Reviews
Guy Oddy
It doesn’t happen very often that I find myself experiencing a performance of music that I don’t really know, sung in a language that I don’t speak – and completely entranced by what’s going on. But prior to this week, Mdou Moctar was a bit of an unknown quantity to me.Mdou Moctar (or Mahamadou Souleymane to his closest and dearest) and his three-piece band are Tuareg musicians from Niger and play muscular psychedelic desert blues sung in the Tamasheq language. To those who are unfamiliar with their recent Afrique Victime album (and those that have come before it), they have something of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Musicals don't get madder than Anyone Can Whistle, the 1964 Broadway flop from onetime West Side Story and Gypsy collaborators Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents which makes history of sorts at Southwark Playhouse as the first Sondheim show to be revived since his death last year, age 91. What this trailblazing talent never short of an opinion might make of Georgie Rankcom's production is anyone's guess, though I suspect he would admire a sizeably non-binary set of artists gathered on a show about otherness and non-conformity.I for one began proceedings with a grin on my face, prompted Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner observes two strangers on a train, taking the arduous journey from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk in 1998. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student hoping to study ancient rock paintings, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) a skinhead Russian miner. Their first encounter is disastrously un-cute, as he leeringly suggests she’s heading north to sell herself, pawing her lap for emphasis. But this idiosyncratically romantic film testifies that most people have something in common, if forced together long enough to find out.Laura thought she’d be sharing her Read more ...
Gary Naylor
When Rhum + Clay conceived this show, the idea of a comic becoming a political leader might have prompted thoughts of Boris Johnson's carefully cultivated buffoonery on "Have I Got News For You" and elsewhere. Since then, a certain Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given politician-comedians a rather better name. Comedy, as is so often the case, is in thrall to timing.Such thoughts may be inevitable as Matt Wells' attempts to create a show detailing his philosophy of political leadership are repeatedly subverted by his stage assistant, Julian Spooner, who wants politics to be "fun" (main picture Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Fever Syndrome has an ambition that places itself firmly in the tradition of the great American family drama (comparisons with Arthur Miller feel the most appropriate), a piece in which the reassessment of ties of blood is played out against a background of issues that touch on the wider society in which its protagonists exist.In Alexis Zegerman’s new play, receiving its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre (where 15 years ago the British playwright was writer-in-residence), that latter element is compounded by a sense of scale, a conscious attempt to bring in big ideas, ranging across Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Zeros And Ones’ poster alludes to Gerard Butler blockbusters (“The Vatican Has Fallen”), but Abel Ferrara’s name guarantees grungier fare. The sleaze of old Times Square still clings to the director, though he’s now a 70-year-old avant-pulp eminence living in Rome. He has always needed name actors who’ll go all the way, six-time collaborator Willem Dafoe’s devotion keeping his recent career going. Ethan Hawke is the star this time, playing twins – soldier JJ and revolutionary Justin – on apparently opposite sides of a plot to blow up the Vatican.Ferrara envisioned Zeros And Ones’ Rome as a “ Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
After two years away, Abi Morgan’s acclaimed legal drama/juicy soap The Split returns for its third series, reuniting us with the closely knit, or, you might say, incestuous, law firm of Noble Hale Defoe.Ruth Defoe (Deborah Findlay) and her daughters Hannah (Nicola Walker) and Nina (Annabel Sholey) all work at the firm, wearing silky clothes fit for a cocktail party. There’s another daughter, Rose (Fiona Button), the youngest, who, thankfully, is not a lawyer. Hardly a British version of The Good Fight – it's far more conventional, bland and often unconvincing – it’s still highly watchable.So Read more ...
David Nice
There are quite a few dull patches in the early Verdi operas that aren’t Nabucco, Ernani or Macbeth, so I wasn’t expecting so very much from the 26-year-old composer’s first shot. That was without taking into account how spiritedly the ad hoc Chelsea Opera Group Orchestra would play for conductor Matthew Scott Rogers, whizzing this shortish opera along but never breathlessly, and how well the main roles would be taken.Rogers's skill in getting his orchestra to phrase and breathe was apparent right at the start in a string arrangement of Myroslav Skoryk's bittersweet Melody, originally for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Time-honoured advice warns actors never to work with children or animals. Perhaps the literary equivalent should tell novelists not to invent other writers in their books. Especially poets. Unless you can command a wholly convincing poetic idiom of your own – like Nabokov in Pale Fire or AS Byatt in Possession – or happen to be a bard of genius yourself (Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago), imagined verses and versifiers can fall dismally flat on the page.In his fifth novel, the acclaimed Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra risks double bathos with not one but two poets at the heart of his plot. Yes, he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What a remarkable band 10cc were. For most of the 1970s they made highly unusual pop that careered without a care between bubblegum and prog. Their ease migrating across style lines from Pythonesque japes to dense seriosity lay in the personnel: four bandleaders who all brought a sensibility to a democratic collective. The wackier half of the band departed in 1976, not long after their most soaring hit, written by the more mainstream half. Godley and Creme, seemingly, were not in love with Stewart and Gouldman, whose next big hit was “The Things We Do For Love”.Their first hit – a falsetto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This two-part documentary about how the Eighties were partly shaped by the British Prime Minister and the US President was obviously planned long before the Russians invaded Ukraine, but it’s a powerful illustration of how history doesn’t stop, but keeps coming around again in a slightly reformatted guise. It’s also a timely reminder of what “statesmanship” means, at a time when this elusive commodity has never been in shorter supply.The story is told by Margaret Thatcher’s biographer and former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore, and bundling Moore, Thatcher and Ronald Reagan together Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s said that even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. While Killing Joke are by no means a stopped clock, it feels that the time is again ripe for their politics-heavy brand of muscular post-punk.Just as in their late '70s and early '80s purple patch, “Wardance”, “Empire Song”, “Pssyche” and “Age of Greed” sum up the character of our present times with a rapier-like accuracy. In fact, their 1985 hit “Eighties” could easily be rewritten as “Twenties” and lose none of its relevance. Similarly, with the band’s original line-up of Jaz Coleman, Big Paul Ferguson, Geordie Walker and Read more ...