Reviews
Daniel Baksi
With the publication of her first work, Waiariki (1975), Patricia Grace became the author of the first ever collection of short stories by a Māori woman. In the four-and-a-half decades since, she has established herself as a canonical figure in postcolonial and Māori literature. Grace’s second novel, Potiki (1986), winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and now re-released after thirty-four years, is an anguished account of a small family living on a remote stretch of New Zealand’s coastline. Set “at the curve that binds land and sea”, it is a searching examination of human nature, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For record buyers, Bona Rays left limited evidence for their existence. One single was issued by the aptly named Mystery Records in 1981. Pressed in a limited quantity by the independent facility Lyntone, it featured “We're Never Going to Miss You”, a poppy new wave outing with funky bass and stabs of synth, and “Catch 22”, a more up-tempo track which came across as an attractive combination of Pink Military and Teardrop Explodes.Bona Rays’ single attracted no attention but now sells for up to £45. According to its insert, the band had an East London address. Their female singer was named Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there are three ways to enhance our ongoing concert dialogues with the composer beyond the bog-standard overture-concerto-symphony format: complete cycles of the quartets, symphonies and sonatas, preferably without old vulgarians presenting; focusing on Beethoven and his contemporaries, including programmes recreated from the early 1800s; and linking the genius with what our own contemporaries have to say about him.By making its own unique tribute to the whopping "academies" the composer presented, not least in the 1808 blockbuster which included the premieres Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently network executives initially reacted with alarm to the premise of Hunters, Amazon’s new big-ticket series chiefly (though by no means entirely) notable for hosting Al Pacino’s first full-scale television role. Its story of Jewish Nazi-hunters tracking down Nazis living in the USA in the 1970s is told with cartoon-ish brio, treating borderline-taboo subject matter with throwaway insouciance. Comparisons with Quentin Tarantino’s buccaneering approach to good taste and historical reality have already been made, and they’re not too wide of the mark.Creator David Weil throws down the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Gaz Coombes noted around the halfway point of Supergrass’s Barrowland set “the last time we were here it was to say goodbye”. That was a decade ago, when one of Britpop’s most enduring acts finally headed into the sunset. Nothing lasts forever in pop though, and here were Oxford’s finest, back onstage, and looking in fine fettle.They opened with “Caught By The Fuzz”, and it sounded as breathlessly exciting as ever, an under three minute blast of punky pop dynamism. That was a common theme throughout the set, and one that not all nostalgia tours like this can always offer, in that music Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s cool to see a car crash or a gunshot wound, it’s exciting.” Emergency medical technician Juan Ochoa, 17, loves his work, which is just as well because he doesn’t always get paid.Luke Lorentzen’s award-winning documentary (he directed, produced, shot and edited it) about the Ochoa family’s private ambulance in Mexico City is an extraordinary rollercoaster ride into the chaos of a metropolis where there are only 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. Private ambulances like the Ochoas’ take up the slack, and it’s a cutthroat business, with vehicles racing to be first at Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s hard enough to imagine hip hop set to the songs of Sting, but a hip hop show in which 27 songs by Sting laid end to end are made to tell a story about refugees? That’s the unlikely latest offering from the choreographer Kate Prince.She has form in this area. Into the Hoods introduced hip hop to Sondheim and Some Like it Hip Hop filched a plot from Shakespeare. Both were bright, funky, funny shows and it was easy to see why the mashup worked. Now she has wrangled streetdance and a string of jukebox hits into what is without doubt the most desperate story of our age, and frankly, it’s a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are any number of ways to perform A Number, Caryl Churchill’s bleak and beautiful play about a father and three of who knows how many of his genetically cloned sons. Since it first opened at the Royal Court in 2002, this hourlong two-hander has been staged in London with some regularity, as often as not with actual fathers and sons (Tim and Sam West, John and Lex Shrapnel). But director Polly Findlay’s entirely fresh take for the Bridge Theatre is the most literal I have yet seen, and also the most lacerating: this Number may not have family on its side, but it certainly boasts two Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Leif Ove Andsnes’s long-term partnership with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has already yielded rich fruit, and the Mozart quartets and trio he performed last night with members of the top-notch nomad band proved just as succulent. However, I would hardly have been alone in leaving the Wigmore Hall with my strongest impressions stirred by the single solo work that the versatile Norwegian master-pianist allowed himself. All of the items of the bill dated from 1785 and 1786: the two piano quartets (in G minor and E flat) with which Mozart effectively launched the form as a serious vehicle for Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner’s disquieting fifth feature, and her first English language one, Little Joe is a sci-fi drama that ponders the tangled choices faced by many modern women – Kubrickian though it is in its immaculate production design and cold, affectless tone.Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham), a driven thirtysomething bio-engineer, presides over table upon table forested with the leafless, infertile plants she has bred in a spacious greenhouse laboratory. She has developed the project with her colleague Chris (Ben Whishaw), the vaguely patriarchal atmosphere of their Read more ...
David Nice
So many performances of Mahler's most theatrical symphony every season, so few conductors who have something radically fresh to say about it. Two who do are London Philharmonic Orchestra chief Vladimir Jurowski, perfecting his vision over the years, and now the Philharmonia's Principal Guest Conductor, Jakub Hrůša. With total command, he captures the scope of a monumental canvas, every nuance in the phrasing – quite often it's simply that Mahler's meticulous instructions need following, but how rarely that happens – and pointillist jabs of colour.The breadth of Hrůša's interpretation – the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack London’s original novel was a brutal and Darwinian account of a dog's life in the Klondike during the gold rush at the end of the 19th century. Chris Sanders’s film, on the other hand, with a screenplay by Michael Green, is a family-friendly entertainment in the Saturday matinee tradition, delivering a message of lump-in-the-throat positivity reminiscent of earlier canine classics like Old Yeller or The Incredible Journey.Harrison Ford gets top billing and delivers the somewhat sententious voice-over which pushes the story along, but the real star is Buck (pronunciation of whose name Read more ...