Reviews
Aleks Sierz
I think I can safely say that polymath playwright Philip Ridley has had a good lockdown. In March last year, when The Beast of Blue Yonder, his new show for Southwark Playhouse, was closed due to the pandemic, he came up with an idea called The Beast Will Rise, and wrote a new monologue for each cast member to be performed and streamed each week. These number 14 in all, and vary from River (two minutes in length) to Eclipse (almost an hour). Then he wrote The Poltergeist, a fantastic one-man show which streamed in November. Now he returns again to this venue with Tarantula, a new monologue Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Carolyn Crawford’s “Ready or Not Here Comes Love” is a 1971 recording. It sounds like a Motown classic from 1968 or so – a confident lead voice soars over backing vocals, light orchestration and a tight arrangement designed to get feet moving. Most of all, it’s about an instantly memorable melody.Kim Weston’s “It Takes a Lotta Teardrops” is as good. From 1967, it was co-written by Vicki Basemore, a Detroit-based writer who also co-wrote “Ready or Not Here Comes Love” and wrote for Motown too. Weston adopts a pleading tone on a similarly impactful track.Then there’s “The Intruder” by Melvin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Throw in footage of film adaptations of their work, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more, and you have a riveting mosaic of two men marginalised by society who came to occupy pride of place in the cultural zeitgeist. It's not only Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Welcome to Commonworld, in the year 2143. It’s been built above the ruins of the old world, and the opening sequence of Sky One’s new interstellar thriller showed us the crumbling remains of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral mouldering beneath glittering futuristic super-scrapers and sweeping skyways. Thanks to rising water levels, London has become an island.It looks good, and while there’s nothing here that’s going to out-imagine Blade Runner or the new generation of Star Treks, it’s only fairly recently that you’d find such advanced CGI in a TV show. Whizzing through this exciting Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by Mark-Anthony Turnage, showed they haven’t given up making waves.Engaging many of Manchester’s most distinguished solo musicians – and performing in ensembles whose numbers would daunt many another music-making organization right now – their enterprise and dedication are breathtaking. This live-streamed event brought together, as scene-setter Tom McKinney put it, “21 musicians, safely distanced’ at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tiny Revolutions With Tiff StevensonThis gem is now in its second series and the back catalogue is worth searching out, as well as the most recent episode with US comedians W. Kamau Bell and Nato Green. It's a collection of conversations between Stevenson and fellow comics – all of them like her politically engaged – about how and why comedy can be a force for political change. Among her guests are American Desiree Burch, who talks about race and cancel culture; old-fashioned lefty Mark Thomas, who describes how he once set up a comedy club in a Palestinian refugee camp; and Irish comic Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“The only child I’ve ever had is you,” the artist’s wife (Lena Olin), spits at the artist, her considerably older husband (Bruce Dern), who retorts, “That was your goddamn choice so don’t blame it on me.”Although the setting – a wintery East Hampton – is gorgeous, this portrait of Richard Smythson, a celebrated abstract artist just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and his equally talented wife Claire, who gave up her own painting career in favour of his, never veers far from a well worn path.It doesn’t bear comparison with Nebraska, where Bruce Dern played another senile old chap so magnificently Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window has spawned its fair share of copycats, including Disturbia and Brian de Palma’s Femme Fatale. For ITV’s new five-night mystery Viewpoint, screenwriter Ed Whitmore (Silent Witness, Manhunt etc) puts another spin on the Master of Suspense’s voyeuristic original with his story of missing Manchester schoolteacher Gemma Hillman and the murky shenanigans which unravel in the wake of her disappearance.When investigators decide that Gemma’s partner Greg Sullivan (Fehinti Balogun) is a good bet as prime suspect, on account of his history of violence and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Wigmore Hall does not dish up a great deal of contemporary music, preferring a menu of mainstream chamber music. But this programme by the Nash Ensemble offered a different kind of mainstream: within the world of contemporary music this was a middle-of-the-road offering. A roster of composers including Harrison Birtwistle, Simon Holt and Mark-Antony Turnage, all at one time enfants terribles, now more les vieux terribles, made for a somewhat monochrome concert that was a bit indigestible, even for a modern music fan like me.And is it ok, in 2021, to have a programme like this, comprising Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some lockdown-era recital programmes have doled out miserly short measures, as performers gallop through a brief, rushed hour (or less) of music as if afraid to tax the online patience of their disembodied audience. If this final concert in Leeds Lieder’s spring weekend of song had a fault, it lay on the opposite side: an abundant generosity that saw Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist, and festival director, Joseph Middleton pack a full-length bill (introduced by presenter Tom McKinney) with intensely flavoured major works almost to the limits of digestion – and then add some extras to the menu Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood. It was Rasputin’s favourite, he Read more ...
Line of Duty, Series 6, Episode 6, BBC One review - the pace accelerates for AC-12's final countdown
Adam Sweeting
As the finishing line begins to materialise through the haze of fear, suspicion and zany acronyms, the pace of this sixth series of Line of Duty (BBC One) has hotted up appreciably. In earlier episodes, there sometimes seemed to be a lack of intensity, and even the fabled interview scenes didn’t always grip like they used to. Maybe filming under Covid conditions had something to do with it.But times are changing. Last week’s episode 5 unleashed the stunning revelation that Joanna Davidson shared a DNA match with evil (though deceased) criminal kingpin Tommy Hunter. This week, in an interview Read more ...