Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
The world’s most successful mystery writer is found dead on the morning after his 85th birthday. In attendance in his Gothic pile are his bickering family, each of whom might wish him dead, and a colourful detective ready to determine whodunnit. We’ve been here before, of course. The good news is that writer/director Rian Johnson’s homage to the Agatha Christie style murder mystery is no dutiful but dull period carbon copy, but a gloriously entertaining, modern-day riff. Poirot and Miss Marple were never as much fun as this. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Grimes, the Canadian art pop performer, made headlines last week when she predicted the end of musical performance as we know it on a podcast interview with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. Live music, she said, would be “obsolete soon”, while she gave a window of a couple of decades in which artificial intelligence would become “so much better at making art” than human creatives.I suspect that Björk, who has been incorporating cutting edge technology into her music since before Grimes was born, would have a few opinions on live music’s purported obsolescence. Her Cornucopia tour, which Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In one of Dora Maar’s best known images, a fashion photograph from 1935 (pictured below), a woman wearing a backless, sparkly evening gown appears to be making her way backstage through a proscenium’s drapes. The star of the show exits the limelight, cheekily concealing her face behind a six-pointed star snatched, maybe, from the star-spangled scenery. Though she’s bracing herself against the wings her posture is also suggestive of abandon, the kind of arms-up relief that comes with finishing a race or dancing late at night when no-one cares. She flirts with the lens and the lens flirts back Read more ...
David Nice
It took no time for Elena Ferrante's two Neapolitan friends to join the ranks of great literary creations: Lenù as successful writer-narrator, critical of her past ambivalence; Lila the unknowable fascinator, her brilliance often diverted into poisoned channels. Four volumes amounting to over 1500 pages offer a psychological complexity four acts of fast-moving theatre can't begin to match. In terms of a theatrical whistlestop tour, though, April De Angelis's adaptation and Melly Still's production - both intensively fine-tuned, I'm told, since the Rose Theatre Kingston run, making dazzing use Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Death in Venice is usually a dark and claustrophobic affair. It lends itself to small-scale staging with minimal props and suggestive, low-key lighting. But for this new production at the Royal Opera, director David McVicar has taken a different approach. He has used all the resources at the company’s disposal to create a more expansive vision. The results are suitably psychological, and atmospheric too, but a greater focus on dance and an ingenious set bring movement and flow to every scene. McVicar knows how to direct his singers too, and the near ideal casting for the two leads, Mark Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Family dramas are a staple of British new writing, but as well as talking about our nearest and dearest, can they also say something about the wider society? The Arrival, by director turned playwright Bijan Sheibani, who won an Olivier award for Bola Agbaje's Gone Too Far! in 2008, has ambitions to be a study of masculinity in crisis. After all, Agbaje's play was about brothers, and both of his recent directing hits – The Brothers Size and Barber Shop Chronicles – were pungent with testosterone. His new one opens at the Bush Theatre, which is enjoying a great run of plays in new artistic Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Given the number of audience members playing air-piano along with parts of Pictures at an Exhibition, Behzod Abduraimov should perhaps be described as a pianist’s pianist. He is nevertheless a great deal more than that. Ten years ago this young musician from Uzbekistan, via Kansas City, emerged victorious from the last-ever London International Piano Competition; he was 18 then and if his artistic growth thus far is anything to go by, we are dealing here with a rare and enchanting musician.Having chosen what appeared to be a programme of miniatures, he made each set of pieces a cohesive Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s claimed that the current world tour of Tutankhamun’s extraordinary treasures will be the last, but they said that about Frank Sinatra too. Whatever, the boy-pharaoh’s life and legend will retain their unprecedented mystique, but no thanks to this first of three programmes fronted by pop-historian Dan Snow.Obviously Channel 5 doesn’t want to vanish down a black hole of academic obscurity, but cluttering up the scenery with three ill-matched presenters treading on each other’s feet while burbling inanities was not the perfect solution. Snow always has an invisible bubble over his head Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
If this is what Sam Fender can provoke on a Monday night, then Lord knows the reaction he generates at a weekend. A chart topping album and sold out tour may mean the Geordie is firmly at pop’s top table now, but it was still impressive the sheer delirium his arrival onstage appeared to generate, a status that lasted throughout the brisk hour or so that followed.Although a youthful crowd, there were older generations in attendance too, perhaps a reflection of the fact that Fender’s influences tap into a cross-generational appeal. There is little point in pretending the 25 year old is re- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beware the asteroid Horus! It’s 60km wide and it’s hurtling towards Earth at incalculable speed. Scientists say, with unfeasible precision, that the impact point will be La Rochelle in France, and it’s going to destroy all of western Europe.It’s terrifying, so it’s strange that this new series from Sky Deutschland (showing on Sky Atlantic) is so flat and uninvolving. The eight days of the title is the time left until armageddon arrives, and the story concerns a group of people (whose interconnections are gradually revealed) and how they respond to imminent extinction.The Steiner family have Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
We all remember that moment when we walked through the back of the wardrobe: the heaviness of the fur coats, that first crunch of the snow underfoot. It’s an extraordinary moment of childhood that has also become too normal because shared memory has made it so. What does it really mean to walk through a door and emerge in another world entirely? That’s inevitably one of the questions involved in staging The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and Sally Cookson’s production rises magnificently to the challenge. Rae Smith’s thrilling design offers nothing as literal as a wooden cupboard Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A 55-minute set without an encore. Songs bleeding into each other. No announcements, no talking from the stage. A constantly moving frontman seemingly channelling a yen to merge Merce Cunningham moves and tai-chi. A band who, barring the odd grin from one of the guitarists, focus on what they are doing without expression. An absence of “please-like-me” posturing.Then there’s the music. In high gear from the moment the stage is taken, it’s a motorik-bedded onslaught systematically augmented with crescendos and mounting power. Beyond the Krautrock influence, other nods are made: New Order when Read more ...