Reviews
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t expect a drama called Dublin Murders (BBC One) to be a laugh a minute, but the cumulative anguish, menace and torment of this eight-parter made it almost unbearable, even if viewers were thrown a tiny scrap of hope in the final frames. Adapted by screenwriter Sarah Phelps from Tana French’s novels In the Woods and The Likeness, it was (mostly) the story of detectives Cassie Maddox and Rob Reilly (Sarah Greene and Killian Scott, both consistently impressive) trying to solve the murder of aspiring young ballerina Katy Devlin while struggling with traumas from their own pasts.The Read more ...
mark.kidel
The joy of Afro-Beat comes from the intricate play of polyrhythms, eloquently constructed around the subtle interplay of guitars, bass, backing vocals, percussion and horns: each voice follows a distinct path, and the combination of each in a rich and complex whole is both powerfully mind-blowing and irresistibly danceable.Seun Kuti pays homage, as well he should, to the ancestral power of his father Fela, who with drummer Tony Allen and others created this extraordinary and unique sound. He does it very well: from the moment he dances onto the stage, his lithe body snaking around sensually Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor Miriam Margolyes is a phenomenon. Not only has this Dickensian starred in high-profile shows both here and in Australia, a country whose citizenship she took up in 2013, but she is also Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. And a familiar face from television. And a voice on radio. The programme lists her 12 major awards. Now she returns to the Park Theatre, having starred in its sellout show Madame Rubinstein a couple of years ago, in a family drama by another Park returnee, actor turned playwright Eugene O'Hare, whose bleak debut, The Weatherman, provoked controversy in its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Who won the Cold War? Nobody, according to comedian Rich Hall in this 90-minute film for BBC Four. His theory is that after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, Russia and America merely “flipped ideologies”. The US government now rules by lies and intimidation, while Russia embraced gangster-capitalism and became “a gas station with a bunch of rusty nukes out back.”Resembling an old outlaw who’d been dragged into town tied to the back of somebody’s horse, Hall cast a caustic eye over the neurotic decades after World War Two, as East and West stockpiled missiles and pushed the Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Another year, another cookbook. Rick Stein is back for his next round of food travels and this time, we’re going to France. “For the French, food isn’t part of life, it is life itself,” says Stein, as his Porsche zips through the French countryside. “So what’s slightly worrying is I keep hearing these stories about things not being what they used to be.”To investigate, Stein takes us to “secret France” — towns off the tourist trail — in search of local gems. In his words, “It’s always better to travel hopefully,” so he’s optimistic that France will deliver the goods. In this episode, France Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It is 70 years since Willy Loman first paced a Broadway stage; 70 years since audiences were sucked into the vortex of a man trying to live America’s capitalist dream only to see his life crash and burn around him. This production, which transfers from the Young Vic, famously recasts Arthur Miller’s vision from a black man’s perspective, a powerful idea that gains heightened potency in an era in which Trump continues so shamelessly to reclaim America for the oppressed white man.Director Marianne Elliott – who so brilliantly re-energised Sondheim’s Company last year by making the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to believe that in 1824 there were no fewer than six productions of Weber’s Der Freischütz in London alone. Since then this colourful piece of German Romanticism hasn’t fared nearly so well, disappearing from the UK’s opera houses not just for years but decades at a time.Fortunately concert halls (in London at any rate) have stepped enthusiastically into the breach, and after last night’s latest concert outing – an imported performance by Laurence Equilbey’s Paris-based Insula Orchestra (pictured below) and Accentus choir – you have to wonder whether maybe this isn’t for the best.If Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jonathan Pie is a YouTube star, a spoof television news reporter (created by actor and comic Tom Walker), who is prone to gaffes. It was one of those on-screen gaffes that led to Pie being sacked as the BBC's Westminster correspondent, footage of which we see here on the onstage big screen alongside the highlights and lowlights of Pie's career – mostly the latter. The Fake News Tour is Pie salvaging what he can from his fame as he starts a lecture tour to explain how we got into this Brexit mess.The show is indeed mostly about Brexit, but Pie also takes aim at TV “celebrities”, social media Read more ...
David Nice
The good news is that television's serial slow burn will allow for a lot more original Pullman to make its way to screen than was possible in the one and only instalment of the intended film trilogy, The Golden Compass. Its virtues were many, despite drastic late alterations, and in terms of casting and cinematography, this version doesn't look set to outstrip it. But from one expository episode on BBC One in which we've only briefly left a parallel-world Oxford for the London nerve-centre of the controlling Magisterium – and that's the bad news, that the thrills aren't here yet – it isn't Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s piano concertos often overflow with good humour, but you seldom expect to hear a hearty chuckle from the audience in the middle of a performance of one. Yet something close to a guffaw burst out around King’s Place when soloist Tom Poster, deep into the last-movement cadenza of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, suddenly quoted Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Poster had played the Gershwin before the interval of this typically smart, eclectic and thought-provoking programme from the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.Its cheeky echo in the midst of Mozart’s drolly ingenious Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A fiddle projects upwards from between Erlend Apneseth’s knees. Seated, he holds another in his right hand facing-off the instruments against each other. He’s plucking both, the pizzicato pitter-patter suggesting water drops on a bell or a koto. On the other side of the stage, guitarist Stephan Meidell is looping the sound, treating it to form a wash akin to that of a waterfall. In between, percussionist Øyvind Hegg-Lunde is behind a drum kit rattling and scraping what looks like a cheese grater attached to some allen keys.The moment passes and the Erlend Apneseth Trio settle back into the Read more ...
mark.kidel
BaBa ZuLa only fully manifest their free spirit when they play live, and in the intimate setting of a venue like the Jazz Cafe, where the entre audience is close to the stage. The Istanbul purveyors of "Turkish Psych" began their set by infiltrating the expectant crowd, Two of the band ambled through the excited throng, summoning energy as they went, and introducing the sounds of the electric saz and the large davul, the deep-sounding drum favoured by gypsy bands throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans.A few minutes later, having processed across the floor, as in a shamanic ritual, Read more ...