Reviews
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everyone (well, almost everyone) can tell a joke. But being a comic – holding an audience rapt, getting a roomful of strangers to like you and laugh at your material – takes real talent. So this is an interesting wheeze, in aid of Stand Up to Cancer, where five comedians mentored five celebrity beginners for two weeks so they could perform five minutes of material before a live audience.The producers delivered the first laugh as they paired up the celebrities and comics – famously anarchic comic Nick Helm was mentor to Tory Baroness Sayeeda Warsi (pictured below), while agnostic David Baddiel Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the events of last year made clear, the police have a problem with race on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, BAME people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody while being forcibly restrained than people from other social groups. Written by award-winning actor and writer Ryan Calais Cameron, Typical is a powerful and inspiring example of how theatre tackles institutional racism. First performed in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the play then transferred to the Soho Theatre for a sell-out run. Now, during the pandemic, this piece has been filmed on location at Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution of Fernand Iveton, the only Algerian-born European (or “pied-noir”) to have been subject to the death penalty during the conflict. It remains one of the most ignominious episodes of the Algerian War of Independence. Ignominious but largely forgotten. Iveton’s case received attention from the likes of Simone Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, a “pied Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries. Patience is not one of my virtues; if I can’t work something out in 30 seconds, I’m liable to give up, and whodunnits tend to need a bit longer than that. Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hung Parliament was, therefore, a lovely surprise: well-paced and earnest without taking itself too seriously, it’s a new interactive experience from Les Enfants Terribles, the company known for madcap, immersive work like their 2016 Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returned the following year). Don’t be fooled by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lockdown has been mostly pants for live performers, comics included. There was that brief foray into open-air performances last summer, made even more fun by some lovely weather (although not always) – and I sincerely hope that promoters and comics will venture outdoors again this spring and summer.But it was social media that created some breakout stars – whether on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube or elsewhere. Comedy couple Rachel Parris (The Mash Report) and actor-comic Marcus Brigstocke, an Edinburgh Fringe stalwart, were hardly unknown before Covid hit but they have become an internet sensation Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Returning to the Wigmore Hall for another socially distanced concert, Edinburgh-born guitarist Sean Shibe brought a programme of moving, often melancholy music, apt for these still locked-down times. He opened with a trio of works by John Dowland written originally for lute. "Preludium" was delightfully intimate, Shibe expertly teasing out the subtleties of its emotion, while the descending chromaticism of "Forlorn Hope Fancy" was played with an almost jazzy sense; here Shibe toyed with the rhythm as he exposed the music’s crunchy discords. "Fantasia" began with a simply played melody which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frànçois Marry’s sixth album as Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains evokes warm days spent lounging in fields of clover reflecting on friendship, places visited and journeys which could be undertaken. Banane Bleue’s 10 tracks are unhurried and delivered as if Marry had just woken up. Relatively, the chugging “Holly Go Lightly” is uptempo – but it’s still reserved.Musically, Banane Bleue is more Eighties sounding than previous Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains albums and comes across as a family friend of Belgium’s Antena, the early Elli Medeiros and él Records mainstay Louis Philippe. Marry’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The four monologues that make up Barnes’ People were filmed in the grand surroundings of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and that venue's atmospheric spaces (now deserted, of course) seem to tell a sad tale of their own, one that chimes rather appropriately with the mood of some of them. Peter Barnes wrote them for Radio Three in the 1980s – the eponymous first series appeared at the beginning of that decade, its successor (More Barnes’ People) towards its end – and they have now been lovingly developed by Original Theatre Company for these filmed adaptations, treated with what feels like Read more ...
David Nice
Young performers seeking platforms for their careers have had it especially rough over the past year, most slipping through the financial-support net and now facing the further blow of the Brexit visa debacle. So it’s always good to welcome quality streamings supporting their progress. The Royal Opera has kept its Jette Parker Young Artists regularly in the public eye – we’ve got to know and care about many of them – while Barbara Hannigan’s recently-launched Momentum project teams up new talent with more established performers, as happens in the Blackheath/Leeds Lieder Brahms special (three Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Havana, 1993. Far away, the fall of the Soviet empire has suddenly stripped Fidel Castro’s Cuba of subsidy and protection, while the US blockade strangles options for an economic reboot close to home. State-imposed “austerity” ushers in the “Special Period”, when cuts, shortages and even hunger return. “A butterfly had fluttered its wings on the other side of the Atlantic,” as Karla Suárez’s narrator – a mathematician – puts it. The chaotic fallout that ensues strikes hard “on this island, in this unstable system”. You might expect a novel set in Havana during those bleak days to make for a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Belfast-based thriller Bloodlands comes from the pen of first-time TV writer Chris Brandon, though he may find some of his thunder being stolen by the show’s producer, Line of Duty supremo Jed Mercurio. Line of Duty is filmed in Belfast too, though it doesn’t advertise the fact on screen. Bloodlands, on the other hand, is steeped in its northern Irish locations both rural and urban, as it unravels a dark and twisty tale of the legacy of the Troubles and how the past has an ugly habit of coming back to poison the present.Ballymena’s own James Nesbitt stars as DCI Tom Brannick, a widower with a Read more ...