Reviews
aleks.sierz
Are we really in “a new era of male anger, societal discontent and rage”? This is what Royal Court artistic director David Byrne claims in the programme of Manhunt, Robert Icke’s new documentary play about Raoul Moat. Weak thought, because surely there has never been a decade in which toxic masculinity was not a problem.Still, the current success of Jack Thorne’s Adolescence on Netflix certainly shows that we are more than ever fascinated by its roots in boyhood, but male rage has a very long backstory. All you have to do is read the Bible. Or scan the myths of ancient Greece (Icke’s Read more ...
Simon Thompson
I was in Germany last week, and nearly every town I went to was advertising a St Matthew or a St John Passion taking place in the week up to Easter. It says something about how deeply engrained Bach’s Passion settings are in German culture that they can muster up so many performances while, in most years, we in Scotland get only one for the whole country.What a one it is, though. The Dunedin Consort are leaders in this repertoire and their acres of experience tell with every well-turned phrase, every carefully shaped cadence, and every dramatically pointed chord that gives life, meaning and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It seems a bizarre idea. Take a pivotal film in American culture that reset the perception of The Great American Dream at this, obviously, pivotal moment in American culture in which The Great American Dream, for millions, is being literally swiped away at gunpoint, And… make it into a musical? Stranger ideas have worked - try Evita and Assassins for starters, but there’s plenty more cut from unpromising cloth and don’t forget that the first words on the programme say ‘BASED ON THE NOVEL WRITTEN BY JAMES LEO HERLIHY’. For all that assertion, the key question persists: can the stage show Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1967, John Lee Hooker released a single titled “The Motor City is Burning.” The song commented on the civil unrest which had taken place in his Michigan home city of Detroit that July. “Oh, the motor city's burnin',” sang Hooker. “My home town burnin' down to the ground, Worser than Vietnam, Well, it started on 12th and Clairmont, this mornin'.”A couple of years on, Detroit’s MC5 released their version of “Motor City is Burning” (no “The”) on their debut album, the live set Kick Out The Jams. Now, the title is borrowed for the three-CD clamshell box Motor City Is Burning - A Read more ...
David Nice
When you’ve already come as close as possible to perfection in the greatest masterpiece, why risk a repeat performance with a difference? Because Bach’s St Matthew Passion needs to be an annual fixture without routine, and because inspirational IBO director Peter Whelan can be guaranteed not only to recapture the magic but to try a few new things, and to choose new soloists with fine judgement.Two replacements matched the impact of last year's Evangelist and alto 1. Having got over the astonishment at the perfect countertenor, Hugh Cutting, in 2024, it was always a given that the great Helen Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Keelan Kember’s play Thanks for Having Me may look like a vehicle for Kedar Williams-Stirling (Sex Education, Red Pitch), but it’s more accurately a showcase for the comedic talents of Keelan Kember, a former OUDS performer with a TV pilot to his credit already. This 70-minute piece looks like another one.The set alone suggests we are in sitcom territory, a fashionable pad belonging to Honey (Williams-Stirling), a 30-year-old accountant, though he styles himself as a wannabe musician to his dates. The latest of these is Maya (Adeyinka Akinrinade, pictured bottom, with Williams-Stirling), Read more ...
David Nice
A lot hung upon the delivery last night of Henning Kraggerud, whom I last witnessed leading performances of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and some of his own music at the head of a mine in Svalbard: he was announced at the beginning of the concert as the Irish Chamber Orchestra’s new artistic partner, following the likes of another instrumentalist-composer, Jörg Widmann, and fellow violinist Thomas Zehetmair. So did he triumph? Beyond wildest expectations.You could even have called this performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons a concert staging. Introducing each concerto with a charming mixture of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2025 is tomorrow (Saturday 12th April 2025)! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been sent a selection of exclusive RSD goodies. Check the reviews. Then check your local record shop! See you amongst it.THEARTSDESK ON VINYL CHOICE CUT FOR RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2025Marianne Faithfull Burning Moonlight EP (Decca)A fitting and thoughtfully put together final release from an icon. Marianne Faithfull, who died in January this year, aged 78, was a one-off singer and creative, also a proper 1960s countercultural heavyweight, a woman who lived the best and worst of bright, fast hedonism. Read more ...
Sad Book, Hackney Empire review - What we feel, what we show, and the many ways we deal with sadness
Jenny Gilbert
Who goes to the theatre to feel sad? That is, knowing full well that they won’t be going home with a skip in their step. Many people, it would appear, given the success of a small touring dance show based on a book by the poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen.Sad Book was written in the wake of the sudden death, from meningitis, of Rosen’s 19-year-old son Eddie. Published in 2004, with illustrations by Quentin Blake, it was originally marketed as a children’s book, but its appeal has clearly been much wider and it regularly appears on lists of recommended texts for adults blindsided by grief.In Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong returned to the symphony with which he made his first big impression conducting the Hallé – and made a big impression with it again.The evening in February 2023 when he conducted Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was his first concert with them, and it has to be said he was a relative unknown to many of the audience listening then and probably to most UK classical music fans. I was there, and recorded my impressions to the effect that there was never a dull moment when he was in charge, and that the main characteristics of his interpretation were an assured and idiomatic approach to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a world of macho super-achievers like Jack Reacher and Ethan Hunt, maybe it’s time to hear it for the nerdy guys. The Amateur (based on a novel by Robert Littell) was made once before, in 1981, starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer and directed by Charles Jarrott. For this sleek remake, the director’s chair is occupied by James Hawes, who, among other things, directed the first series of Apple TV’s Slow Horses.Thus, perhaps he’s attuned to the misfits and renegades in the undercover world, though the opulently-equipped CIA in The Amateur is a far cry from the low-budget squalor in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Director Louise Courvoisier has put herself firmly on the film map with this story of young Totone and his little sister, carving out a living in the modern-day Jura countryside after being orphaned. Think the Dardenne brothers with more sunshine and less angst, a way of life where young calves are transported to market in the front seat of the family car.Courvoisier is from the village featured and cast her film from the locals working there. All are amateurs, all are naturals. Her Totone is a poultry farm worker, Clément Faveau, an 18-year-old with the ruddy cheeks and telltale half- Read more ...