Reviews
Robert Beale
It’s catching on … for the second consecutive night I heard an orchestra begin by playing, to a standing audience, the Ukrainian national anthem. The previous night it was Opera North’s musicians: this time the Norwegian conductor Tabita Berglund addressed the audience at the Bridgewater Hall to explain that it would be dedicated to the victims of war in Ukraine, and the Hallé gave it a resounding reading, followed by loud applause.The outstanding performance of the evening came from a Swede, cellist Jakob Koranyi, in Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, wisely positioned as the opening event. With Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a long tradition of foodie romances proving art-house cinema hits – think of Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, and Chocolat. Sadly, it’s unlikely that Master Cheng, a gentle and very slow Finnish-Chinese coproduction about a chef from Shanghai charming the Nordic locals with his cleaver skills, is going to light up the UK box office. Written and directed by Mika Kaurismäki (Aki’s older, less outrageous brother), this is a languorous fish out of water (and into sweet and sour sauce) story. Cheng (Chu Pak Hong above right) and his young son Niu Niu (Lucas Hsuan) turn up in a Finnish Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Love is the most difficult four-letter word. And platonic love is perhaps the hardest kind of emotion to write well about. But it’s the central subject of Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin, and she describes it beautifully. This 2020 Verity Bargate award winning one-woman show, which has also been shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize, had a sell-out run in the summer of 2021, and now the Soho Theatre brings back this heartwarming story, whose effect is heightened because the playwright herself takes centre stage. Wilkin plays Myah, a mixed-race thirtysomething who loses her Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mahler on modern instruments is ubiquitous these days, so historically informed performance is bound to be revealing. Here, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment brought transparency and focus to Mahler’s often complex textures in his Fourth Symphony. The concert was programmed as a showcase for young South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, whose voice is ideal for this repertoire. But just as interesting was conductor Ádám Fischer, an engaged and energetic Mahlerian, and always gently resistant to convention.The concert opened with the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth. The gut Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
"Get into the scene late and get out early." So wrote David Mamet in his 1992 book On Directing Film, and Southwark Playhouse, among London's most charmingly eclectic theatres, has delved very early into Mamet's canon, reviving his 1977 play The Woods – a two-hander not seen in London since 1996. While the play revolves around a dynamic that is hardly obscure – man and woman's ultimate incompatibility – a spirited production can't disguise why we will see plenty more of American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross before this Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity, rather than the fate which clings to the protagonist of Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, led me to catch the last night of a double-cast spectacular at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. What a tonic to find a top-notch young cast and orchestra working their disciplined socks off for conductor Dominic Wheeler and director Martin Lloyd-Evans after the dog’s dinner of English Touring Opera’s Rimsky-Korsakov on Saturday.Menotti’s 1946 bagatelle about a girl who’d rather be on the telephone than communicating with her matrimony-minded boyfriend is the light to the mostly dark of Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was something extraordinarily powerful and moving about Saturday’s Beethoven commemoration concert by the BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Omer Meir Wellber.Originally planned for 2020 but of course postponed, its second part consisted of a UK premiere: a work co-commissioned by the BBC to be the opening of something quite novel. Wellber told the audience it would be like “a symphonic poem by Beethoven”. He meant that Ella Milch-Sheriff’s The Eternal Stranger would be followed without any break by both the Funeral March from Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony and then (again with no Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Tragically, Shane Warne’s sudden death at age 52 means that Amazon’s new documentary about him has suddenly become an obituary as much as a celebration.Directed by John Carey, David Alrich and Jackie Munro, Shane does a solid job of tracing Warne’s ascent to cricketing glory, with contributions from an array of friends, teammates and family members. Best of all, there’s plenty of input from the man himself, since the ebullient Warne was never at a loss for words either on or off the pitch.As much as anything, his story was a powerful demonstration of mind over matter. Initially, he would have Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The main course of this Wigmore lunchtime concert was Brahms but I was lured in by the dessert: a rare chance in this country to hear the music of the French composer Guillaume Connesson. Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and his international group also treated us to a newish piece by another Macedonian, Pande Shahov, in a nicely-proportioned programme that started with high seriousness and ended with a fluffy-light soufflé.Sadly I was unable to be there in person, but caught the stream on the Wigmore’s website – their streaming of concerts that began during Covid seems to have become a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
With its violent storms, bombed out cities and stories of families ripped apart by war, Small Island feels very much like a play for our times. From its stunning opening, in which the frantic silhouettes of humans are interwoven with black-and-white footage of hurricane-swept palm trees, it whirls us into an epic tale of fractured dreams, fraught beginnings and a constant search for humanity amid hatred.Timely though it seems, this is of course the return of Rufus Norris’s 2019 production of Andrea Levy’s Orange-Prize-winning Windrush novel that traces the stories of two women – one born in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sidney J Furie’s 1965 film The Ipcress File is a much-loved benchmark of its period. Stylish, sinister, witty and depicting a determinedly un-swinging London, it was conceived as the flipside to the absurdly glamorous James Bond movies and pulled it off with panache. It also had Michael Caine playing the lead role of Harry Palmer, and a superb John Barry soundtrack famously featuring that mysterious instrument, the cimbalom.Turning the same story into a TV series nearly 60 years later was not a job for the faint-hearted, but, remarkably, screenwriter John Hodge and director James Watkins have Read more ...