Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
Pinocchio is one of our most irreverent metamorphosis stories, and in this visually ingenious blend of film and stage performance it’s given a particularly modern twist. Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill – lovers in real life as well as creative collaborators – use Pinocchio’s quest to be a “real boy” as a witty route to exploring what happened to their relationship when MacAskill began the process of gender transition.The result is a show of varying quality but when it’s good it’s truly exceptional. Cinematographer Kirstin McMahon and camera operator Jo Hellier make extensive use of the camera Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the world lurches ever deeper into multiple manifestations of chaos, writer-director Peter Kosminsky’s new drama about cyber-warfare taps into the prevailing climate of unease. Based around the top secret operations of GCHQ at Cheltenham, it takes us backstage as the UK is struck by a crippling cyber attack which brings airports, cashpoint machines, email servers and online shopping to a screeching halt. However, it leaves social media intact, no doubt so the perpetrators can spread further panic and confusion with a barrage of spin and misinformation.It could happen. It already has Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in New York City, in an upscale loft apartment, with that absence of stuff that speaks of a power to acquire anything. There are paintings on the walls, but we see only their descriptions: we learn that the owner (curator, in his word) really only sees the descriptions, too, and that the aesthetic and artistic elements barely register. The maid has been given the evening off – it’s soon obvious why – and an art dealer flits about nervously waiting for his client to arrive with a view toward arranging a significant purchase. The artist is Black; everyone else, indeed, Read more ...
India Lewis
The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an allusion to the depths hidden below the surface, which is also one of the book’s central motifs.Adaui is the Peruvian author of three books of short stories and a novel, who now lives in Buenos Aires. Here Be Icebergs, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is an elegant, slim volume, which, despite its size, manages to capture the enormity and complexity of familial and personal ties.The opener, “The Hunger Angel”, is an excellent depiction of how we can merge into our family whilst Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joe Lycett’s career was on an upward trajectory when he took on hosting duties on The Great British Sewing Bee, and the crafting show delivered a whole new audience for his live comedy. But anybody thinking that his sweet-natured wit was all there was to Lycett might be taken aback by some of his stand-up material.And so it proves in his new show, More, More, More! How Do You Lycett? How Do You Lycett? (a title he says was foisted on him by his agent), which was Covid-delayed and contains a section referencing a “giant donkey dick” – which some humourless person referred to the police, a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In a week when all kinds of people were going bonkers over an octogenarian playing songs from over 50 years ago to tens of thousands of people in a field in Somerset, it’s nice to know that rock’n’roll has not yet rolled over completely to become family friendly entertainment. In fact, if an evening with the Bobby Lees is anything to go by, it’s positively thriving – as long as you know where to look.The Bobby Lees are a four-piece who look like mid-western farmers' kids from the USA on their first trip to the UK and, while they may not pull in the same numbers as Sir Paul McCartney CH MBE, Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nitram, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s deeply disturbing film about the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, seems especially topical after the Uvalde school shootings, one among several other shootings in the US in May.Martin Bryant, aged 28, killed 35 people and wounded 23 in the historic site of Port Arthur (he’s now serving concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole). At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in history. No longer, of course. And at the end the film reveals that although Australia acted fast to change its gun laws, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rowan Atkinson’s strange little comedy (written by Will Davies) is the story of Trevor Bingley, a rather pitiable late-middle-aged man who finds a new job as a house-sitter for a disdainful and ridiculously wealthy couple, Nina and Christian Kolstad-Bergenbatten (Jing Lusi and Julian Rhind-Tutt, pictured below). They live in a high-tech superhome in countless acres of lush green countryside.Little bits of back story filter into the narrative as the show ambles through its nine cartoon-like, slapsticky, 10-minute episodes. We learn that Trevor is a doting father to his daughter Maddy (India Read more ...
David Nice
Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, a stunning Elsa in this Royal Opera season's revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was the lure to sit through Jan Philipp Gloger's Mozart Così again (the title, by the way – "All Women Do It" – belies the complexity applied to a schematic plot). As it turned out, the mixed-up couples were all love’s young dream, which made it all the more of a shame that this production remains determined to squash their hopes and even their new matches.Gloger has shown us that Mozart's Dorabella, the flightier of two sisters under siege, doesn't take too long to see through barely Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. A few days ago, the borough’s aptly named Windrush Square hosted events which celebrated the contribution of the Windrush Generation and their descendants.With Windrush Day being 22 June, last week was originally going to be the opening night of Roy Williams’s new Hampstead Theatre play, The Fellowship, until plans had to be changed because Lucy Vandi, who was to play the main character, fell sick and performances were postponed. Cherrelle Skeete bravely takes on this major role and her dynamic stage presence, partly with script in hand on press night, is one Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It takes some confidence for a first-time feature director to interrupt her essentially realistic first feature with a splash of psychedelic abstraction, but Jacqueline Lentzou doesn’t lack for visual or aural daring. Two-thirds of the way through Moon, 66 Questions, a semi-autobiographical drama written and directed by the Greek filmmaker, an astronomer’s view of a night sky appears. Myriad stars glitter in delicate colours, the image morphing into a silver and gold vortex as low-mixed spectral music plays and a staticky snatch of a telephone call is heard.If a literal interpretation Read more ...