Reviews
Bernard Hughes
The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First Night of the Proms. This is traditionally an opportunity to programme a large-scale choral work, and last night that was Vaughan Williams’s seldom heard Sancta Civitas. Of course it’s seldom heard, with its huge orchestra expanded to include organ, piano and off-stage trumpet, baritone soloist, massed choir behind the orchestra and children’s choir in the gallery – plus a blink-and-you-miss-it tenor solo at the end that must command the highest Read more ...
James Saynor
Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like sheet music transfigured into the sound of an orchestra. Too often, though, the resulting film can resemble the sound of the orchestra trying to play in boxing gloves.Such worries arise for readers of Jim Crace’s rich and eloquent novel Harvest, published in 2013. It iridescently tells of an English rural community assailed by the enclosure movement, in which landlords fenced off common land to make money off sheep (a gambit that picked up steam in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons linen jackets, Church brogues and Mulberry shades? It’s 1987 and I do wear it well though…Chiara Atik’s comedy crosses the Atlantic bearing prizes and venom and could hardly have fetched up anywhere more suited than leafy Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. A once Lib-Dem / Conservative marginal seat has swung decisively to the former and seems unlikely to swing back rightwards any time soon. In the programme, the playwright says she wants “to challenge us… to take a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the librettist in a race to stage the first production of La Bohème. The race was against Ruggero Leoncavallo, a composer Illica had once collaborated with on a libretto – for Puccini, his Manon Lescaut.In the snakepit of the Milanese opera business in the late 1800s, these tangled connections were standard, as dozens of young composers fought for prominence to be the new Verdi, whose portrait hangs on Leoncavallo's wall. That there would be rival productions based on Henri Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a considerable challenge. How to re-imagine what is admittedly a very 19th century, very French Romantic re-imagining of Shakespeare for the intimate setting of Buxton Opera House and the necessarily limited resources of a summer festival?Adrian Kelly, the festival’s artistic director and conductor of the opera, with his director Jack Furness, have made some clear and rewarding decisions. The music comes first: the score is renowned for its resourceful and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have been turbo-charged, mad-staring, cringe-inducing figures occupying the centre of comedies and propelling them at least as far back as Molière, and continuing through John Cleese, Jim Carrey, and others.Robinson made his name in quickfire TV series consisting of sequences of gags, such as Netflix's I Think You Should Leave. Such sketch-based material is easy binge-fodder, but after a few episodes it can start to feel like a disposable, single-use product. It is therefore understandable Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile away.”So says Gen, AKA Genesis P Orridge, AKA Neil Megson, in David Charles Rodrigues’s intimate portrait, filmed toward the end of his/her life, bare-chested, huge of torso, talking while posing in an artist’s studio for a larger-than-life portrait, getting up from the chair to gaze at their own image, tracing the contours of blue tattoos on the arms and torso, including that of a gun.This is a human being who, by their own account, died twice. Once Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Billie Eilish may be one of the biggest names in new music, but here at the O2 Arena, she’s just Billie – the one who stares deep into your soul, smiles at you like she knows your secrets, and shouts “I love you” like she means it. “You are seen, you are safe,” she tells us. We believe her. And judging by the thousands of utterly hysterical fans, heaving and shaking with sobs amidst their singing – mostly clad in jorts, sports vests and ties – the feeling is mutual.The 23-year-old pop sensation first appears crouched in the centre of a metal cube, dangling above the crowd, instantly evoking Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
From the animatronic cat on the bar of the Garter Inn to the rowers’ crew who haul their craft across the stage and the military ranks of “Dig for Victory” cabbages arrayed in Ford’s garden, all the period flourishes that helped make Richard Jones’s Falstaff such an audience hit twice before at Glyndebourne look as spruce and smart as ever in this revival.However, the opera does not belong to any director, however imaginative, nor even to his ever-ingenious designer Ultz – but to Verdi, his inspirational librettist Boito, and the singers and players who truly possess the power to restore this Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A three-century-spanning countdown rapidly ticks to a version of now, and a beaten Superman (David Corenswet) ploughing into Arctic snow. His super-whistle fetches Superdog Krypto to excavate him like a favourite bone, and drag him to crystalline sanctuary the Fortress of Solitude. James Gunn’s vision for this fourth modern cinema Supes and DC Universe launch embraces the character’s simplicity and silliness as Zack Snyder constitutionally couldn’t. But by leaving the familiar origin largely implicit in a tale set three years into Superman’s adventures, the DCU’s hoped for new dawn Read more ...
David Nice
A Salome without the head of John the Baptist is nothing new: several directors have perversely decided they could do without in recent productions. In concert, the illusion needs the charismatic force of a great soprano and conductor. We got that at the Proms 11 years ago with Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles. Now Asmik Grigorian, even more the ideal as the obsessive teenage princess, crowns the end of a season that has been a total triumph for Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.I've never bought the line that Richard Strauss's incredible 1905 psychodrama to most of Oscar Wilde's text Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End transfer. Its title taken from an Auden poem urging people to dance till they drop, it’s probably the most passionate show in that locale, and definitely the lewdest.It opens with the female equivalent of locker-room talk as the women of an extended family in what was once Notts and Derby pit country bicker and banter while preparing for the wedding of young Sylvia (Sinead Matthews). Topics of conversation range from the naughtiness of next door’s "sex pond”, ie hot tub, to the Read more ...