Reviews
Anonymous
The eyes have it in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which is in no way to discount this venerable writer's gift for words. Time and again in this vaunted series of dramatic solos, ten of which have now been remade alongside two new ones, a character will interrupt a thought only to be seen peering at us or into the middle distance or directly into the dark heart of psychic disturbance. Now 86, Bennett anatomises lovelessness and despair with a mastery second to none, and the timing of these as we emerge from lockdown tallies directly with a collection of people who themselves know a thing or Read more ...
David Nice
Solitude, mortality and transcendence have never been more profoundly expressed in music than by Mahler, who composed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in the valley of the shadow of death (too superstitious to give it the name of Ninth Symphony, though that and a sketched-out Tenth did follow, he never lived to hear it performed). It seems like the perfect work to benefit from a silent background in an otherwise empty Royal Opera House - though there's no substitute for the intense silence of a full audience. Gluck, too struck his deepest note with the highest ones of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Singing in a choir can be terrific therapy for anxiety, depression or loneliness, but one of the cruellest effects of the coronavirus is the way it has restricted normal human interaction. The notion of social distancing might have been designed to sabotage the proximity and togetherness which is so much a part of collective singing.However, choir supremo Gareth Malone (now sporting a shaggy lockdown hairstyle) doesn’t give up easily, so he’s made the best of what technology has to offer to create an online facsimile of the choir-singing experience. He’s the first to admit that hooking up a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.For the purposes of this entertaining, if slight, new US drama series (on ITV2), the object was a flying saucer, and unknown to the locals, unearthly survivors from the crash have been living among them ever since. The secrets of the past begin to unravel when Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) returns to this “sleepy cowboy town” and starts re-establishing contact with her old Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Picture an antiquarian book dealer. Typically, it’s all Harris Tweed, horn-rimmed specs, and a slight disdain for actual customers. At the beginning of D.W. Young’s new documentary we are guided around New York’s rare book dealerships, and witness how, in the age of the internet, this rare breed may be going the way of the Gutenberg press.Whilst the impact of Amazon (specifically the Kindle) as well as Barnes & Noble are mentioned, the heart of Young’s work focuses on the dozen or so booksellers who are trying against the odds to make a living trading in leather-bound books and literary Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Last Tuesday’s offering from the Wigmore Hall’s series of live broadcasts was a fiery recital from Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova partnered by pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Beginning with Schubert’s Violin Sonata "Sonatina" in A minor, Bezuidenhout’s opening bars had a restrained urgency, giving just a hint at the passionate flourish Ibragimova was to provide as she entered. Dialogue between violinist and pianist was intense, as they moved very much as one unit through the movement towards a rounded end.The second, Andante movement opened with a serene poise with some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).The original Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner told readers next to nothing about Mason’s history and background, so creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones had a huge canvas to splash about on when they devised their new show. Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The note of longing scored into this exhibition’s title is well-judged: as things are now, it is the sight of the elderly in the company of friends, watching the world go by from a doorstep or park bench, that provokes a pang of nostalgia, far more than the surface details of the mid-20th century, when these pictures were taken.Produced in response to the virus, this selection of 20 photographs by Shirley Baker (1932-2014), focuses on her depictions of the elderly, who blossom under her gently satirical gaze. The online exhibition includes examples of Baker’s colour work as well as her Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. Over the course of seven years, and apparently 200 drafts of the first episode alone, Catton has eloquently distilled her 848-page novel The Luminaries into six 60-minute episodes for the BBC. In the process, she’s stripped away the novel’s structure and a lot of its detail to create something more appropriate for a visual medium. The result is spectacular, but very different from the original Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, which have plagued thinkers for around 2500 years, tell us that super-speedy Achilles can never outrun the tortoise and that an arrow in flight must always occupy a fixed position at intervals of time – and so can never hit its target. My introduction to these favourite brain-tanglers came when, as an easily overawed teenager, I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers and learned that, thanks to that arrested arrow, “Saint Sebastian died of fright”. Stoppard doesn’t take a bow in Joseph Mazur’s far-reaching and idea-crammed tour of the meanings we Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Orange Crate Art makes most sense in the context of Van Dyke Parks’s solo career rather than that of Brian Wilson’s. For the former it was preceded by Tokyo Rose, an orchestrated set tackling the intersections of American-Japanese cultural and socio-political relations. All the way back to his debut album, 1967’s Song Cycle, Parks has created albums with American signifiers as their pegs. With Orange Crate Art, the theme is symbols evoking mythic California. The punning title is literal: an inspiration is the graphics on crates of California-grown orangesBefore Song Cycle, when Parks and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has evinced more wolf-cub-like fierceness or childlike purity of purpose than does Lise Leplat Prudhomme. That’s because Prudhomme was 10 when she portrayed Jeanne from age 17 onwards in Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont’s sequel to his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc.Prudhomme appeared in the first half of Jeannette as the little girl shepherdess Read more ...