas speaks with that breathy undulating voice of incredulity Monroe impersonators use, but her real voice was softer and more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It always feels special when a play speaks so directly to an audience that you feel and hear the ripples of recognition across the auditorium. And when disgraced banker John Gabriel Borkman roars that, “There are different rules for exceptional people”, at London’s Bridge Theatre, it’s a brilliant reminder of Ibsen’s uncanny prescience.Borkman isn’t just a Ponzi or a Madoff, but a Boris Johnson and yes, let’s throw in a Kwasi Kwarteng for good measure, people who believe they can lie, steal, or play with people’s lives with impunity, simply because they’re better than the rest of us. Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Liminal: a word that conjures thresholds and between states. Caught between three languages – the adjective is a borrowing from the Latin that enters English by way of German – liminal also has three distinct definitions.There is the underused sense: to produce “minimal” effect or when “a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced”. The more ubiquitous definition: being “transitional or intermediate between two states, situations”, or “characterised by being on a boundary or threshold”. Lastly, there is liminal’s cultural anthropological meaning, as when a person is between two “culturally Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What is the Royal Court theatre for? Is it a space that stages innovative new writing, or does it prefer to do documentary theatre? Is it concerned with reaching out beyond its regular audiences, or is it more focused on its own internal problems? In November 2021, it made an appalling blunder by allowing an antisemitic stereotype – a money-grubbing billionaire called Hershel Fink in Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle – to get through the rehearsal process despite protests from several members of the company. Eventually the character was renamed, and you’d think that the venue would Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li’s fifth novel, is the gripping story of two teenage French girls and their intense, uneven friendship.On the surface, at least, it’s more accessible and light-hearted than some of her fiction, such as The Vagrants, an account of life in totalitarian China, where Li was brought up (she moved to the USA in 1996 and is now a professor of creative writing at Princeton) or Where Reasons End, (2019) a hauntingly beautiful dialogue between a mother and her dead 16-year-old son.This, tragically, mirrors Yi’s life: that book is dedicated to her own teenage son, Vincent, who Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
From underneath the messy ash-white thatch of hair, a strange mooing suddenly issues: Sir Kenneth Branagh is wrestling with Boris Johnson’s odd way of saying the “oo” sound. It’s a brave attempt but ultimately a bit wayward, rather like the drama series Branagh is starring in, This England, Michael Winterbottom’s six-part reconstruction of Boris’s early days as PM, Covid, lockdown and all. Branagh has certainly captured the former PM’s stance, arms held unnaturally behind him, shoulders hunched, trousers at risk of dropping as he shuffles in and out of a quick succession of government Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A dead pigeon. A dead squirrel. A dead fox. Lots of maggots – very much alive. I might be describing your worst nightmare (throw in a rat or two and it would be very close to mine) but this array of wildlife forms an important part in Kim Noble's latest show, Lullaby for Scavengers. I warn you, it takes a strong stomach to sit through it – and I have to confess I had to shield my eyes at several points. The show comes with a content warning for a reason.It's an intricately plotted multimedia show, where Noble operates the equipment with the help of said dead squirrel (perhaps one that he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned from old masters such as Robert Bresson, and there is a similar spiritual focus to objectively small, ineffable moments in his 26th film of a prize-winning career.Sangok is a former film actress who has returned from the US to Seoul to stay with her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee, pictured below right with Lee). Though secretly carrying a heavy Read more ...