Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Would you be willing to play the guinea pig in a designer-superhome created by a deranged architect? That is one question posed by this four-part drama (adapted by JP Delaney from his own novel), a kind of haunted house mystery underpinned by the damaged psychological states of its protagonists.David Oleyowo plays Edward Monkford, the architect in question, whose minimalistic and futuristic creation at One Folgate Street becomes the setting in which themes of compulsion, obsession and deception are played out in an atmosphere of steadily-gathering menace. Orbiting around Edward and his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I do like this record. Despite their tremendously loser name, this group from America is pretty good. They have a sound of their own added to by Byrd-like guitar playing and Everly Brothers voices. In a funny way, it’s rather sexy.”Although Penny Valentine’s verdict on The Beau Brummels’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers” edges towards damning the single with faint praise, it was positive and homed in on an important aspect of the San Francisco band – their Everly Brothers’s resonance. Readers of her Disc Weekly reviews column that mid-November in 1965 will have been well-aware of America’s decisive Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's netherworlds for his tales of misfits and misdeeds.So it's no surprise to see The Tiger Lillies bring their unique sensibility to A Christmas Carol, Jacques' song cycle taking us into the head of the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, paring the tale back to its psychological trauma and its bitter social critique. The Lillies' leader is front and centre, of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask.Matthew Bourne’s dance panto Nutcracker! had its very fresh charms in 1992 – the classical skit that launched a path to a knighthood, naughtiness nicely bedecked in every shade of pink, on stage and in innuendo. I observed from its press night audience at Sadler’s Wells last night that a good half of them could not have been out of nappies in 1992, or even born. A generation of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Sixteen are one of the jewels of the choral world. For over 40 years they have led the way in singing excellence and programming that brings together old and new. This Christmas concert combined some traditional favourites with Renaissance and contemporary carols, all bound together by Bob Chilcott’s Advent Antiphons sequence, offering “a message of hope in renewal, in life itself” – something we can all get on board with.It arrived at London’s Cadogan Hall – one of my favourite venues – the day after the radio broadcast of the same programme from Symphony Hall, Birmingham. It was sung Read more ...
David Nice
“It was the hand of God,” says the Neapolitan family patriarch about a rather unexpected consequence of Maradona's coming to play for the city’s team. That gives us a date, 1984, and, while the adolescent protagonist Fabietto remains in Naples, a fleeting sense of time and place.Paolo Sorrentino never resorts to the dully realistic or overdoes the period detail, though. This location for a transfigured autobiography is rarely the noisy, vivacious place which brands itself on the memory in most books, films or touristic experience. At the start of a film graced throughout by Daria D'Antonio's Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
A brief warning to readers: while effort is made to avoid spoilers, I would advise anyone who has somehow missed the massive amount of online speculation about the film’s plot to not read on. See the film first, and please come back. Right… on to business. In No Way Home Tom Holland makes his third outing as Spider-Man with returning director Jon Watts at the helm. In the film’s opening credits, we are reminded that Peter Parker’s identity has been exposed as Spider-Man and he has been framed for a crime by the FX wizard Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal). Struggling to come to terms with his Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In his 1973 play Habeas Corpus, now revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory under the direction of Patrick Marber, Alan Bennett had his way with the venerable Whitehall farce. Today’s younger playgoer would probably marvel at the popularity of these plays in the 1950s and 1960s, and at the ease with which they made it onto the nation’s television sets.Powered by wince-worthy double entendres, trouser-dropping and much rushing through multiple doors, they passed for light entertainment: the middle classes laughing at naughty sexual shenanigans, harmless fun, what! Bennett, though, decided to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To clarify: this is less a review, more a dispatch from a raucous wake. We all have a band that means something extra. Mine is The Men They Couldn't Hang, who I saw on Saturday night at the Powerhaus in Camden for the umpteenth time.I first came across the band when I was commissioned to go to Reykjavik with them in March 1989. They had been going for five years, were on the rise, their third album Waiting for Bonaparte was out, and they were warming up for a big tour. Beer had just been legalised in Iceland for the first time since the 1930s and I may well have ingratiated myself by buying a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack and the Beanstalk, Hackney Empire ★★★ It's always good news when Clive Rowe decides to don the frocks to play the Dame, and this year he has also taken over directing duties (with Tony Whittle), with a script written by Will Brenton. It's a straightforward retelling of the tale, pun-heavy – although I did miss the sauce that Rowe has brought to proceedings under previous writer Susie McKenna, and couldn't fathom why the Dame's love interest, Councillor Higginbottom (Whittle) was dressed as a Freddie Mercury tribute act.A giant has stolen Hackney-on-the Verge's musical harp and magic ring Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we ride towards the holiday break on our magic reindeer, it’s time for one last theartsdesk on Vinyl, a seasonal special that, if you scroll down, contains all the usual up-to-date music reviews but, before that, takes a look at Yuletide-themed releases, reissues and heritage fare that might make great presents. As ever, all musical life newly pressed to plastic is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASONPatrik Fitzgerald featuring Lemur No Santa Clauses (Crispin Glover)This year’s VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASON top pick is by long lost new wave troubadour Patrik Fitzgerald. It’s only his Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham’s when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that strips away all unnecessary material till the beating heart of the matter is revealed. His latest tour de force takes the pulse of 1968 America where – against a backdrop of anti-Vietnam protests and outrage at the assassination of Martin Luther King – right wing polemicist, William F Buckley, is embarking on a series of TV debates with liberal Gore Vidal.Graham’s fondness for origin stories is well-chronicled. Ink, for instance, his play about the rise of Rupert Read more ...