Reviews
Graham Fuller
Run is the story of disgruntled 36-ish Finnie (Mark Stanley), a big, dour worker in a fish processing plant in the Aberdeenshire port of Fraserburgh – writer-director Scott Graham’s hometown. Long married to his onetime high-school sweetheart Katie (Amy Manson), and the father of twentyish Kid (Anders Hayward) and adolescent Stevie (Scott Murray), Finnie wants to get the hell out – or he thinks he does. At its core, Run is about being mature enough to recognize your glass is half full.The film completes Graham’s trilogy about ordinary people yearning to escape their constricted lives. Like Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Beatles lyric that gives Mike Bartlett’s terrific play its title dates to 1967, which also happens to be the year in which the first of Bartlett’s three acts is set. What follows are two further scenes in the evolving relationship between Kenneth (Nicholas Burns) and Sandra (Rachael Stirling), set in 1990 and then 2011. By that point, their marriage has ended, only for the onetime Oxford University sweethearts to exist under siege from their two children, not least a 37-year-old daughter (Isabella Laughland) who courses with disappointment on every front (romantic, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal, autistic five-year-old son and the kinds of friends who get him into trouble. Chief among them is Dympna (Barry Keoghan, in a wholly chilling performance), the heir apparent to the local drug-dealing Devers clan. Dympna exploits Arm’s pugilism to add muscle to his verbal threats. Violence is the Devers’ modus operandi and Calm with Horses veers Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
When the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison died last year, it was a chance to celebrate the remarkable life of a storyteller who shook the literary establishment. Her work, including her debut novel The Bluest Eye, broke radical new ground in depicting African American life. Now her life is the subject of a new documentary directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.This is a documentary that brims with love and admiration for Morrison’s work and life. All the critical biographical details are correct and present. Still, Greenfield-Sanders’ film is much more than a tick box Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some wondrous acting is sacrificed on the altar of an increasingly wonky plot in On Blueberry Hill, the first play in 10 years from Sebastian Barry, the Irish playwright and novelist whose onetime Royal Court entry The Steward of Christendom showcased a treasured theatrical memory in the leading performance of the late and truly great Donal McCann.This latest work, a two-hander premiered in 2017 by Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company, isn’t remotely the equal of its 1995 forbear. And yet it, too, offers major acting opportunities for both David Ganly and Niall Buggy, the Irish actors here Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Six weeks ago, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation announced that it the winner of its prestigious and extremely valuable main annual prize for 2020 "to a composer, performer, or scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the world of music" will be the viola player Tabea Zimmermann. She commented to an interviewer that what mattered to her most was neither well-paid concert appearances nor playing in large halls, but rather to be involved in things that are interesting for what she called their "Inhalt". The German language is blessed with words that have a whole field of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Created in the mould of Made in Dagenham and Pride, Philippa Lowthrope offers up a cheery, kitschy British comedy centred around the 1970 Miss World Contest that was disrupted by feminist protests. Leading this crowd-pleaser are Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jesse Buckley. Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe divide their screenplay across the trio, but the central perspective is that of Knightley’s character Sally Alexander. As a young mum trying to make it as a mature student, her battles with the prevailing patriarchy are given a stiff kick when she meets Buckley’s Jo Read more ...
David Nice
That virtue can be fascinating and prayers to a just God dramatic have been proved in riveting productions of two late Handel oratorios, Theodora and Jephtha. Whether Susanna can ever be reclaimed for the stage as powerfully seems unlikely, but this showcase for the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme may just have bungled it. Simple goodness surely needs a lighter touch than conductor Patrick Milne gave it through some numbing quarters of an hour early on, and director Isabel Kettle's heavy, often leaden, contemporary fishing community setting added nothing to the essence. Read more ...
David Nice
Eyes watering, heart thumping, hands clenched: no, not The Thing, but a spontaneous reaction to the opening of Bach's St John Passion in the urgent hands of Masaaki Suzuki. How his Bach Collegium oboes seared with their semitonal clashes while bass lines throbbed with pain, before the chorus added a different, supernatural turn of the screw. Immediate indeed, but this Passion was never too fast, only continuous in its drama so that even the chorales, with every word illuminated as Bach so expressively set it, hit home like a Greek chorus reacting to the immediate situation rather than as the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Jennifer Saunders is a one-woman tickle machine. As her countless appearances in television shows such as French and Saunders and Ab Fab prove, this triple BAFTA winner is box office magic. The mere incantation of her name is enough to sell out any West End show. So there is something really fitting about casting her as the spiritual medium Madame Arcati in this revival of Noël Coward's 1941 mega-hit, Blithe Spirit, which comes to London from the Theatre Royal Bath, where it opened last summer, in a production directed by the ever-reliable Richard Eyre.The plot concerns Home Counties novelist Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final sequence of Levan Akin’s coming-of-age drama And Then We Danced is as gloriously defiant a piece of dance action as anything you’ll remember falling for in Billy Elliot.Merab, the film’s youthful dancer protagonist (played by Levan Gelbakhiani, pictured below, in his first screen role) has been through a lot by then – the trials of first love, exacerbated by the realisation that he’s gay – and those closing minutes see him asserting his right to be who he is at an audition that pits him against his highly conservative surroundings.It’s a clash of values in every sense. The Georgian Read more ...
Richard Bratby
No orchestra wants its conductor to cancel in the week of a concert. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s illness was announced only on Monday, but even in ideal conditions, if you needed to find a last minute replacement maestro for a programme of Bartók and Bruckner, you could hardly do better than Omer Meir Wellber: a conductor with whom the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has built a relationship that predates his recent appointment to the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. And while it was unquestionably disappointing to be deprived of Gražinytė-Tyla’s first adventure into Bruckner (on these Read more ...