Reviews
Jill Chuah Masters
Pose offers something that is really rare in the TV world: it’s a show that manages to be both darkly sombre and completely uplifting. The drama, which is about New York City’s 1980s ball culture, focuses on the lives of trans women and gay men competing for glory in the ballroom while fighting for their lives on the streets.The first series was intoxicating. It was fast-moving, beautifully shot, and more camp than the Met Gala. It introduced us to a sprawling cast of talented trans actors. It told a nuanced and harrowing story about the love and loss of a community torn apart by HIV. Pose’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a wonderful thing when a talented comic goes from niche performer to international star almost overnight, and that's what happened to Australian stand-up Hannah Gadsby. In 2017, she announced that her award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show, Nanette, was to be her last as she felt ground down after a decade in a misogynistic and homophobic industry.The show, which recounted her experiences of sexism and homophobia, and of being raped several years ago, was a searing, emotional, heart-rending experience, as well as a call to arms against the patriarchy. And what a swansong. But then...Nanette Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This recital finds Angela Hewitt nearing the end of her “Bach Odyssey”, a project to perform all of Bach’s keyboard works, in five cities around the world, between 2016 and 2020. That’s an impressive feat, especially as she performs from memory. Here she presented the English Suites Nos. 4-6, plus an early Sonata, BWV 963.At first glance, none of these works have immediate audience appeal. The English Suites, although mostly based on dance forms, are elaborate contrapuntal constructions, long and with little melodic character. But they proved an ideal vehicle for Hewitt’s pianism, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Botticelli is a household name, but who knows the true story behind his most famous painting? The painter's 1480s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, is one of the most striking images of Renaissance Florence – and has achieved iconic status. Because it has been minutely dissected by generations of art historians, it takes a bold playwright to smash through the scholarship and give a memorably fresh, in not necessarily accurate, account of its commissioning. Enter Jordan Tannahill, the Canadian polymath whose work spans theatre, film, dance, novels and everything else. And he's still only 31. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One of the more harmless pastimes of us retired academics is rummaging around among the so-called minor contemporaries of great and famous composers. It often turns out that quite a few of them aren’t minor at all, or at least not minor enough to have to have retired academics dig them out. And two such composers made up nearly the whole of this fascinating opening concert of the annual Brecon Baroque Festival, an event well worth battling through floods, high winds and falling trees to be present at, as was necessary on this occasion.The 2019 festival is all about Bohemia, and the stars of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule. In By the Grace of God – its French title, Grâce à Dieu, is drawn directly from the story and freighted with a macabre irony revealed in a late scene – he achieves something very different: male roles dominate in a film that follows documentary lines in its investigation of a real-life Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Starting life as a comic strip in 1938, The Addams Family seems to have reinvented itself for every generation. It’s the story of an odd-ball family from ‘The old country’ (where that is geographically located is by-the-by), who love the grim and gothic. Their outlandish ways were neatly juxtaposed against the wholesome values of American suburbia. The comic preached a message of acceptance which was rife with quirky and yes, kooky, humour. It’s a narrative construction that lends itself easily to being updated, without losing that original black magic. From its humble begins in the New Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Sometimes a dance talent arrives that causes the ground to shift and alters the landscape. Natalia Osipova is one such. Not content to be queen of all she surveys at the Royal Ballet, she is hungry for new territory. Pure Dance is the second solo programme of classical and contemporary work she has presented at Sadler’s Wells and then toured around the world, and this is its (expanded) second edition.Of course this is not the first time a great ballet dancer has turned to contemporary dance. Mikhail Baryshnikov and then Sylvie Guillem famously added more than a decade to their performing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
“People collect diamonds because they sparkle; or they sit on a bench in Cornwall and look out to sea”. At the Hayward Gallery for the opening of her retrospective, Bridget Riley speaks of such uncomplicated pleasures with evident delight. To experience Riley’s works is to be exposed afresh to the thrill of seeing, the sensations induced by her optically challenging fields of lines, curves, spots and waves an unapologetic, bodily reminder that perception is a mechanism over which we have no control, a process that is mysterious and powerful, and fundamental to being alive.They may look like Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is a repertoire piece nowadays, probably as familiar to as many listeners as to orchestral players, which means you look for something distinctive in any performance to identify its essential quality against all the others.With Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro in charge, concluding the BBC Philharmonic’s concert at the Bridgewater Hall last night, it was the soulful obbligato horn solo in the Scherzo (superbly played by guest principal Itamar Leshem) and the immediately following passage that became the emotional heart of the piece. The movement itself had been Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
I wouldn’t want to live in Jack Thorne’s head. Nor Sarah Lancashire’s, for that matter. The Accident is Thorne’s latest four-part drama, and the final instalment in his grim and gripping trilogy of shows for Channel 4. The Accident’s predecessors were National Treasure (2016), about historical sexual abuse, and Kiri (2018), which starred Lancashire and centred on the murder of a young black girl. The Accident is shaping up to be just as compelling as its forerunners, while – if you can imagine – even bleaker in its outlook.The Accident focuses on the aftermath of a fatal explosion at a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In the opening scene of Alejandro Landes’s strange, beautiful but finally unsatisfying Monos, eight teenage guerrillas are playing football blindfold on a high mountain plateau. Why the blindfolds? Perhaps to warn us not to expect any light to be thrown on whys and wherefores in this unsettling, visually stunning film, with its echoes of Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now.These Colombian kids, some gender fluid and mostly first-time actors, are a convincingly feral, Mad Max-ish bunch, with names like Wolf, Bigfoot, Swede, Rambo and Lady. Their code name is Monos and they receive sporadic Read more ...