Reviews
Matt Wolf
Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious energy through two hours still to come. Adapted and directed by the actress Emily Mortimer, who has given herself a plum supporting role as an errant mother known as "the Bolter", the between-the-war three-parter is off to a galloping and giddy start, as if taking its cue from the breathless Linda (Lily James) at its ever-pulsating heart. The course of true love may not run smooth, to co-opt a line from a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
We may not be in the EU any more, but geographically and culturally we can celebrate being part of Europe as much as we jolly well like. For Europe Day, the European Parliament Liaison Office, the Camōes Institute, the Embassy of Portugal and the Delegation of the EU in the UK staged a special lunchtime concert at St John’s Smith Square, given by the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Bloxham. The ensemble is from Bloxham’s eponymous festival in the north east, sporting 12 different European nationalities and a larger number beyond that continent. In its ranks you Read more ...
India Lewis
China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the story of Mehar, living in late 1929 in rural Punjab, is narrated alongside that of her unnamed descendant in 1999, who has grown up in England. Despite the hardships endured by the book's protagonists (arranged marriage and heroin withdrawal, respectively), it is a gentle, if not particularly gripping read. There is, however, a mystery to be solved, set up in the book's first line, when Mehar isn’t allowed to know which of the three brothers is her husband. Sahota explores this delicately, turning over and examining Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At the end of 1976 Al Stewart talked to Melody Maker, contrasting how he was seen in America and the UK. He was in Los Angeles. “I haven’t played in England for nearly two years,” he told Harvey Kubernik. “The best way of looking at it was that I had Love Chronicles [his second album, issued in 1969], and I was getting a lot of good press. Then Zero She Flies and Orange were not as good, and consequently I received some bad press. After Past, Present, and Future I came here and never toured England with a good band. In England they have an image of me which is completely out of date.”He went Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This Philharmonia concert from the Royal Festival Hall comprised three masterworks of English music, following a (welcome) trend that has emerged in COVID-era streamed concerts in digging out a couple of smaller-scale, less often programmed pieces to put alongside a sure-fire hit. So we had Britten’s last, tormented vocal work Phaedra and Tippett’s wonderful Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli before finishing with the banker: Elgar’s Enigma Variations.The conductor was Sir John Eliot Gardiner (pictured below) who, in a mid-concert interview, revealed this was his first appearance Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by conical horns that emanate a gentle angelic howling or lower end drone-hums. Eyes closed – and being music-geeky about it – this carefully calibrated tonal concerto assails the ears somewhere between US mystic Laraaji’s processed gong experiments and the final ethereal works of Spacemen 3.But this is about the experience. Artist Ray Lee Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation. Poltergeist (main picture) and Doppelganger, the works that dominate Internal Objects, Rachel Whiteread’s powerful and moving new show at the Gagosian Gallery, imply isolation and are a vision of sheds destroyed, broken apart – structures that speak of a post-apocalyptic, unpeopled world. No home offices there.These are not her typical inside-out interiors cast in concrete, resin or steel, negative spaces Read more ...
David Nice
“You have to be careful you’re not judging the piece,” cautioned a pearl-necklaced Nicholas Daniel, great oboist and winner of the 1980 BBC Young Musician (of the Year, as it then was). Yet while the work, Japanese composer and marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe’s Prism Concerto for the instrument she's done so much to pioneer, was infinitely the most fascinating of the evening’s three, so too was the performance by 17-year-old Fang Zhang. Sometimes flash can win over more interior qualities, but this unpredictable tour de force had everything.What a long time it took, though, to get to the musical Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It wasn’t Jane Austen’s subtlest move, naming her roguish soldier George Wickham. As countless GCSE English teachers have patiently read in generations of essays, his surname sounds a lot like "wicked" – and wicked he is. Adrian Lukis, who played him in Andrew Davies’ 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, reprises the role in the perfectly pleasant Being Mr Wickham, livestreamed this past weekend from the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds by the Original Theatre Company. It’s Wickham’s less-than-successful attempt to clear his name of the mud Austen dragged it through in her novel. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERSHalf the fun of this series of Line of Duty has been the crescendo of conspiracy theories surrounding it, fuelled by the way creator Jed Mercurio has skilfully kept tapping into the LoD mythology built up over the preceding five seasons. Craig Parkinson, aka the evil Dot Cottan from earlier series, has been hosting the Obsessed With… Line of Duty podcast, exploring secrets, theories and myths surrounding the show.With the air dripping with fear and paranoia, almost everyone has been fingered as being the potential Napoleon of Crime known as the Fourth Man (or woman Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To accept or not accept a donation: that’s certainly the burning political question of the moment. So Isla van Tricht’s play Money – specially designed for Zoom – has proven more timely than even perhaps she suspected, though the question is made infinitely more complex by the fact that the target of the donation is not curtains but charity.This is the inaugural production of represent., a new company whose stated mission is "to increase access to the [theatre] industry for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds". Importantly and practically, this means it acts as a professional Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a pleasure it was to go to the first drive-in date of 2021 as Mark Watson's Carpool Comedy Club, produced in association with The Alfresco Theatre, rocked up in the picturesque surroundings of the Hop Farm, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The gigs are a pleasurable affair, held in pretty venues with designer food on hand, far removed from the dark, sweaty enclosed spaces that every comic is now so desperate to get back to in just a few weeks. But I for one have become a great fan of alfresco comedy and hope it becomes a permament summer fixture – and that the British weather plays Read more ...