Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
The news that the Continuity IRA created a bomb destined for England on Brexit Day has added to the timeliness of this revival of Joseph Crilly’s gut-punching comedy. Set in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, it takes a merciless glance at the myths and delusions surrounding small-town Northern Ireland, which are exposed in painful detail following the release of former IRA terrorist, Fra Maline, from prison.One of the most striking aspects of Irish drama is the way in which landscapes and buildings are so strongly steeped in the memories of the lives and conflicts that have played Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It’s Beethoven with everything for 2020, the composer’s 250th anniversary year. But the London Philharmonic has devised an interesting approach for their Beethoven-themed programming. “2020 Vision” is a series of concerts which couple a work by Beethoven, or occasionally one of his contemporaries, with a piece written 100 years later and another written 200 years later. The result is a series of gloriously eclectic programmes, not least for the obscurity of the later works chosen. In this opening concert, Beethoven’s First Symphony (1801) was followed by Snatches of a Conversation (2001) by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel is a keen Twitter user, commenting on matters of the day, making witty observations about this and that, or simply chatting to his 650,000 followers. But he does seem to attract trolls, whose idiocy he frequently confronts – and his new show, Trolls: Not the Dolls, was inspired by some of those interactions.In a laugh-filled show that's a PowerPoint presentation cum TED talk, the comic seeks to explain the various types of troll on the social platform – the hard of thinking, those who don't get irony, the soulless killjoys, the out-and-out anti-Semites – and how to avoid them. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I knew I shouldn’t have let monkeys read the contract,” Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) mutters. The star should have read the script of his first post-Marvel vehicle more closely, too, before taking on the role which previously sank Rex Harrison’s career. The animal-fluent doc is living in secluded mourning amidst a wise-cracking menagerie when he’s ordered to save Queen Victoria from a rare disease, via a protracted voyage to Antonio Banderas’s Arabian Nights kingdom (Banderas is pictured below). Jim Broadbent’s courtier is having the young queen poisoned for reasons which will somehow lead Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to another sub-genre - the narrative of life on the road, with all its detours and disorientations. Captured at intervals, from her thirties to her fifties, McBride‘s protagonist picks up the tangled threads of a woman’s life. In a sense, this work follows on from the stricken childhood conjured in her remarkable debut, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and the youthful passion and misery evoked in its Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s not hard to see why The Sicilian Vespers has struggled since its surprisingly successful opening run at the Paris Opéra in 1855. Verdi had composed it reluctantly, despised the librettist, Eugène Scribe, who he regarded as a well-named cynical scribbler, and tried unsuccessfully to get a release from his contract. The result is undeniably patchy, narratively implausible to the point of silliness, and though tight by the standards of French grand opera, nevertheless at least one scene too long.Yet having said all that, one is left with the impression of a work that overall only just Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs – they have been called “fragments” and even “stanzas” – might be the first thing you notice about Weather, if you are new to her writing. Sometimes they are pithy, aphoristic; mostly they stretch to the extent of a vivid vignette, and the logic that links them is not necessarily linear, but spatial, as they slip from observation to joke to anecdote to rehearsals of Q&As and facts carefully collected like objet trouvés, although the gaps between them never feel abrupt. The “plot” happens in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any knowledge of the Hank Williams narrative heavily influences how he is perceived. He died at age 29 on New Year’s Day 1953, in the back of a car while travelling to a show in Ohio. His schedule was punishing. A day earlier he had played in West Virginia but a storm meant he could not fly from one show to the next.He had spina biffida and was in constant pain. There were prescribed painkillers, self-medication and a long-standing problem with alcohol. He missed shows. Contracts were cancelled due to drunkenness. He had married Audrey Sheppard in 1944 but they fought. Divorce came in 1952. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Preston, as consul in Yekaterinburg through the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, no doubt needed all the extra cultural support he could find, witnessing control of the city pass between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and living there when the Imperial family met its end. That tragic page of history provides a chapter for Roberts, loosely following her search for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Say what you will about The Taming of the Shrew (and you’ll be in good company), but it is one of Shakespeare’s clearest plays. Asked to summarise the action of, say, Richard II or Love’s Labours Lost and you might lose your way somewhere between rival Dukes or intrigues within intrigues, but the marital tussle between Petruchio and his “shrew” of a wife Katherina is –for good or ill – secure. Whatever else director Maria Gaitanidi has done with Shakespeare’s most provocative play here, the overriding impression here is one of confusion. Wrapping unpalatable clarity in abstraction doesn’t Read more ...
David Nice
Not even the unengaged or terminally weary could have dozed through this. Pianists have often commented how the Wigmore Steinway is too big for the hall, and most adjust accordingly. Not 27-year-old Italian Beatrice Rana, but not in the bad way of interpreters who simply bash (there was a young Ukrainian here recently who did just that). If she needs to convey sonority at full pitch, she won't compromise; and her soft playing is equally compelling. The certainty of means to ends is unwavering, the calm upright posture at the keyboard somehow at odds with the massiveness she can convey.Her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It looks as if vandals have ransacked Whistler's Peacock Room. The famous interior was commissioned in the 1870s by shipping magnate, Frederick Richard Leyland to show off his collection of fine porcelain. The specially designed shelves have been broken and their contents smashed; shards of pottery lie strewn across the floor.The destruction seems also to be coming from within, though; it’s as if some form of vile corruption were infecting the very substance of the exotic room. Over the mantelpiece hangs a painting of a princess by James McNeill Whistler; circles of mould have infected Read more ...