Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
It’s 1959. Trinidad is fighting for independence from British colonial rule, while the US is beginning to stake its own control over the island, whether through labour exploitation or crime. Some of the locals are finding themselves torn – between a desire to escape, or to have a piece of the action. And it’s driving them towards disaster. Trinidadian British actress Martina Laird has turned to playwriting with a confident, evocative, and boldly authentic drama, set in the place of her birth, Port of Spain, and enriched by its patois. It follows its premier at the RSC’s The Other Place, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall comeback concert on Sunday, 23 April 1961 has often been lauded as "the greatest night in show business history", though that judgment surely depends on where Garland sits in one’s personal pantheon. Elvis’s made-for-television 68 Comeback Special, the king lean in leather, must be up there, and likely Sinatra at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Whatever, the sold-out performance featured some 25 standards, Garland backed by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey. Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, and Julie Andrews were in the audience. The album, Judy at Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The world as we perceive it always has bits missing. This is either because your brain cuts bits out to avoid data overload, or because things are externally cut out before the data reaches you. Either way, this “missingness” is both essential to our being able to experience the world in a manageable way and also the cause of error and misunderstanding as we move through that world. Such is the thesis of this new book by mathematician and public scientist Kit Yates, You Don’t Know What You’re Missing (or, You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng, as it appears on the book’s title page – and I’ Read more ...
David Nice
Range, I decided on Monday night, was what makes for great performances: range of emotions, dynamics, pitches. It was as true of Abel Selaocoe and his fine fellow musicians (★★★★★) as it had been of the Belcea Quartet with Tabea Zimmermann at the Wigmore Hall last week. The Wigmore also welcomed this team on Friday, and you can be sure that the programme and approach were different; you could also add to the various ranges the gamut from timeless improvisation to the tightest of shared rhythms. Those of us who've followed Selaocoe's progress for some years now know there are regular Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Never have I had such a day,” sings the baffled Emperor Tito as he wearily forgives all and sundry for their conspiracies, treacheries, deceits, attempted murders – and, by the way, for trashing the Capitol long before Trumpian thugs had the same idea. At which point the Grange Festival audience, forgivably, laughs. Mozart’s farewell opera seria from 1791, La Clemenza di Tito presents such a high-minded tableau of imperial nobility and forbearance that we can lose sight of its closeness at some points to utter, Marriage of Figaro-level, farce. Tito’s breakneck shifts Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The fact that what’s now known as The Paper Factory – a disused paper and cardboard manufacturing plant on the west of Edinburgh – is soon to be demolished (for flats, obviously) gave this year’s Hidden Door festival an even more spooky, ethereal feel than previously. Whilst last year’s event – the first in that venue – felt weird and exploratory, this year the death of the space was very much to the fore, with the Hidden Door team giving it a blazing requiem to see it out in style. Again, the physicality as well as the history of the venue inspired much of the programming. One of the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Danish by name, and very much Danish by appearance (the cellist is Norwegian, but we’ll let that go). This quartet combines a glorious selection of blonde beards and moustaches and eyelashes and floppy fringes with playing that is joyful and life-affirming, both in the sound the players produce, and the evident joy they have in playing together. This was my first time hearing the Danish Quartet, but I am determined it won’t be the last.They played three pieces, starting with Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, an arrangement of an arrangement of an arrangement. It’s based on Stravinsky’s ballet Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Kurt Vonnegut’s hallucinatory countercultural classic, Slaughterhouse Five, famously took his experience of being a prisoner of war in Dresden and turned it into a story about a man abducted by aliens whose life jolts backwards and forwards in time. It’s a testament to the So It Goes theatre company that this agile production – performed by four actors – simultaneously captures Vonnegut’s eye-spinningly deadpan humour and the horror that led to this becoming one of the Vietnam era’s great anti-war narratives. Cream’s late Sixties song Sunshine of Your Life is playing as we wait for Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The first question is always: Don Carlos or Don Carki? Verdi’s opera was originally composed for Paris in 1867, in French, with the requisite five acts and the inevitable ballet. For Milan in 1884 he reduced this to four acts, dropping the whole of the first act and the ballet, and making substantial revisions to what remained, as well as of course translating the libretto into Italian. There were many tinkerings in between.Jo Davies’s production, made for the Hampshire Grange Park Opera a decade ago and now revived for the second time at the Surrey Grange Park, opts (somewhat unfashionably) Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Ryland Caravan Festival is an annual festival put together by local musical eccentrics, Independent Country, and held in the outside amphitheatre at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Park. As it is takes place just as spring becomes summer, the elements can obviously be a bit temperamental – with punters being just as likely to have to deal with sunstroke as trench foot – but with the bar of the MAC within spitting distance, there’s always protection from whatever the unpredictable weather might produce with a bit of added alcoholic support.The MAC’s amphitheatre Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Metallica have long known, Ennio Morricone's Ecstasy of Gold is a rousing choice of walk on music. Deadletter might not be playing the stadiums the metal giants ply their trade in, but strolling on to a near pitch black stage with music from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly booming out was a nicely theatrical opening.The group themselves might have wished for a Clint Eastwood style lawman at points this year. While 2026 has marked the arrival of second album “Existence Is Bliss”, it also saw the theft on tour of thousands of pounds worth of equipment and gear from the Yorkshire six-piece, a Read more ...