Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Sir Lenny Henry, PhD and CBE, is scarcely recognisable as the teenager who made his TV debut on New Faces in 1975. He’s been a stand-up comedian, musician and Shakespearean actor, and even wrote his own dramatised autobiography for BBC One.A determined buster of boundaries, he has also campaigned tirelessly for more ethnic diversity on British TV. For this new three-part series, aided by film clips and a few talking heads, he uses the history of TV comedy to map changing attitudes to race and immigration. Programmes two and three will tackle stand-up and sketch comedy, while this opening Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Bill Frisell is all about sound and melody and enhancing whatever context he is in.” That quote, which defines both the American guitarist’s gentle and benign nature and his huge level of musicianship, is from Emma Franz, who recently directed and produced a film portrait of him.In Frisell’s new project, Harmony, which also, finally, marks his debut on Blue Note Records with an album in his own name, he applies that principle to working with singers. “I’m singing with my guitar and the rest are singing with their voices. But basically that’s what it is: we’re singing together,” he has said Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Dichterliebe is a song-cycle full of gaps, silences, absences. Where is the piano at the start of “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” when the voice enters first and so startlingly, ungrammatically alone? Where is the voice during the long piano postlude when the vocal line disappears but the singer continues to stand centre-stage? We even seem to join the cycle mid-conversation, unsure what has prompted the diffident, tentative harmonies with which it starts. Biggest of all however, are the gaps left by the four songs that Schumann excised between completing the manuscript version and publishing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently your odds of dying in a plane crash are about one in 11 million, while chances of death in a car accident are about one in 5,000. Therefore flying is theoretically safe, and supposedly getting safer. You wouldn’t know it from the TV schedules though, littered as they are with the likes of Air Crash Investigation, Seconds from Disaster and documentaries about Concorde’s hideous demise in Paris in 2000. YouTube hosts an apparently infinite number of air crash “greatest hits”.Chaos in the Cockpit is Channel 5’s contribution to the queasy cult of plane-wreck TV, and director Kim Lomax Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
David Greig’s reimagining of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel has brought a masterpiece of intellectual science fiction back to its philosophical core. Over the concentrated two hours of Matthew Lutton’s production, which reaches the Lyric Hammersmith from Melbourne via Edinburgh, we are compelled to contemplate, in the best tradition of the genre, ideas that go “beyond the reach of human beings”, as Lem himself put it. The experience is mesmerising. And if that sounds somehow cold or inhuman, the dramatic kernel of the story hits home at a deeply human level: Lem’s premise in this space Read more ...
David Nice
Verdi, Elgar, Janáček, John Adams - just four composers who achieved musical transcendence to religious texts as what convention would label non-believers, and so have no need of the "forgiveness" the Fátima zealots pray for their kind in James MacMillan's The Sun Danced. Dodgily championed by fellow conservative Damian Thompson - ouch - as "fearless defender of the Catholic faith and Western civilization" (for which I read, no Muslims in Europe, please), MacMillan is rather nauseatingly cited as a composer with a direct line to his Catholic God (he doesn't claim that himself); but, dammit, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This programme of three short works is all about influence, specifically the supposed cross currents between ballet and contemporary dance in the latter half of the 20th century. The irony is that this is the first time that the Royal Ballet has presented a piece made by the great American dance pioneer and experimenter Merce Cunningham, whose centenary this marks. Had they not thought him relevant before now?Still, better late than never. This trio of ballets – a compact, early-ish work by Cunningham, a contemporaneous one by Frederick Ashton, and a world premiere by New Yorker Pam Tanowitz Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sabrina Mahfouz is a British-Egyptian writer who has explored issues of Muslim and British identity in various formats. Her work includes poetry, fiction, anthologies and performances, as well as plays. And she's pretty prolific. Since her Dry Ice was staged at the Bush in 2011, she has written some 18 other plays, of various lengths. Now she makes her debut at the Royal Court, the capital's premiere new writing theatre, with a short play that boasts an intriguing title, A History of Water in the Middle East, and which features Mahfouz in the cast. It is also part of the recent trend for gig Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Time passes slowly and remorselessly in The Irishman. Though its much remarked de-ageing technology lets us glimpse Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) executing German POWs aged 24, none of the gangsters here ever seem young. Everyone is heavy with experience, bloated with spilt blood. The Scorsese gang’s all here for what is surely his last stand in the genre - the returning De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, and a great Scorsese debut for Pacino. They’re assembled for the story of a gangster’s working life, from first killing to casket.Like Leone’s elegiac, De Niro-starring Once Upon a Time Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You seldom expect to feel the breath of apocalypse and the terror of the grave amid the modestly rationalist architecture and passion-killer acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, before Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra set to work on the Verdi Requiem, I wondered whether – on a gloomy, rain-swept autumn night – any echoey, cobwebby, run-down Victorian church in south London might have suited the spirit of the piece better than this antiseptically clean, well-lighted place. By the time, though, that a lighting malfunction in the gantries above made the stage Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Every now and then a book comes out that can change lives. If a survey like this had appeared when I was a student at the Slade, the struggle to make headway as a female artist would have seemed less daunting. We’d have had role models and names with which to counter the assertion that there had never been any significant women artists. And the recent explosion of female talent celebrated in this book might have happened a generation earlier.Phaidon’s latest offering is a revelation. The title is a response to the essay “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” written in 1971 by American Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The temptation with the 20th anniversary reissue of Ḣ-Camp Meets Lo-Fi (Explosion Picture Score) is to look for traces of what came earlier and pointers towards what would come in Iceland’s music. The album was credited to Dip, a collaboration between former Sugarcubes drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson and the on-the-up Jóhann Jóhannsson.The latter soon went on form Apparat Organ Quintet and instigate the arts collective Kitchen Motors. By the time of his 2018 death, he was internationally known for his soundtrack music for Sicario, The Theory of Everything and more, and solo works such as Orphée Read more ...