Reviews
Sam Marlowe
In a purgatorial summer, this boisterous, camp and chaotically charming musical is a tonic. It’s a winning combination of slick and slapdash, performed before a masked, socially distanced audience in a hastily repurposed beer garden behind the Eagle pub in Vauxhall.Aptly, its fascinating, fact-based story is one of triumph over adversity. Fanny and Stella were two comely Victorian ladies with a penchant for theatricals, who led double lives. Beneath their paint and petticoats, they were Frederick William Park and Thomas Ernest Boulton, cross-dressing young gay men from well-to-do families, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
During World War Two, President Franklin D Roosevelt described the USA as “the arsenal of democracy”. Only a couple of decades later, Fidel Castro was busily turning Cuba, only 100 miles from the US mainland, into the factory of revolution, exporting armed struggle around the world. It made his country a geopolitical player out of all proportion to its size, at the cost of violently antagonising the Americans.Castro’s militant interventions in Algeria, the Congo, Angola and El Salvador were covered in the first part of this documentary (made by factual programming specialists Brook Lapping Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Lockdown, perhaps more than any other time, has amplified how modern technology can be both a blessing and a curse. Of course, it’s wonderful to have the means to connect with friends and family scattered across the globe; carry on working, learning, eating, praying etc. with others; and enjoy art in new and innovative ways, such as this particular digital series. But how many of us have felt the exhaustion that comes from back to back zoom meetings, the ennui that comes from barely leaving our homes and the self doubt that comes from others’ social media streams? (Does my garden look as nice Read more ...
Sarah Collins
TW: This article discusses suicide, suicidal ideation, antidepressants and self-harm We first meet Nora Seed, “nineteen years before she decides to die”, as she plays chess in the school library with Mrs Elm, the matter-of-fact school librarian. Nora, who is treated ‘like a mistake in need of correction by her mother”, seeks comfort and kindness from Ms Elm, after finding out her father has died. Nineteen years later, after a series of painful events, including the loss of her job and the death of her cat, Nora feels that the world would simply be better off without her. She ruminates on Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It has taken a good half decade for the Dutch series Overspel (The Adulterer) to make it on to TV screens in the UK. Its 32 episodes were made in 2011-2015, but the third and final series is only now being broadcast on Channel 4’s Walter Presents.This carefully crafted mosaic of forbidden love and organised crime is atmospheric, addictive and hugely bingeworthy. The plotting is meticulous, with each of the three series building inexorably to a final showdown episode where all the plot strands are resolved. And it has some very strong central performances, which, as some Dutch Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Wowee! Twenty weeks after the last time I set foot in a theatre, I was able to visit a venue once more. Hello again Donmar! It’s great to see you again. Not for a show featuring live performers, who are currently banned, but for a theatre experience in the guise of an art installation, which is allowed. Not only was there a distinct frisson to this experience, but the event itself – a sound version of Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness – was superbly accomplished, written by master penman Simon Stephens and featuring the recorded voice of Juliet Stevenson. It is Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Dvořák’s "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka rose to its impassioned climax, Natalya Romaniw had to battle a helicopter thumping overhead. The helicopter lost (well, of course it did). As Nardus Williams and David Butt Phillip disappeared into the wings after a heart-rending "O soave fanciulla" from La Bohème, a squirrel scampered centre-stage to fill the dramatic vacuum. Anna Patalong and Ross Ramgobin’s wistful COVID-era take on "La ci darem la mano" from Mozart's Don Giovanni (pictured below) made sure that fingers never touched, but lent a previously unknown erotic frisson to a Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Poet Sharon Dolin’s memoir Hitchcock Blonde ends (no spoilers) in the same way as the famous English director’s Vertigo begins: with a cliffhanger. Of sorts. In the film, a rooftop chase gone awry leaves James Stewart’s Detective “Scottie” dangling off the side of skyscraper, while one of his colleagues tumbles straight over the edge – an incident which leaves him, naturally enough, with a bad case of acrophobia (fear of heights) and the titular vertigo he spends the rest of the movie trying to conquer. Dolin finds herself similarly hanging off a rooftop railing, but voluntarily, with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether explicitly or indirectly, what’s written on a master tape box can tantalise. Revealing part of a picture creates a desire to want to know more. Take the example seen above. It’s for an album by South African alto saxist Dudu Pukwana. The annotation gives a date of July 1968 and the client is Witchseason, the company run by manager/producer Joe Boyd. The recording took place at Sound Techniques, the independent Chelsea studio favoured by Boyd for his other clients. He’d worked there with Pink Floyd in 1967. Around the time of this session, Boyd had brought Fairport Convention and The Read more ...
David Nice
Nostalgia of all kinds played a part in this summer evening’s divertissement. Some audience members were probably remembering when operetta held a greater sentimental sway than it does now; many would have been thinking of the full Opera Holland Park seasons – a proper theatre with raised seating, covered stagings, full orchestra and chorus – on what was now the bare terraced spot in front of the semi-derelict house. I was casting back in my mind to the blissful haven the park was in the spring, a necessary restorative on lockdown afternoon bike-rides and walks, and further to childhood Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We first see Leigh (Frankie Box), the cheeky heroine of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley’s debut feature Perfect 10, hanging upside down during a gymnastics workout. The image is appropriate given that the teenager’s Sussex life – an aimless routine given what vague shape it has by her athletic interests – is about to be turned upside down by the unexpected arrival in her midst of an older half-brother, Joe (Alfie Deegan), whom she’s not known before.What transpires is a tale that locates real sweetness within the sullen as the duo form a bond, however shortlived, that takes them both by Read more ...
India Lewis
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a collective examination of its past, with Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich at the helm. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union looks back at the USSR through the lens of the personal, much like recent memoirs East West Street and The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like these accounts, Halberstadt’s book focuses, at least in part, on the tragic history of the Jews in Europe. It works well in that Halberstadt relates the story to himself throughout – not so frequently as to feel heavy-handed, but often enough so as not to lose himself as the Read more ...