Reviews
Kieron Tyler
A compilation album titled Pennsylvania Unknowns was issued in 1982. Its 17 tracks chronicled the US state’s Sixties garage rock and psychedelic scenes. Amongst the bands included were Pat Farrell & The Believers, The Flowerz, The Loose Enz and The Shandells. About the best known were Allentown’s The Kings Ransom, whose moody 1968 single “Shadows of Dawn” was a collector’s staple.Pennsylvania, though, is better known musically due to what came a little later from its capital city Philadelphia: the soul music of the Philly Sound. Before, in the Sixties, few bands from the state broke Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-eight films and 19 proliferating TV series in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was becoming wearisome, testing fans’ faith with grimly effortful new entries, and choking other sorts of film into the margins, like knotweed. But like the mid-20th century Western, superheroes are also a commercial template for anyone to tell any sort of story. When Taika Waititi’s dry satirist’s voice let rip on Thor: Ragnarok (2017), he combined all his and the genre’s wild virtues.And now, washing away the grim taste of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, here he goes again. With Odin dead and Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Tempest, a rich and profound late work, is probably Shakespeare’s most complex and layered play: the combination of power politics, philosophy, magic and romance is dizzying and a challenge to any director who attempts to encompass the complexity of the work.The opening production from Theatre Royal, Bath’s Ustinov Studio’s new artistic director Deborah Warner offers dazzling theatre at times, and comparatively disappointing moments of flatness at others. Could the small space, providing intimacy one moment and a feeling of being cramped at others have something to do with it?The set by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of August Strindberg's 1900 paean to the power of loathing over loving uses the now familiar trick of dressing characters in period detail while giving them the full range of the 21st century's argot of disdain and distress.Indeed, the spectacular sprinkling of the C-word (indeed, pretty much the A-Z words) here jolts us into the thought that though divorce laws may be more liberal these days, marriages can still limp on with each party secretly (or not so secretly) waiting for the release that only death can bring.Roll in medical interventions that prolong Read more ...
Katie Colombus
By day three of any festival things are usually winding down. But there was a sense that Love Supreme have saved the best for last this year with a strong offering of funk and soul, R&B and experimental jazz.Crowds of Londoners hitching a tractor ride to Glynde rubbed shoulders with campers and glampers – there’s a definite demographic here of people whose kids have flown the nest and they’re living life to the fullest.Georgia Cecile (pictured left) in peach satin with fur cuffs kicked off the party on the South Downs stage with a touch of old school jazz glamour and a nod to the Great Read more ...
David Nice
Last year’s relatively slimline East Neuk Festival felt like a feast in time of plague. This July everything was back to full strength in numerous venues, with the most remarkable line-up, and the greatest single day of concerts, I feel certain, ENF has ever seen. But that was in spite of the apocalyptic signs all around.Covid is, of course, rampant again, and casualties included guitarist Sean Shibe as well as the festival’s director Svend McEwan-Brown, who had to head home at the midway point with a stricken husband. Avian flu had hit the seabird community; more than half the gannet Read more ...
India Lewis
A sequel is always a hard thing to write, especially if the book that precedes it is a bestseller, adapted for television and read by more than a million people. Yet Jessie Burton’s The House of Fortune, following as it does on the gilded heels of The Miniaturist (2014), deals with its antecedent with grace, allowing for its larger shade.Picking up the story eighteen years after The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune returns to the beautiful house on the Herengracht, in Amsterdam, where we left it. Its original owners are dead, one of them executed for the crime of sodomy, the other dead in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the beginning of this film, Mick Jagger says: “What most documentaries do is repeat the same thing over and over… all the mythology is repeated until it becomes true.” He’s right, as he so often is. This latest attempt to prise open the enigma of the Rolling Stones’ indefatigable frontman reveals nothing a reasonably observant Stones fan won’t already know.The film is the first of a quartet, the others being about Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and the sorely-missed drummer Charlie Watts. Watts aside, they do at least contain new interviews with their subjects, who are all reliably Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Grange Festival production of Tamerlano the other day, I noted the difficulty Handel poses the modern director with his byzantine plots and often ludicrous love tangles, expressed through music of surpassing brilliance but mostly stereotyped forms. But at least Tamerlano is a comprehensible story with its feet planted firmly in a sort of reality. In Alcina earthbound reality is hardly anywhere to be seen. We are on a magic island ruled by the enchantress of the title, who disposes of her many lovers by turning them into wild beasts or rocks, trees or rivers. Bradamante Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Where should Leila live — Ilford or Kent? It doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering decision for a 15-year-old to make, but the stakes are higher than they look in Ambreen Razia’s latest play, Favour.Ilford means Leila continuing to live with Noor, the strict grandmother who took over when Aleena, Leila’s recovering alcoholic mother, went to prison for two years; Kent means moving into a bedsit with fun but wayward Aleena, now coming home and keen to start over. Which will Leila favour? It’s the simplest of agons, but it packs a big punch here.Razia carefully builds up the two factions. Noor’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last minute of Found Light’s third track “Seaside Haiku” is defined by the repetition of a single phrase: “give but don’t give too much of yourself away.” Before this is the line “I’ve learned a lot from pain.”Working out whether an album’s lyrics are a form of personal reportage or if they’re about imagined scenarios is always tricky. In this case Laura Veirs has said her 12th album is about what comes after divorce, so it feels safe to assume that “Seaside Haiku” is born from past events and describes an outlook generated by what’s been experienced.Elsewhere on Found Light, other lyrics Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oghneya opens with the extraordinary “Matar Al Sabah.” Jazzy, with an overt Brazilian feel it gently swings and swoons. Wordless backing vocals and pulsing but gentle strings add atmosphere. Milton Nascimento comes to mind but the intimate lead voice also feels French, a little bit Julien Clerc. It’s instantly impactful.Despite what it evokes “Matar Al Sabah” opens an album issued in 1978 by Ferkat Al Ard, a band fronted by Lebanese singer Issam Hajali (full name Issam al-Hajj Ali). Hajali had spent time in Paris in 1976 and 1977, and Oghneya was recorded Beirut in 1977. The album was first Read more ...