Reviews
Helen Hawkins
The new version of Ibsen’s classic by Anya Reiss at the Almeida prompted me to wonder at times whether wrenching a play out of its era and transposing it to a contemporary setting is worth doing.The Almeida has fielded a strong cast for this updating, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, in a set by Hyemi Shin that cleverly uses the theatre’s unadorned brick walls as a contemporary design feature, along with a giant square skylight overhead like a James Turrell light sculpture. The place reeks of an empty kind of affluence – partly because the Helmers have just moved in and haven’t finished Read more ...
Robert Beale
A concert by the National Youth Orchestra is like no other. For one thing, there are 160 of them – you simply don’t get the kind of power and intensity they can create from a normal-sized orchestra. For another, they play with an enthusiasm and eagerness that even the most committed and devoted professionals would find hard to emulate. They want to share their music: they want you to feel it as they do. And the skill levels are right up there with the best of them, too.It’s a fact that in theatre or dance those whose bodies are still approaching maturity are necessarily unable to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When Jim Jarmusch won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival, it came as something of a surprise. The best film award had been widely expected to go to the emotionally demanding The Voice of Hind Rajab, not to the mannered ensemble piece that is Father Mother Sister Brother. Perhaps the jury, led by Alexander Payne, a fellow American auteur, felt that it was time to honour another veteran indie film-maker, or that it was just too politically fraught to award a docudrama set in Gaza.Either way, the Venice prize cued a cascade of positive reviews from critics, which judging by the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“He’s got a brother who’s a brotha!” exclaims an ecstatic Anna (Halle Bailey; The Little Mermaid; The Colour Purple) to her bestie (Aziza Scott) back in New York. She’s just arrived in Tuscany, where she’s trying to pass herself off as the fiancée of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who she’s only met once, briefly.Matteo has a British-accented cousin, Michael (not his brother, and maybe he’s adopted, but never mind) who’s played by Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton). Cue shirts off in a vineyard, swoon, screams of excitement from the audience.This rom-com, directed by Kat Coiro (Marry Me; Matlock) and Read more ...
James Saynor
Communication devices have long been taken over by unwelcome entities in scary movies. Maybe it was the bedevilled TVs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) that started it. It’s not so much that we believe our phones and gadgets and media might actually be haunted – more that we hate them so much that we want them to be.We’re still waiting for the first great haunted-chatbot movie, but in the meantime this tidy Canadian chiller offers a bit of a throwback, courtesy of a possessed podcast. A woman called Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying in her mother’s dowdy antique home to nurse this comatose Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It feels fitting that this latest revival of Copenhagen should open so soon after Arcadia at the Old Vic. These masterworks by, respectively, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard have much in common, as highly sophisticated marriages of ideas, moral inquiry and human drama, wrapped in mystery.With wars currently waging around the globe, and the threat of greater escalation, this production of the nuclear-themed Copenhagen, which plays around the decisions and tricks of the mind that can determine mass destruction, or not, is an apt reminder of the play’s calibre and resonance. It really is a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
James McAvoy’s directing debut has a plot that’s so implausible, it would probably be laughed out of pitch meetings. But the story is essentially true, as recounted in the 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. “Based on a true lie”, the opening credits announce.This mad storyline’s two protagonists really were ridiculed when they took time out of their call centre jobs and boarded a bus from Arbroath to London for a record label’s open auditions, only to be dismissed as “rapping Proclaimers”. Their authenticity and nationality derided, they decided to prank the “Scottishist” music industry Read more ...
David Nice
Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's. Not quite so much could be said of Wagner's Lohengrin, which I heard on Easter Sunday, though it has stretches of greatness and was Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s not often I feel guilty about making an assessment of a set almost instantly after making it. The support act for the first full-band live show in the UK by NYC alt-pop sensation Jamie Krasner aka James K, was Ryley Walker. Singer/guitarist Walker is well established in US alternative circles to say the least – he’s made a dozen-odd albums, and collaborated with everyone from experimental/improv mainstays (Bill McKay, David Grubbs) to straight-up musical royalty (he toured as a duo with the former Pentangle bassist Danny Thompson). We’d kind of expected, given that the headliner’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell. But does the complexity of real life undermine the inherent drama of this fictional tale?Well, the situation is simple: Fenella Harford is an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. An opening swoop towards London’s gleaming high-rise skyline ends at the building site where a Luftwaffe bomb is unearthed, snub nose shark-like in the soil. Initially disorienting, parallel tales follow. Police Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sarah Millican is at an age where she is pausing to reflect and in Late Bloomer, her most recent show – shown as a special on Channel 4 and Netflix outside the UK and Ireland – she ruminates on what the teenage Sarah would have thought of middle-aged Sarah.The former was shy and bullied, the latter is super confident and a hugely successful comic. How did she get from there to here?To set the scene, Millican divides children into two categories: late bloomers and eager beavers, and she has a handy list that explains the differences so we can see where we are along the spectrum. Among her Read more ...