Reviews
Graham Fuller
The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so.While depicting Mafia violence as a pestilential evil, The Kingdom allows that crime families’ blood ties and Old Testament revenge ethos prevent insiders from walking away and starting their lives elsewhere. Such Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you have never watched a single episode of the BBC period gangster drama Peaky Blinders, I am not sure what you would make of Rambert’s two-act ballet version. I have watched all six series, and I still left confused. Confused, but also impressed by the five-star standard of the dancing, by the inventive stage pictures created by designer Moi Tran and by the three onstage musicians. Led by lead guitarist/vocalist Mitchel Emms, this trio blast out a score specially written for the piece by Roman GianArthur, alongside tracks featured on the TV show by Radiohead, Frank Carter and the Read more ...
India Lewis
Running as part of the South Facing Festival in Crystal Palace Bowl, Thursday’s headliners, Mogwai, and their friends across the water, Lankum, were an excellent pairing, both atmospheric, wonderful musicians whose instrumental (and vocal, in the case of Lankum) virtuosity, were a real joy to listen to.Confessionally, although I had wanted to arrive earlier to watch Caroline (much lauded by friends who also came to the festival) and The Twilight Sad (glorious Scottish misery), this was the first time that we had left our three-month-old with a babysitter, so we got to the park in time to get Read more ...
David Kettle
The Beautiful Future is Coming, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★Flora Wilson Brown’s epoch-straddling, climate change-themed six-hander had a run at the Bristol Old Vic before transferring to the Traverse Theatre for its Fringe residency. It shows: this is a rich, assured production, deeply bedded in, and as fluid in its performances as it is clear-headed (sometimes harrowingly so) in its themes.And those themes are pretty weighty ones. In 1850s New York, hobbyist scientist (as she’s patronisingly called) Eunice Foote has made a shocking discovery about carbon dioxide, air and heat, but expresses her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.This mystery at first seems secondary to its effect on six protagonists, whose points of view provide pieces of the puzzle. Alongside artfully creepy imagery and gorehound excess, Cregger relies on structure and characters to reel you in, till the central enigma is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Back in the day, when America’s late-night chat show hosts and their guests sat happily smoking as they shot the breeze for a growing audience, the most sought after guest was Oscar Levant. No longer a household name except to fans of vintage Hollywood musicals, in some of which, notably An American in Paris, he appeared, Levant (b 1906) was the Swiss Army knife of the entertainment business: a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, actor, a writer of hilarious memoirs, a raconteur with his own TV chat show. He was also beset with mental health problems, notably OCD, hypochondria and Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jacob Nussey, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Write about what you know, comics are told, and in Primed – his Fringe debut – Jacob Nussey does just that. He describes to great comic effect what it was like in the three years he worked in an Amazon warehouse.It’s not as bad as everyone thinks, he says, but his descriptions suggest otherwise, delivered though they are with a generous dollop of gags and smart observations.He paints a vivid picture of his time there, of his colleagues and how they enacted their revenge for the boredom and dead end nature of the work. Although, he says, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rob Auton, Assembly Roxy ★★★★ The stage is littered with 30-odd large white cards bearing words such as “love”, “believe” and “push”. Rob Auton comes on stage and tells us he’s CAN, a former motivational speaker, and in the following 60 minutes of CAN (An Hour-Long Story) we hear his tale.As ever with Auton, he draws us in, peppering the story with lots of clever gags and asides, and even the odd groaner. His shows are mix of performance poetry, spoken word and storytelling, and he has a knack of looking at things from a different angle, prompting us to look at things anew.For Read more ...
David Nice
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless night of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, from explosive A major to quietest C sharp minor. If not everything along the way was perfect, or even in one major case present, the outlines were bold and engaging.Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was the last major work I heard at the Pärnu Music Festival only a fortnight ago. It bears repeating that young Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Wilderness is the kind of festival where you can overhear a conversation about the philosophical implications of rewilding whilst queuing for Veuve Clicquot, or watch a man dressed as a vicar strip naked mid-cricket match without anyone blinking. It is, in every sense, deeply decent – equal parts bougie and bonkers, like a country house party that accidentally invited in the circus, the club kids, and a few stray shamans.This year’s gathering was a reminder of how the annual arable revel in Cornbury Park has become the gold standard for sophisticated summer merrymaking. And golden it was, Read more ...
Simon Thompson
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented in the arts. This Edinburgh International Festival concert marked their European debut, and they’re doing a miniature residency in Edinburgh that, in another concert, involves them playing alongside some talented young Scots. Whatever their age, they can certainly play. Perhaps the only concession to their inexperience came from conductor Read more ...