Reviews
Veronica Lee
Loyiso Gola, twice nominated for Emmy awards for his satire show Late Nite News, has been a big star in South Africa for some years now but this show should help cement his reputation abroad. UK fans will remember his 2018 appearance on Live at the Apollo, where he guyed the audience with his views on the British and Brexit, among other things.Unlearning, a show written a few years ago but updated for this hour-long Netflix special, is rather lighter on gags than the Apollo material but is entertaining in its own way. In it he weaves a story about living in Apartheid-era South Africa, his Read more ...
Heather Neill
Shakespeare's enduring tale of star-crossed lovers is especially pertinent in a pandemic. The fatal plot twist depends on failed communication during an outbreak of pestilence, and one of the most famous lines is Mercutio's heartfelt, "A plague on both your houses" – clearly no idle curse. Written a couple of years after plague had closed theatres in 1593 (when Shakespeare turned to writing poetry) that undercurrent must have been all too real for the first audiences. It resonates still.After the technical panache of the recent Manchester Palace version and before the Globe presents its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director of the Courtauld Institute, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and a particular expert on the art of Poussin, Sir Anthony Blunt spent decades at the epicentre of the royal family and the British Establishment. He was, as the so-called “Fourth Man” of the Cambridge espionage ring, also a spy for the Russians who handed over countless documents and nuggets of top secret information during and after World War Two, including super-sensitive details about the D-Day landings.The Blunt story, in all its murky fascination, has long gripped writers, historians, documentary-makers and The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wilderness has close-ups. And intimacy. And glorious empty beaches. A couple – John (James Barnes) and Alice (Katharine Davenport) – first meet outside the back door of a jazz club. They become completely infatuated with each other. We see them heading off to a seaside cottage in a 1960s Volvo sports car. And then, gradually as we find out more about them, they also learn more about each other.So, in an early scene, John says: “What comes after besotted?” And Alice replies: “Won’t we always be besotted?” The illusions, the "bubble" of their ignorance about each other and their desire for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule. Miserly, timid, cheese-paring, grudging: the Proms partially excepted, BBC TV’s default attitude to classical music never fails to disappoint – even when the oratorio in question has been a beloved pillar Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Heard now, InnerSpeaker sounds as it did when it was issued in 2010. Tame Impala’s debut album was crisp, fizzing; a pithy collection of psychedelic rock nuggets which made its case instantly. This was modern psychedelia, infused with a dash of Sweden’s Dungen, which still sounds fresh. Despite brushing the borders of freak-out territory, it was direct. Tuneful too. Fantastic.Up to this point, the Perth-based Kevin Parker had used the name Tame Impala to release an EP and single, the second of which was recorded in 2009 at London’s prime garage rock set-up, Toe Rag Studios. Travelling there, Read more ...
David Nice
Last Easter, viewing options were limited: no-one who saw it will forget a version of Bach’s St John Passion from the church where it was first performed in 1724, Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, with an idiosyncratic tenor taking all the parts other than the chorales – live from a quintet and streamed in from around the world – and accompanied only by organ/harpsichord and percussion. But the real thing has been so longed for. This year, if you booked far enough in advance, you could even catch small vocal groups in various church services; I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by the Maundy Thursday Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“The crocus of hope is, er, poking through the frost.” When he uttered that dodgy metaphor back in February, Boris Johnson probably didn’t predict that it would become the opening number of the third edition of Living Newspaper, the Royal Court’s anarchic, hyper-current series of new writing. Then again, there’s little BoJo does that the Living Newspaper writers can’t tear to pieces accompanied by a jazzy saxophone riff. There’s a new group of writers this time, providing short scenes stitched together into one big "newspaper", all set in different spaces within the Royal Court building Read more ...
Saskia Baron
All is harmony as another day breaks in paradise. Kong yawns and stretches luxuriously, his furry brown musculature surely paying homage to Burt Reynolds’ iconic yet discreet Playgirl centrefold. Bobby Vinton croons Over the Seas over invisible speakers as the giant ape showers in a waterfall. If only Godzilla vs. Kong had continued in this genre, a relaxing portrait of life in an Eden where a lonely primordial primate’s main problem is that he can’t get trousers to fit him. But sadly this is not that kind of film. Kong’s nemesis, Godzilla, that scaly creature who has Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Drifters remakes the romance crime genre by placing the main themes of rebellion and freedom in the context of the race and migration divisions of present day Britain. It is a noble mission for a debut by British director Benjamin Bond. Sadly, this film never gets close to succeeding in either developing a unique aesthetic, or engaging robustly in politics.We begin in an English language class in London, where the Parisian waitress Fanny (Lucie Bourdeu) and African migrant Koffee (Jonathan Ajayi) meet and quickly fall in love. They are both escaping pasts of suffering. Fanny has a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rumours keep swirling of pressing plants stumped by the effects of COVID-19 lockdown, and it’s true that vinyl editions of many albums have been delayed, yet still those records keep arriving. At theartsdesk on Vinyl, no-one cares if an album was streaming or out in virtual form months ago. Vinyl is the only game here and when those albums arrive, they are heard, and the best of them, from hip hop to Sixties pop to steel-tough electronic bangin’ to whatever else, makes it into 6000 words of detailed reviews. There’s no shortage of juice or opinion here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSubp Yao Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Just what the Zoom era has brought to theatre – to performers and audiences alike – is something we will no doubt be pondering for some while yet, certainly still in the much-anticipated eventual hereafter when stages in their “traditional” multifariousness are once again standard. Watching director Jenny Caron Hall’s livestream rehearsed reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an offshoot of the Suffolk-based SHAKE Festival and a loose follow-on from her December Tempest, raised some such questions rather intriguingly.Following one of the best-known phrases from this early Shakespeare comedy, Read more ...