Reviews
Adam Sweeting
A lifelong socialist who has regularly written about the Labour party, playwright David Hare admits that in his career he has “rarely looked closely at the appeal of Conservative values”. On the evidence of the first episode of his new political thriller Roadkill (BBC One), the reason for that would be because he finds Conservative values repellent, judging by the swamp of sleazy allegations which threatens to drown his protagonist,Tory Transport Minister Peter Laurence. Nor is Prime Minister Dawn Ellison’s tone of sarcastic contempt (delivered with relish by Helen McCrory, wearing various Read more ...
David Nice
Think you’ve seen enough of monologues and duets over the past few months? Watch this and reel. Four British directors, four conductors with close ties to the Royal Opera and five singers based here, from South African and Spanish-born sopranos on the house's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and a baritone with youth also very much on his side to a top tenor and mezzo, between them serve up stagings of cantatas and song cycles which work brilliantly as a whole. The curator (three cheers!) is Director of Opera Oliver Mears, while the flawless and evocative designs common to four are by Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Ronnie Scott was a remarkable man: “Jazz Musician, Club Proprietor, Raconteur and Wit, he was the leader of our generation,” reads the memorial to him at Golders Green Crematorium. Oliver Murray’s documentary film Ronnie’s is an affectionate and portrait of him and of the jazz club he founded.It was Ronnie Scott’s trips to New York as a member of the dance bands on the transatlantic liners (the musicians known as “Geraldo’s Navy”) that crystallised the idea in his mind to start a club run by the instrumentalists themselves, to play the bebop music they had heard on 52nd Street. An ill-starred Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
What do you want to do on your 80th birthday? Well, playing two of your favourite pieces of music at the Wigmore Hall is not a bad option. To celebrate his big day, Stephen Kovacevich returned to the scene of many of his triumphs since 1961, chose the Bach Partita No. 4 and Schubert’s final piano sonata, D960 in B flat major, and enjoyed a rapturous welcome from a distanced audience overjoyed to be sharing the occasion with him.Kovacevich has always been a one-off: a free spirit with attitude yet no aggression, and a giant heart without a vestige of sentimentality. He builds music in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After a successful – and very welcome - summer season of gigs in its outdoor courtyard, Battersea Arts Centre has come indoors for its autumn season of comedy from the Grand Hall; it started with this strong mixed bill curated by the promoters Berk's Nest. BAC was using, for the first time, technology similar to that which has been used for a little while now by BBC One's Question Time and Radio 4's The News Quiz – an interactive experience in which presenters and performers can converse directly with the audience at home, and can hear their applause.Sarah Keyworth, MC for the night, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rarely have I seen so many smiles on stage as at Kings Place on Saturday. The combination of the delight of the performers being back in their natural environment with the genial and generous-spirited music they were playing brought out the best in everyone. From Mozart to Schubert via the up-and-coming Perivolaris this programme offered a bit of everything and I walked away with a smile on my face too.Aurora Orchestra’s five year long project to programme all the Mozart piano concertos was to have reached its final stages with the final three concertos, big boned and magisterial. These have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
La Locura de Machuca translates as “the madness of Machuca.” A Colombian label which issued its first record in 1975, Machuca was active until 1995. Around 26 singles and 36 albums were released. The new compilation brings together 17 tracks from its first five years.While choosing the word “madness” as the title's operative word is questionable, there’s no doubt that what’s heard is arresting and unusual. The opening track is “Eberebijara” by Samba Negra. It sounds like a DIY collision of “Life During Wartime” Talking Heads and West African drumming with a repeated chant as a vocal overlay. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Thank you, Shepherd, for allowing us to be your wives. Come down upon me and fill me with yourself.” Collective ecstasy – and a lot of wool – is the order of the day in this cult led by Michael, aka Shepherd (Michiel Huisman; Game of Thrones; The Haunting of Hill House), a handsome, bearded chap who looks soft and likeable but has a sadistic Jesus complex. He is surrounded by adoring women (there’s a whiff of The Handmaid’s Tale in evidence) wearing coloured robes: red for wives, blue for daughters. If he’s the father of these daughters, things are even darker than they seem.Polish director Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
If “things” hadn’t intervened, September would have seen the Divine Comedy play a five night residency at the Barbican, playing their entire back catalogue, two albums a night, to mark 30 years since the band was started. Instead we got just one night – which Neil Hannon described as “the first night of the tour, and the last night of the tour” in front of a well spaced out live audience and a remote streaming audience (which included me). In a short, 13 song set, we had a canter through all the favourites which would remind anyone who needed reminding that the Divine Comedy are a jewel in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl was brilliantly explored in last years’s HBO series, but here, prolific Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska finds an alternative purpose for the disaster. As a child Zhenia, the Ukrainian protagonist of Never Gonna Snow Again, fell under the shadow of the doomed reactor, as we see in bleak, colour-drained flashbacks. The film’s title refers, in part, to the pervasively swirling radioactive dust particles created by the catastrophe.The adult Zhenia has transported himself to Warsaw, where he works as a freelance masseur gifted with extraordinarily Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Though live performances are, thankfully, starting to reappear throughout the country, and socially distanced seating, mask-donning and constant hand sanitising becomes the norm for audiences south of the border, those in Scotland are still eagerly anticipating the opportunity to once again be in a concert hall experiencing live music first hand. Thankfully that hasn’t deterred the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from returning to Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall for a series of live streamed chamber concerts. Thursday evening’s focused on French repertoire, with Francis Poulenc’s Sextet, paired with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In 2012, two great Danes, director Thomas Vinterberg and actor Mads Mikkelsen, teamed up for the powerhouse drama The Hunt, about a teacher victimised by his community when wrongly accused of abusing a pupil. For their reprise, Mikkelsen again plays a teacher and is again phenomenal; though this time the film fails to deliver on its premise. Four male, middle-aged school teachers and friends are stuck in a rut: Martin (Mikkelsen) is the worst, so overcome by ennui that he barely speaks to his wife and kids, and has completely lost the trust of his history students; sports master Read more ...