Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Even today, Charlie Chaplin still earns glowing accolades from critics for his work during the formative years of cinema, though a contemporary viewing public saturated in CGI and superheroes might struggle to see the allure of his oeuvre as the “Little Tramp”. Nonetheless, his films such as City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator are built into the foundations of motion picture history.As its title reveals, this new documentary, directed by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, pitches itself as a quest for the “real” Chaplin, surely something of a wild goose chase since Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Somewhere in the world right now, one can hear Mister Mister's AOR hit, "Broken Wings" on an MOR radio station, capturing mid-Eighties synth pop perfectly. Few listeners will know that its inspiration is a 1912 autobiographical novel by Lebanese-American poet, Kahlil Gibran. A source that worked for a four-minute pop song has now been extended by two hours and made into a West End musical. Stranger ideas have worked – unfortunately, this one doesn't.Having fled Beirut as a child with his mother and siblings when his father was imprisoned, 18 year-old Gibran returns from America at the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If Florian Zeller isn’t a Wordle fan, I’d be very surprised. As with the hit online game, the French playwright likes to offer up a puzzle for the audience to solve, clue by clue, before the curtain falls. His latest play, The Forest, which had its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in an unusual move for this writer, is his most purely puzzle-like yet, and also his least rewarding. Whereas Zeller’s standout play, 2012’s The Father (a double Oscar-winner in its screen adaptation last year), wrung poignancy from its theatrical tricks at every turn, his shtick here is all trick: Read more ...
David Nice
Painful more often than funny, this is not This Is Going To Hurt, the laugh-one-moment-rage-the-next book by obstetrician turned comedian Adam Kay. He’s written the script so essential truths remain. But the on-screen Adam Kay, national treasure Ben Whishaw – how happy Kay must have been about that – does relatively few lines to camera and what was essentially a diary has been shaped into a seven-part drama.It just about manages to balance horrors with human warmth and springs a few shocks even on those who’ve read the book or seen Kay’s show.An apparent bombshell was dropped recently by Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If Carlos Acosta could have bottled the year-round sunshine of his native Cuba, he would have. Instead he did the next best thing and founded Acosta Danza. Seven years later, years which included a UK tour kiboshed by the first lockdown, when the company only narrowly made it on to the last plane back to Havana, the troupe is sleeker, slightly smaller, but if anything even more ebullient. The show currently touring the UK, titled 100% Cuban, may comprise only 80% new material, but it’s the full mojito in terms of sunny energy and pizzazz.The Cuban tag doesn’t only apply to the dancers. There’ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
With some films it’s all about the editing, a brisk parade of striking images accompanied by a kinetic score. And then there are films like Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, where the camera stays still and watches the performers watching each other talk.Long, mainly static dialogue scenes mean that every small zoom, edit, or pan draws attention to the moment, highlighting the shift in the director’s gaze. Movies like this bring the essential voyeurism of cinema to the fore; in real life you don’t get to stare at Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Black women often find themselves subject to a double dose of prejudice. Pressure. They face everyday racism as well as sexism. It’s called misogynoir, and Queens of Sheba is a short show dedicated to calling it out. In as joyous and energetic way as possible. First staged in 2018, and subsequently revived several times nationwide, Jessica L Hagen’s debut play has been adapted by Ryan Calais Cameron and now visits the Soho Theatre in London.The show was loosely inspired by a particularly grotesque incident which happened in September 2015, when two women from a group of four were turned away Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lots of drama follows well-worn paths; just as we expect that in a tragedy that Chekhov's gun (or variants of it) will deliver the denouement, so we know that in a romcom the two leads will end up together. So – no spoilers, but you know the drill – Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson's characters overcome all sorts of obstacles that could thwart their romance. Only in Kat Coiro's film (based on a graphic novel by Bobby Crosby), it's after possibly the most preposterous set-up yet.But it delivers. Lopez is pop star Kat Valdez, about to marry her equally famous beau, singer Bastian (Maluma), at a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1957, popular music was given a jolt when the first electronic pop record was recorded. “Song of the Second Moon” was created and composed by the Dutch musician Dick Raaijmakers who was working at NatLab, the research laboratory of the electronics company Philips.“Song of the Second Moon” was based around a rhythmic pulse, and incorporated tape manipulation and multiple Ondes Martenots. It predicted the bubbling sound which became associated with Jean-Jacques Perry and presaged the machine beat Giorgio Moroder incorporated into his Donna Summer productions. It is also echoed by the 1962 Read more ...
Ian Julier
The Drama and Romance of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s promotional hook for this concert signalled a heady musical mix. Appropriate for the stark contrasts of mood central to Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, but potentially less so for Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 that casts barely a cloud to compromise its predominantly sunny G major disposition shared with the outer movements of the Beethoven.In the event, resolution of the conflict between profane and sacred love in Tannhäuser’s ultimate salvation, together with the framing of the concerto’s central dark Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Louise Bourgeois didn’t throw anything away and, during the last 20 years of her life, she used her own and her mother’s old clothes to create theatrical tableaux which revisit painful childhood memories. “These garments have a history,” she explained. “They have touched my body and they hold memories of people and places. They are chapters from the story of my life.”Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001 (pictured below, right) is like a scene from an Ibsen play with dresses standing in for people. Three female characters are trapped inside a wire cage, caught in the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
By all accounts, whenever The Chairs is dusted off for a new production it manages to resonate for audiences, as would any half-decent play laughing in the face of the futility of existence. And this cheeky, charming, often uproarious new spin on Eugène Ionesco’s "tragic farce" has landed at just the right time.How much of a punch the play ever lands, though, depends on the balance it strikes between comedy and pathos. Perhaps director and translator Omar Elerian feels that the pandemic world has had a bit too much suffering; maybe he was just enjoying himself too much. Read more ...