Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining table to a young Jewish woman. Between them is a dish of chicken stew that we, just moments beforehand, have seen her lace with poison.The tone is darkly comic – "I’ve dreamed about killing Nazis," she tells him. Drily he replies, "Do you want to talk about that?" Still he eats the stew, declaring "Poison can make you foam at the mouth, bleed from the eyes." There is a chilling silence. "In that way it’s very similar to gas."Playwright Josh Azouz – who is descended from Sephardic Jews – Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Composer George Benjamin has dazzling talent, but he is difficult to showcase. He is not a naturally extrovert type, and most of his projects take years to formulate, and only come about through collaboration with close and trusted performers. But this Proms programme cleverly exploited that trait, presenting a varied portrait of the composer through his many friendships and collaborations. Benjamin himself conducted, leading the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom he has worked for many years, also giving a concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, another regular collaborator, as part of a Read more ...
Douglas McDonald
This lively interpretation of Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera provides a feast for the senses as a musical highlight of the Edinburgh international Festival. As with the rest of the festival’s 2021 programme, the opera is performed outdoors, in a hangar designed to protect the audience from the Scottish elements and to allow for social distancing.While the venue has proven challenging for some concert performances, it feels appropriate for the setting of Ariadne auf Naxos.The two-hour show is an excellent choice for a slightly chilly evening, as Strauss delights in revealing the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved. All of which may have played a part in its half-century long journey from screen to stage – but this new adaptation, on tour around the UK and Ireland through next spring, proves the wait was well worth it. The show's co- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja has a joyous hunger for communication through music. She sometimes seems to dance through it. This was at its most vivid when she lunged towards BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra leader Laura Samuel to invite her to start the encore at the end of the first half of Saturday’s Bartók Roots Prom, “Baladă și Joc” (ballad and dance), a duo for two violins by György Ligeti.This friendly challenge – gleefully accepted – was made in the spirit of bringing the energy and vitality of folk fiddling into the formal arena of classical music. As Kopatchinskaja has said in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As we saw recently in M Night Shyamalan’s Old, a visit to a holiday resort in a tropical location can have ghastly consequences. In Mike White’s expertly-wrought six-parter The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), the title refers to a pricey but tacky beach hotel in Hawaii, where a group of characters find that what was supposed to be a vacation ends up more like an exhaustive psychological examination.Happily, White is able to put his characters through the wringer with wit and panache, and everything that befalls them is a way of prising them open a little more to explore what makes them tick. For Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When I Hit You - You’ll Feel It opens with “When I Was Walt Whitman”. A French-language answer-phone message is abruptly cut off by a massive-sounding percussive pulse over which a borderline menacing voice enigmatically murmurs words which are hard to make out. There’re snatches about “repeating tiny fragments” and “when I was Walt Whitman you should have seem me…the words wrote themselves.”It ends with “Fragment #2”, a comparatively lighter piece which comes across as a distant relative of Suicide’s “Cheree”. Again, Leslie Winer's close-miked voice is near to a mumble. Full attention is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful lot of bees.Swarms of stripy insects, however, are far from the most severe problems besetting the new hipster residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green luxury lofts. These were formerly a crime-ridden high-rise public housing project, as pictured in the 1992 film, now partly torn down and in the midst of gentrification.“White people built the ghetto, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Budget constraints. In the hands of the right filmmakers, they can be a blessing in disguise, forcing creativity from simplicity. That’s exactly what works for The Toll, a dark comedy set in the wild west of these isles: Pembrokeshire.Michael Smiley plays a nameless toll booth operator in the middle of a large coastal wasteland. What the booth is for isn’t clear – there’s plenty of room to drive around it. But there’s a heavy implication that doing so would put you on the wrong side of the mild-mannered operator, and the locals know better than that.There’s a taste of the spaghetti western to Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Minds in Flux is the largest of this season’s Proms commissions, and last night it afforded a rare chance for UK audiences to hear work of George Lewis outside the often insular new-music and avant-garde improvisation circuits. As a trombonist-provocateur, Lewis (pictured below) was thumbing a nose at German new-music festivals the best part of half a century ago with a fellow African-American experimental composer, the saxophonist Anthony Braxton, doubtless to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. His blurring of boundaries – between composition and improvisation, jazz and classical, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s often the company one keeps that makes a journey worthwhile, not the destination. That’s as true for the five ebullient Fort William schoolgirls making their first trip to Edinburgh in Our Ladies as it is for the film’s audience. These Highland hoydens are so much fun, it’s a pity when our brief time with them ends.Choir members at a Catholic all-girls’ school, they descend on Edinburgh, after some unnecessarily beautiful shots of braes and glens, with high hopes of getting laid and zero interest in winning the singing competition the choir’s been enrolled in by its optimistic organiser Read more ...
David Nice
Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have imagined. The Met, Bayreuth, and all the other great opera houses of the world fell over themselves to acquire stakes in her special incandescence, but she always returned to her home region.Her parents’ farmhouse became a summer home, and their only child laid flowers on their grave when she gave recitals in the church at Västra Karups where she’d sung Read more ...