Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Is Emily in Paris “the dumbest thing on Netflix right now?” or a sugar-rush of escapism in the midst of our global pandemic misery? “We need things to make us smile,” commented one Parisian viewer. “In the time of Covid,we don’t need more to stress us out.”The show’s creator, Darren Star, has a genius for tickling the ratings g-spot, having been the mastermind behind Beverley Hills, 90210, Melrose Place and Sex and the City. This time, though, he’s ventured beyond traumatised teens in California and the tortuous lives of career women in New York, to take a look at transcontinental culture Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
“O wise young judge”, says Shylock to Portia in The Merchant of Venice.It seemed just such a figure who made her way to the piano at the Wigmore Hall last night. Besuited, bespectacled, with a poised upright posture that frees her arms, plus the serious demeanour that I sometimes term “Heifetz face”, the youthful Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili eschews any fashionable emoting, arm-flinging or face-pulling. Instead, her energy is entirely focused upon the instrument and the music. (The significance of “Heifetz face” is the calm, even severe visual frontage of that legendary violinist’ Read more ...
David Nice
How many musicians can you fit in the main space of the Fidelio Orchestra Café? The answer is 23 string players in masks, for the recording of Strauss’s Metamorphosen of which I was a solitary witness in the summer. With diners accommodated, probably four is the limit. It's being tested this week with the first emergence of a piano quartet I’ve witnessed since March, violinist Benjamin Baker, viola player Timothy Ridout, cellist Bartholomew LaFollette and pianist Louis Schwizgebel sparing nothing in the storm and stress of teenage Mahler’s solitary movement and the much more chameleonic Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
"Don’t hold back,” a front-of-house manager told us. “If you want to show your appreciation, go for it.” This was nothing to do with providing sound effects for the imminent streaming to tens of thousands around the world. It was about letting the performers know there was a real, live audience in the House. Safely distanced, the non-paying crowd (which included many NHS nurses and their families) filled barely 400 of the 2,200 seats in the Royal Opera House and it felt spookily empty.The dancers of the Royal Ballet have been off stage for seven months but that doesn’t mean they’ve been Read more ...
India Lewis
There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely feminism lite, a palimpsest for young women in London who are into yoga and small plates. But that is not to detract from the fact that it is eminently readable, and frequently charming.The narrator and protagonist of Ghosts, 32-year-old Nina Dean, is a very thinly veiled portrait of the author. Alderton has amended some details, but the bare bones are very obvious to any readers of her 2018 Everything I Know About Love. Nina is short where Alderton is tall, dark-haired where Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile times – not least because it unpicks twisted ways of thinking that stretch far beyond the legacy of the Third Reich and its leader. Sir Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian and Hitler-era specialist who supported fellow-academic Deborah Lipstadt in her landmark court victory over the Holocaust-denying writer David Irving, led a five-year research programme on “Conspiracy and Democracy”. It bears fruit in this Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment strand in Britain’s recent history but who is virtually unknown to today’s under-40s. Michael who? was the common reponse to my own admittedly fairly narrow survey. But Clark deserves a place in the pantheon of 20th-century movers and shakers for the same reason as, say, Andy Warhol or Jean Cocteau. Like them, he operated at the intersection of many Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the historic slaving hotspot of Gabon rang with a steely sense of commitment. Elsewhere, though, the editorial focus was slack and the content rambling, as though the project (on BBC Two) had undergone a last-minute salvage job using whatever was at hand.However often you hear them, the details of the slave trade are stomach-turning – it’s estimated that Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre’s pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare’s Beat the Devil and Fuel’s production of Inua Ellams’s An Evening with an Immigrant, with both having their runs extended. And, next month, this venue is also venturing out beyond the M25: two of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – Imelda Staunton in A Lady of Letters and Maxine Peake in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet – will visit Sheffield Theatres and Leeds Playhouse (where Rochenda Sandall will also perform Bennett’s Outside Dog). Meanwhile, back at base, last week Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Set on February 25 1964, Kemp Powers’s 2013 play One Night in Miami put newly-crowned World Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay in a motel room with soul singer Sam Cooke, superstar NFL footballer Jim Brown and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X. The four men were real-life friends, but Powers’s account was heavily fictionalised, depicting the foursome engaged in sometimes furious debate over issues of racism, black power, politics and personal responsibility.Putting it on film (showing at the BFI London Film Festival) was a big ask for first-time feature director Regina King, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cultural imprint Crass were leaving was apparent while they were active. As well as their own music, their label Crass Records released records by Flux Of Pink Indians, the pre-Sugarcubes outfit Kukl and The Damned’s Captain Sensible – Crass were instrumental in him becoming a vegetarian.Crass also had significant boundaries-testing brushes with the establishment: the Penis Envy album led to court cases; a montage tape of a supposed conversation between Reagan and Thatcher was linked to Crass. Further subversion came when the song "Our Wedding" was given away with the mainstream Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Famous dystopian novels are reliably popular with TV adapters, so it’s strange that this is the first time Aldous Huxley’s treatise on a society controlled by technology and psychological manipulation has been turned into a TV series. Of course, these days you need a pretty good fictional dystopia to surpass the one already running amok outside your window. Still, this is written and produced by David Wiener, one of the masterminds of Fear the Walking Dead, so you might at least hope for a generous helping of horror and massed blood-letting.But last week’s first episode of Brave New World ( Read more ...