Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Since Back in Time for Dinner in 2015, this BBC Two social history strand in which families travel into a recreated past to experience ways in which society, leisure and lifestyles have changed has proved a robust perennial. Its latest iteration, Back in Time for The Corner Shop, whisked us away to a Sheffield corner shop in 1897, where the local Ardern family threw themselves into the rigours of late-Victorian retailing with commendable joie de vivre.Sara Cox played presenter and sergeant-major, chivvying the Arderns along in their unfamiliar new roles, and filling in some factual history Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Everybody lies," says property developer Tony to his PA and secret lover Natalie. “Even your mum probably.” And of course he’s not wrong.Sarah Williams’s drama, showing over four consecutive nights on ITV, is an easy-to-digest and deftly-wrought piece of work, using an unspecified accident which has left somebody in hospital – Williams has bent over backwards to avoid revealing the victim’s identity until the final episode – to prise open the secrets and lies of Vivien (Francesca Annis) and her family. Vivien, who's turning 70, has been living on the Sussex coast for the past 40 years, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert represented the British leg of the NHK Symphony Orchestra’s European tour. Tokyo’s radio orchestra is Japan’s flagship ensemble, and they are fine advocates for the country’s thriving musical culture, the playing precise and the tone focused. Paavo Järvi is the orchestra’s Chief Conductor and a good fit for the orchestra’s sound. Järvi takes a similarly focused approach, expressive but never extrovert. He has a real feeling for drama as well, often driving climaxes furiously, while always relying on the orchestra’s unshakable unity. Despite his minimal gestures, he has a tendency Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s common to see the term “vanity project” applied to self-produced shows by ballet stars, but Alina – the first such London venture by Alina Cojocaru – was quite the opposite of vain. If the opening item (a duo for violin and cello, with no dancing) was a mission statement, then this programme wasn’t about the 38-year-old Romanian at all: it was about the music and the people whose talents have nourished hers.Halvorsen’s Passacaglia, a fiendish 19th-century showpiece for strings, was delivered with throwaway panache by violinist Charlie Siem and cellist Margarita Balanas, whose spirited Read more ...
David Nice
Startlingly high levels of expression and focused fire made this rich concert worthy of the dedicatee who radiated those qualities, Jacqueline du Pré. Beyond even that, this Wigmore Hall special was an oddly synaesthesic experience – or maybe I'm just suggestible; at any rate Joanna MacGregor's full-blooded way with Frank Bridge's torrid late romanticism seemed to drip red, there was ethereal silver in the more other-worldly Shostakovich playing of the Gildas Quartet and gold from their viola player, Jenny Lewisohn, as well as from superlative cellist Adrian Brendel, in perfect synchronicity Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This latest musical theatre exercise in “geek chic” has been an American phenomenon: a show propelled by social media that developed a rabid fan base taking it all the way to Broadway last year. And here Be More Chill now is in London at The Other Palace, previously home to Heathers – another American musical about the psychological torture inherent in being a teen – and arriving in time to suggest Dear Evan Hansen on amphetamines, but with much familiar pushing of buttons where an honest appeal to the heart might be.Not that the adoring public for this lunatic sci-fi paean to normalcy will Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s an undeniable romance to mid-Nineties New York. Absent of the chirp of mobile phones, or the swirl of social media, it comes across as a more halcyon age, closer to the Forties than the Noughties. It makes the perfect setting for Berlin International Film Festival opener My Salinger Year, Philippe Falardeau’s gentle adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s elegant and much-loved memoir detailing her fledgling career at a Manhattan literary agency. At just 23 and fresh out of college, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) has moved in with her new beau, Don (Douglas Booth), an armchair socialist who Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The exhibition starts on the Barbican’s lift doors, which are emblazoned with photographs from the show. They include one of my all-time favourites: Herb Ritts’s Fred with Tyres 1984 (pictured below right), a fashion shoot of a young body builder posing as a garage mechanic, in greasy overalls. Despite his powerful muscles, he looks tired and petulant. The admixture of power and vulnerability is a theme running through this wonderful show, which explores masculinity in all its glory as portrayed by artists in photographs, films and videos, since the 1960s.Introducing the show is a quote from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The comic book of Locke and Key, written by Joe Hill (son of horror writer Stephen King) and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, was first published in 2008, and its mix of multi-generational family drama and supernatural creepiness made it a cult hit. Various film and TV companies have spent the last decade making desultory efforts to bring it to the screen, and now Netflix have finally managed it.Whether or not it's what aficionados would have dreamed of, being familiar with the comics would certainly give you a leg up in getting to grips with the TV show. It’s slow to pick up momentum, as if Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days. Nevertheless the creative exchange between the two nations has a long and fruitful history – our folk traditions are conjoined twins, after all, and our contemporary musical cultures part of a continual flow back and forth.Imagining Ireland, first mounted to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising back in 2016, the year of the Brexit Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has been seven years since Alexei Sayle last toured, with radio shows and books detaining him elsewhere, but he's back with a bang. As he walks on stage, he immediately starts railing about the “Eton boys running the country”; instead of hailing the school for having produced 20 prime ministers, “it should be in special fucking measures.” Oh, we've missed him.The old-fashioned lefty – who invented alternative comedy, he says with a knowing look more than once in the 80-minute set – is in mourning for what might have been, he says. He clearly has a lot to get off his chest, as a referendum Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some menus never change. In 1910, the Loyal British Waiters Society came into being, prompted by “xenophobic resentment at the dominance of foreigners in the restaurant trade”. London’s German Waiters Club, one symptom of the alien rot the bulldog servers aimed to stop, was itself founded in 1869. Almost anywhere, at any period in the capital’s history, from Tudor times until the present day, what Panikos Panayi calls “a backlash from nativist sentiment” has sought to halt and reverse successive waves of immigration. Those Loyal Waiters yearned, in words that today’s immigrant-descended Home Read more ...