Reviews
Veronica Lee
Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh's second visit to Agatha Christie's oeuvre, was supposed to be released in November 2020 but Covid, a studio sale and some embarrassing revelations about one of its cast members put paid to that. Was it worth the wait? Not really.Oh, it's as sumptuous as Branagh's first Christie adaptation, Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and boasts more gorgeous scenery, but it's noticeably less star-packed. If the cast of the train whodunit were all comfortably seated in Hollywood's first-class carriage, most of the Nile riverboat passengers are, with no disrespect Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“If you want romance,” the cast of Emma Rice’s new version of Wuthering Heights say in unison just after the interval, “go to Cornwall.” They’re using the modern definition of romance, of course – Emily Brontë’s novel is full of the original meaning of "romantic", much wilder and more dangerous than anything Ross Poldark gets up to.Rice’s anarchic adaptation preserves that feral quality, with the Moor itself telling the doomed love story of Cathy (Lucy McCormick) and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter), but doesn’t do enough to keep up its energy.The opening is more Kafkaesque than Brontësque (though Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s good timing for the release of Flee in UK cinemas. The Danish movie has just made Oscar history by being nominated in three categories – Animated Feature, Documentary, and International Feature and is bound to win in at least one of them. Flee's director Jonas Pohar Rasmussen tells the story of an old school friend, who was smuggled into Denmark in his teens when he was a desperate Afghani refugee. In order to protect his friend, who had a long, traumatic journey and is now a high-achieving academic, Rasmussen has changed his name to Amin, but we’re assured that this is a true story Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Hamlet isn’t often played for laughs. When David Tennant took the comedic approach in the RSC’s 2008 production, it was testament to his mercurial genius that his performance brilliantly conveyed the manic grief of a young man whose world was disintegrating around him.In Sean Holmes’s new production, by contrast, the humour is used not just to shed light on Hamlet’s psychological state, but as a wrecking ball for every preconception about how the text should be played. The result veers between inspired anarchy and a mire of nihilism.George Fouracres – one third of the Daphne comedy trio – at Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Souvenir Part II apparently concludes Joanna Hogg’s fly-on-the-wall drama about a woman film student's emotional evolution as the victim of both her older boyfriend's abuse and the disdain of her male instructors. It’s a psychologically perceptive drama full of acute observations, yet it’s disconcerting in its social complacency.Hogg’s sequel to her semi-autobiographical 2019 drama finds the callow aspiring director Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) channelling her grief for her dead lover, the mysterious drug addict Anthony (Tom Burke), into her film school graduation project. Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Two pianists; two concertos; two orchestras. It is not often that Edinburgh’s most venerable concert hall plays host, on consecutive nights, to two of our national orchestras offering strikingly similar programmes.While the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Emelyanychev had the young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, the following night saw the Royal Scottish National Orchestra tackle Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the not-quite-so-young Steven Osborne as soloist. Both orchestras also included a Beethoven symphony in their programmes.On paper Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Elie Wajeman’s moodily lit film noir is, among other things, a great advertisement for the French healthcare system. Doctors in Paris do home visits! Even at night, and even for minor troubles such as a painful leg or stomach upset. It costs slightly more than going to the surgery, but t’inquiète pas, you’ll be reimbursed. Just don't lose your insurance card.Mikaël Kourtchine (Vincent Macaigne), leather-jacketed, bearded and slightly hang-dog, is one of these night doctors and although apparently a devoted father, has been doing more than his fair share of night shifts. Although the film Read more ...
David Nice
Boléro and Scheherazade may be popular Sunday afternoon fare, but both are masterpieces and need the most sophisticated handling. High hopes that the new principal conductor the Philharmonia players seem to love so much, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, would do Ravel and Rimsky-Korsakov justice were exceeded in a dream of a concert.It's the first time I’ve seen a packed audience at the Royal Festival Hall since lockdown. Young people were very much in evidence: even if there were special or free offers, the fact is they came. And what was the overall lure? Those popular classics? Or perhaps the 2019 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Irish teenager Saoirse Murphy has a dirty mouth. And she’s not afraid to use it when talking to the nuns at her convent school. But it soon emerges that her feistiness is a cover for some very disturbing problems in Sarah Hanly’s energetic debut monologue, Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks, which was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin last year and now visits London’s Royal Court for a short run. And although much of the material is familiar, it’s thrillingly performed by the playwright herself.Beginning with Saoirse explaining her discovery of the joys of masturbation to her best Read more ...
graham.rickson
This new production of Handel’s Alcina opens well, with no preamble, the protagonists’ arrival on the island inhabited by the titular sorceress suggested by footage of rushing water projected onto the backdrop. This is billed as Opera North’s first sustainable production, the costumes, furniture and props all second-hand.Designer Hannah Clark’s “Heaven on Earth” is little more than a patch of linoleum littered with scruffy office chairs and the characters are in modern dress, their mismatched outfits seemingly sourced from a charity shop. Thankfully, video designer William Galloway’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Lingui” is the Chadian word for “sacred bonds, the common thread”, a social ideal put to the test here by an illegal abortion. Director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun – Chad’s artistic conscience, best-known for A Screaming Man – focuses for the first time on the sort of strong women who raised him, as they wage guerrilla war against cultural and religious strictures. Backstreet abortions were staples of ‘60s British kitchen-sink cinema, signifying grim, grey working-class reality. Haroun’s approach is very different, showing resilience, not bleak despair.We meet our heroine Amina (Achouackh Abakar Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Path of Miracles is a serious, hefty 65-minute choral work about the traditional Catholic pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by – and there is a slight cognitive dissonance here – Joby Talbot, the composer of, among other things, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film. But although it sounds forbidding as a concept it is anything but in performance, where it is engrossing, textured, emotionally engaging and dramatic. Path of Miracles is a mighty sing, and an ambitious project for any choir to take on, but the Elysian Singers tackled it with commitment and skill.Path of Miracles was Read more ...