Reviews
Daniel Baksi
Roughly two years since “the posh mums are boxing in the square” scooped first place in the 2018 National Poetry Competition, Wayne Holloway-Smith returns with Love Minus Love, his second full-length collection. The follow-up to Alarum (2017) includes that competition winner, which describes the magical revival of a cancer-stricken mother, sent into the boxing ring against the very tumour that threatens her life. Now, it is but one of many standout poems in this highly personal exploration of anxiety, broken families, and masculine fraility.If the voice of “the posh mums” performed its Read more ...
Katie da Cunha Lewin
Selva Almada’s newly translated work has a stark title in both English and the original Spanish: Dead Girls, or Chicas Muertas. That apparent bluntness belies the hybrid sensitivity that makes up the pages. Its subject matter is the murders of three young women during the 1980s, spread across different provinces of Argentina, a country where murders of and violence against women are unbearably commonplace. This book, originally published in 2014 and now out in a translation by Annie McDermott from Charco Press, gives space to what is left over: the immediate grief, shock, and confusion that Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a year of absences and separations, here was another one we had to bear. Built around a programme of Baroque double concertos, last night’s Prom should have brought Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova together in a violin super-duo that promised marvels. In the event, a family bereavement kept Ibragimova away from the audience-free Royal Albert Hall. Yet, and again in the phoenix-from-the-ashes spirit of the arts in 2020, the improvised solution proved an uplifting delight. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which backed the soloists, has always sounded like a band of stars. Its Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Whilst New Mutants slips surreptitiously into cinemas, Disney’s live-action spin on Mulan arrives with more fanfare on their streaming platform, even if it does come with a price-tag of nearly £20.Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and her cohort of screenwriters have ironed out the kinks of the ’98 animation, giving it a greater feminist spin, but losing much of the heart and humour of Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook’s original film. The story focuses on the young Hua Mulan (Liu Yifei), a free spirit who has to suppress her martial gifts for the sake of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I’m Thinking of Ending Things ends in a giddying gusher of weirdness, the steady drip of earlier oddness finally bursting its narrative banks, till a horror scene becomes a Gene Kelly ballet, and an Oklahoma! tune is sung in bitter valediction by a male lead now resembling elderly Charles Foster Kane. It’s a Charlie Kaufman overdose, trashing convention to alienating effect. And yet this also stays his simplest chamber piece, about a young couple driving to meet the boyfriend’s parents in the country one snowy night.Later, you forget the first sight of Lucy (Jessie Buckley) as she lets a Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Josh Boone’s New Mutants. Delayed production, reshoots, the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, Covid-19, and accusations of whitewashing, have all contributed to it being dubbed a ‘cursed’ film. Now, with little fanfare, this YA horror has finally limped onto cinema screens three years after production wrapped.Updated from the original 1980s setting, the film opens in the mid-90s in the spooky surroundings of Essex House, an asylum for unruly teenage mutants (far removed from the hallowed halls of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters). This Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Originally due to premiere back in March, Sleepless – a musical version of the winning 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle – now acts as a test case for the return of fully staged but socially distanced indoor theatre, AKA Stage 4 of the Government’s “roadmap”. Though a musical adaptation premiered in the States in 2013, this is billed as a new work, with a fresh book by Michael Burdette and score by Brits Robert Scott and Brendan Cull. Bravo to all involved for bringing audiences back safely and enthusiastically, even if the show itself, contrary to its title, is a tad more somnolent than might Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apart from her acting abilities, the qualities which made Sheridan Smith a star were her authenticity and lack of pretension. Both shone brightly from ITV's affecting documentary, in which Smith assessed how her success affected her mental health and how she desperately wants the arrival of her new baby to open a fresh chapter in her life.Perhaps director Tanya Stephan took it for granted that the audience would already know about her longer-than-your-arm list of stage and screen credits (comedy, TV drama, stage musicals and even a bit of Ibsen and Shakespeare), because hardly any of it was Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In reviewing Sunday night’s LSO Prom I was impressed by the innovative and exciting programming and that was also a hallmark of Tuesday’s Prom, although this was more true to form for the London Sinfonietta. Since its inception the Sinfonietta has sampled both ends of the contemporary spectrum and everything in between, and that was the case here. The theme was “city life” but the music was also united, as the conductor Geoffrey Paterson said, by having pulse – and sometimes more than one at the same time.The most pulsing – if not pulsating – piece was Philip Glass’s Façades and actually the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC’s version of James Herriot’s books about his life as a Yorkshire vet became a weekend TV staple, running for seven series and a couple of Christmas specials between the late Seventies and the start of the Nineties. This elegantly-mounted revival is a partnership between Channel 5 and PBS in the States, and judging from this opening episode it has the potential to pick up where its much-loved predecessor left off.It’s 1937, and in dingy, depressed Glasgow, the young James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) has trained as a vet but is having trouble finding a job. His father, an unemployed Read more ...
Doric Quartet, Bandstand Chamber Festival, Battersea Park review – radiance on a late summer evening
David Nice
Wonderful as the livestreamed Proms are for players working together again and for viewers/listeners who wouldn’t be able to get to the Royal Albert Hall even if they could be admitted, I’d sacrifice them all for one evening of live musical communication like this. There’s nothing like late Mozart in serene mode to make you feel connected to your surroundings, at one with a world in which everything seems completely right, especially on a sunny evening with the first hint of autumn in it; from the first bars of the Quartet in B flat, K589, led by Alex Redington's supremely cultured melodic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If two dozen DJs spin tunes and no one’s there, did a rave really happen? There is plenty of time for such questions during the 25 hours of livestreams substituting for SW4’s annual bank holiday party on Clapham Common. It’s a benefit for the Mind mental health charity, and the illegal raves springing up unstoppably across the country show visceral physical and mental needs social distancing can’t meet. Feeling your sweaty body and breath move close with others in fuggy air is potentially dangerous, but an unforgettable frisson. More than most Covid-crippled activities, it’s also digitally Read more ...