Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
“Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.” A cosy scene: Anne (the superb Trine Dyrholm: The Legacy; The Commune; Nico, 1988) is reading Alice in Wonderland to her twin daughters in their stylish Danish family house deep in the woods.The Alice-down-the-well analogy could apply to Anne herself. Her marriage to Peter (Magnus Krepper), a hard-working, often absent Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Back to Georgian brothels, now – at least, for those of us who don’t have a Hulu subscription. The BBC’s airing of the second series of Harlots over the summer felt strangely timely. Barely an episode in and an angry crowd was hammering at the local judge’s door, demanding justice after the needless death of one of the city’s poorest residents. The third series, showing weekly on Wednesdays on BBC Two and available in its entirety on iPlayer, is less easily related to 2020, but it’s still a rollicking ride. Harlots, created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman, is billed as a bodice- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway tends to be the Darwinian environment where a show's opening night can also mark its closing. But such has been the Covid-prompted fate of the National Theatre's fiery return to the fray that Death of England: Delroy managed 11 performances before shuddering to a lockdown-induced halt following its Nov 4th opening night. The good news is that Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' sequel to last winter's National entry, Death of England, was filmed at that decisive performance for tranmission in due course. The even better news is that the play, and co-author Dyer's direction of it, Read more ...
David Nice
Beethoven anniversary year would not have been complete without witnessing a masterly live interpretation of his 33 ever more questing piano variations on a jolly waltz. This one was revelatory. Could I have afforded it, had there been more performances and not sold out, I’d have returned to be helped as never before in further understanding some of the mysteries, weirdnesses and journeys to the strangest of other worlds. I couldn’t and there weren’t. But the one evening (actually the second) just before a second lockdown, and stomach-churning anxiety about the American election left at the Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Poulenc’s La voix humaine comes close, but Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle has to be the perfect lockdown opera, this heady tale of two mismatched souls stuck in a confined space (admittedly an enormous one) alarmingly pertinent. Simon Rattle’s London Symphony Orchestra should have been performing the work on a Japanese tour this autumn, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by this streamed performance, available to watch on the orchestra’s YouTube channel.Eberhard Kloke’s chamber reduction of Bartók’s score, which was advertised as the version used, allows for an orchestra Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Dear Joan & Jericha podcast began in 2018, and quickly became a cult hit. That was no surprise as the spoof's creators, Julia Davis (Joan) and Vicki Pepperdine (Jericha), have impressive comedy CVs behind them; Davis created and starred in Nighty Night, Camping and Hunderby, while Pepperdine co-wrote and starred in Getting On.Joan and Jericha are agony aunts, women of uncertain age (“trained in psycho-genital counselling”), who give appalling relationship advice in jaw-droppingly graphic and unPC terms: “We don't beat about the bush. Apparently you're not allowed to say that any more Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Zeina Durra’s sophomore feature arrives on our screens a decade on from her debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! It was worth the wait. Luxor is a subtle, low-key drama that possesses an atmosphere of meditative calm, exploring a life that has seen too much pain and is desperate to find a way to heal. “Do you ever worry about opening up places that have been laid to rest?” asks Hana (Andrea Riseborough) to her one-time lover and archaeologist, Sultan (Karim Saleh). It goes without saying that it’s a loaded question. Until recently, Hana has been working as a doctor on the Jordanian- Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Feuds make good theatre. I mean, look at the furious 1970s spat between playwright Lillian Hellman and critic Mary McCarthy. Yikes. So far, I’ve counted three recent stage versions: in 2002 there was Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends, followed in 2014 by both Brian Richard Mori’s Hellman v McCarthy and Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars, which addresses this feud obliquely and got an Off-Broadway workshop production by Beautiful Soup Theater. It’s now streaming in a new rehearsed reading with a starry all-woman cast led by Juliet Stevenson and Linda Bassett.A bit of background always helps, so Read more ...
David Nice
How does Mozart do it? His music can provoke deep emotions even in the unlikeliest operatic situations, if well done, and present circumstances stirred them up all the more on Sunday afternoon. Those flirtatious ladies flouncing around the prone prince in the first musical number of The Magic Flute – no overture here – only had to sing “although it breaks my heart in two/I have to bid farewell to you/until we meet again" for another tearful turn of the screw. There was more dramatically justified cause for the floodgates to open as heroine Pamina arrives to lead her Tamino through the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Half-way through the 22 tracks of Showdown – The Complete 1966 RCA Recordings, what’s been increasingly apparent from the opening cut is confirmed: this is an extraordinary archive release, as much so as the live Stooges album looked at by this column in early September.“What’s That on Your Finger” opens Showdown's second half. A mid-tempo, deftly arranged, fully orchestrated uptown soul cut, it has a guitar figure subtly nodding to “Tracks of my Tears”, dexterous backing vocals, a confident, soaring lead voice and an irresistible melody. Yet the recording of the song, co-written by its Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was a night of multiple firsts: the first live performance at Sadler's Wells in seven months (the place hasn’t been dark for so long since the War); the official first day of Carlos Acosta’s tenure as the new director of Birmingham Royal Ballet; and the premiere of his first company commission – an ambitious piece involving live orchestra, 12 dancers and a sorcerer’s handbook of visual effects. It was also, on a note rather less positive, the first time in its history that Sadler’s Wells is likely to have considered a 30 per cent house to be a roaring success.Like the Royal Ballet a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The bleak power of the Australian horror movie Relic, Natalie Erika James’s feature debut, derives from its masterful use of a simple metaphor. The creepy house wherein Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) first seek and are then stalked by Kay’s enraged elderly mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) is an externalization of Edna’s waning cognitive skills. Many haunted houses in movies can be considered the manifestations of damaged psyches; few have literalized so terrifyingly the division between mental acuity and the void many people fall into before they die.Having learned Read more ...