Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Do we have a right not be offended? It's a question that’s growing bigger and uglier, thanks to the censorious “cancel culture” which has become such a disfiguring aspect of social media.Leith’s notoriously profane and scabrous novelist Irvine Trainspotting Welsh ought to have been the perfect investigator for this Sky Arts inquiry into the creeping threat of cultural policing, but he seemed slightly uncertain, treading tentatively across the new-media firing range as if nervous about stepping on a troll-mine. At 62, having grown up in an era when the unsayable was still sayable, maybe he was Read more ...
India Lewis
This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour, has written a modern-day odyssey, with a return that is ambiguously hopeful. Grey Bees follows a year in the life of Sergey Sergeyich, a retired and lonely beekeeper, keeping the fire burning with his sole neighbour, Pashka, in Little Starhorodivka, a village that sits uneasily inbetween two sides of an entrenched war. The first third of the book concerns Sergeyich's life in the village, before he loads up his ancient Lada (complete with Soviet numberplates) with provisions and beehives and Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly two weeks into the latest lockdown, and already I feel nostalgic about the last day of freedom. You should too, just watching the film released last night of the CLS’s most recent happening in Southwark Cathedral. It’s of the evening performance; I was there in the golden afternoon, sunlight flooding the nave, we spectators free to wander albeit in one direction and masked and head for one of the points of the Charles Ives-like soundscape that suffused the place to hear what a musician had to say, and play, about his or her part in Haydn’s Symphony No. 104.Haydn had more forces at his Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot up even in an empty auditorium. In Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, wildness and passion war with inhibition and conformity. The piece channels the mingled fascination for, and fear of, an untamed Roma culture that runs through so much Central European art, its music not least. What kind of work is this vocal narrative, premiered a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Unfazed by yet another forced cancellation, the Royal Ballet has notched up a small triumph over the virus. When what was to have been a performance to a live audience in the Opera House fell prey to new restrictions, it went ahead anyway. With safety protocols for the dancers and orchestra already in place, as well as plans for filming, the only difference was that the public didn’t have to turn out in the rain. And with a single £10 ticket covering everyone around the TV, what a bargain that has turned out to be.For a start, there is the sheer variety of a programme that includes little- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the world was in lockdown and performers turned to TikTok to keep in touch with their fans, Sarah Cooper started using the online platform for short videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's speeches, and they quickly went global. Not many people can say they owe worldwide fame to Covid and America's worst-ever president.Now Cooper has a very good special on Netflix, and it shows that there is so much more to the actress and writer than her TikTok fame. But then those short videos showed what a great actor she is, with every twitch of the eye and curl of the lip neatly capturing Trump's Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the Black Lives Matter movement spurred this year by another wave of police brutality against African Americans, Steve McQueen’s blisteringly powerful, viscerally topical drama reminds us of the UK’s own torrid record in that regard, by returning to a true story that is, thankfully, as inspiring as it is appalling.Mangrove is the first of five films the director has made under the banner Small Axe, each telling a different story involving London's West Indian community, between the late Sixties and the mid-Eighties. This concerns the seminal trial of the Mangrove Nine Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Pre-release excitement about the fourth coming of The Crown (Netflix) has centred on Emma Corrin’s portrayal of Princess Diana, still big box-office 23 years after her death. There’s no denying that Corrin has risen heroically to the challenge of playing a character who has assumed mythic proportions, skilfully evoking Diana’s way of speaking as well as catching her coy, doe-eyed expressions and physical gestures. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Earl Spencer has chosen the run-up to Diana’s new TV incarnation in which to launch his assault on the BBC regarding Martin Bashir’s notorious 1995 Read more ...
David Nice
It must have felt very strange to Mark Wigglesworth that he returned to the London Coliseum under such unanticipated circumstances. ENO’s shortest-lived but also (many of us think) best Music Director campaigned from the start for direct communication with the audience, in that magic triangle between composer, performers and spectators, and lived it to the full in all the productions he conducted (“we underestimate the public as performers at our peril,” he told me in 2015 before taking up the post). Now, replacing a self-quarantining Martyn Brabbins, his successor, he had his back to an Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rock documentaries are so often disappointing, the result less a portrait than a whitewash. A J Eaton’s 90-minute rock doc David Crosby: Remember My Name, which premiered on Sky Arts, was an unflinching close-up, utterly absorbing and all the more affecting for its searing honesty in showing a man who’s gone through the fire and is willing to show the burns. That he was the arsonist only adds to the power of the story and to the viewer’s sympathy for the man at its heart, though sympathy is probably not what he wants.Croz has been part of two of the 20th century’s most distinctive bands: The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Manchester’s Slaughter and the Dogs were perfect for 1977. In May, their debut single “Cranked up Really High” sported bee-in-a-jar guitar, a hoarse vocal and an unstoppable forward motion. Its follow-up, September’s impeccable “Where Have All the Boot Boys Gone?”, was more muscular and prefigured the chart-bound terrace-chant punk of Sham 69. Next, in November, the brash “Dame to Blame” revealed a glam-rock undertone.All great and all essential, but not necessarily reviewed positively at the time by the weekly music papers. The first was Melody Maker’s “saddest single of the week.” The Read more ...
peter.quinn
Oh to have been in the beautiful surrounds of Cadogan Hall last night – not just to have experienced the gorgeous wall of sound, heartfelt artistry and musical camaraderie at first hand, but also to have been able to show our appreciation for a concert which takes months of preparation.Social distancing measures saw the EFG London Jazz Festival Ensemble reduced from its customary 40-plus musicians, but while the textural palette may not have been quite as luxuriant as usual, the slightly leaner charts provided their own rewards. This was a necessarily different Jazz Voice, but even a computer Read more ...