Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
From This Place (Nonesuch) is a complex, meticulously produced and many-layered album which demands concentrated and repeated listening. In many ways, it is all the better for it. Pat Metheny himself has written an essay or “Album Notes” of no fewer than 2,020 words to explain how the concept of the album evolved, as it went through a several-stage process of conception, recording, arranging, production. He also explains its significance in his oeuvre: he calls it “a kind of musical culmination, reflecting a wide range of expressions that have interested me over the years.”There Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Netflix’s Sex Education has returned to our screens and streams. The show made waves last year for its refreshing take on the teen comedy-drama. It took on abortion, consent and female pleasure — subjects strikingly absent from our actual high school educations. The result was a show that was always bingeable, sometimes educative, and oozing with sex-positive delights. Not everyone liked it. But those of us who did — teenagers all over again — could not stop talking about it. These are high expectations for a show going into its sophomore season. But thank God and thank Laurie Nunn: this is a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When Pina Bausch died at the height of her creative powers in 2009, no one knew if her work or her company would survive. A decade later, to judge by the scramble for tickets for this early, highly experimental piece, both seem to be doing just fine.Bluebeard, from 1977, is a test of loyalty for even the most ardent Bausch fan. A response to Bartok’s opera about a serial wife-murderer and his last victim, it has none of the humour, nostalgia or scenic extravagance of her later pieces. Unremittingly dark, it’s a tough watch. It’s a tough listen too as Bartok’s richly textured music, relayed by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
An early trailer for this adaptation of the ‘90s games franchise caused Cats-like horror at its overly humanoid Hedgehog. Rather than the former film’s risky freak-show, though, this diligently redesigned Sonic is the most safely saccharine family movie imaginable.Given the basic premise of a fast blue anthropomorphic critter, a Road Runner-style animated chase movie would seem the obvious choice (one made by 1993’s Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series). Instead, after a cynical origin story splicing Spider-Man and Bambi, in which Sonic’s slain mother-figure explains that great Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The screen is filled with the head and shoulders of a man lying on his back; he could be dead in the morgue or lying on the analyst’s couch. He doesn’t move (it’s a still), but we hear his voice recounting the terrible story of the day he accidentally killed his brother. 7th Nov. (main picture) lasts 23 minutes – long enough for you to examine every follicle on the man’s scalp, while at the same time picturing each detail of the horrific tale. The film demonstrates the amazing power of words to trigger mental pictures, while also highlighting the difference between seeing and imagining. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It’s not uncommon for playwrights to begin their careers by writing what they know, to co-opt a frequently quoted precept about authorial inspiration. So it’s among the many fascinations of Leopoldstadt that Tom Stoppard, at the age of 82, should have written his most personal play and also, very possibly (and sadly), his last. Audiences will surely warm to the news that this bustling dynastic tale leading, as its story necessitates, to unimaginable despair and loss is also among Sir Tom’s most accessible, as well: yes, there are a lot of characters to track, and a glance at the family tree Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The decade is kicking off with the revisiting of old classics. That’s not a bad pursuit, with new audiences in mind, though these days there’s a reasonable expectation of a shot in the arm, a contemporary spin, a fresh perspective. Greta Gerwig certainly achieved that with Little Women, as did Armando Iannucci with The Personal History of David Copperfield. In contrast, and despite much to enjoy, this new version of Jane Austen’s perennial charmer ultimately feels rather routine.You wouldn’t expect so at first glance. Director Autumn de Wilde comes with a reputation for Read more ...
David Nice
Those who booed the production team last night - there was nothing but generous cheering for singers, conductor and orchestra - might reflect that this was at least regietheater, that singular brand of not-all-bad director's opera in Germany, with discipline and purpose close enough to its subject. There were some cliches and the occasional question-mark - who's the trembling, plastic-wrapped youth in underpants and why the nearby oil drum? - but you had to hand it to Barbora Horáková for making everything connect, in however stylised a way.Think back to Daniel Kramer's party nightmare in La Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Caryl Churchill, Britain's best living playwright, is enjoying a spate of high-profile revivals of her classic work. Last year, the National Theatre staged her Top Girls, and an upcoming production of A Number is coming soon to the Bridge Theatre. In the meantime, Far Away, her visionary 2000 play about genocide and the war on terror, arrives at the Donmar Warehouse. Twenty years after its first outing at the Royal Court, when it was staged by Stephen Daldry (didn't he do well?), it is now directed by Lyndsey Turner, who in 2019 reinterpreted Top Girls as a big state-of-the-nation drama in a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jen Brister loves her five-year-old twin boys, she is at pains to tell us, even when they have a major meltdown and, like Little Lord Fauntleroys, refuse to eat broken biscuits. Stories like these are sprinkled throughout her new show, Under Privilege, in which she describes trying to instil proper values in children who, she hopes, will probably never know any life struggles, and the broader issue of what privilege is.There’s a lot of domestic detail in the show, and Brister is disarmingly honest about the irritations of parenting – although, she says drily, she dodged a bullet by not being Read more ...
Heather Neill
Ibsen's Nora slammed the door on her infantilising marriage in 1879 but the sound of it has continued to reverberate down the years. In 2013, Carrie Cracknell directed Hattie Morahan in an award-winning performance at this theatre, last year Tanika Gupta profitably wove her story into that of colonial India at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Robert Icke's Children of Nora is due to open in Amsterdam in April and Samuel Adamson's exploration of relationships in four distinct periods, Wife, at the Kiln last summer, echoed Nora's experience. Jamie Lloyd is scheduled to bring his original touch to Frank Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Dingle Peninsula is a thumb of land that protrudes into the Atlantic as if trying to hitch a ride from Ireland to America. The choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan recently moved there, and its crags and vales and unspoilt coast have sucked him into an older, slower way of life that – paradoxically, because his work was and remains radical – has given him a shot in the arm.The opening minutes of his latest confection of dance-theatre and live music feel like a sequel to his last, a savage take on Swan Lake that explored the effect on Irish communities of corruption in the Catholic church. Read more ...