Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Ballet’s choice of season opener could be dismissed as safe and predictable. But as the glorious naturalistic detail of 1830s Paris unfolds in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 retelling, you see the reasoning. It’s only a year since the Royal Opera House remodelled its ground floor spaces to be more welcoming, and Manon is the ideal first-time ballet. It has everything – glamour, history, a fast-moving love story crackling with illicit sex, crime and social injustice. And it has MacMillan’s choreography, the like of which – in terms of examining the human heart in all its waywardness – Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Second performances are even more valuable than premieres, composers say, when it comes to launching a piece into the world. Spare a thought, then, for Jan Ladislav Dussek, who has had to wait over two centuries for this prize to be awarded to his Mass in G – really, a Missa solemnis – of a scale to rival Beethoven’s example. It was revived last night for the first time since its premiere in 1811 with exemplary spirit and dedication by Academy of Ancient Music forces under Richard Egarr.Like Beethoven, Dussek was a composer primarily for and at the piano. He flourished as a touring virtuoso Read more ...
Heather Neill
Reviewing Ian McKellen's show is, in one sense, like appraising the Taj Mahal or Mount Everest: he too is an awe-inspiring phenomenon. In another sense, Sir Ian is not like that at all, going out of his way to be available to the adoring patrons filling the theatre, apparently enjoying every minute of up to three hours from a jokey beginning geared to Gandalf and Widow Twankey to shaking a collecting bucket at the door as the audience leaves. Apparently indefatigable - despite this show marking his 80th birthday - he can even be found chatting to punters in the stalls during the interval. He Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Joker won the Golden Lion in Venice in September, it was an unprecedented achievement, the first time a comic book-related film had won such a prestigious prize. But then, isn’t your typical comic book film. Starring a phenomenal Joaquin Phoenix, it’s seriously themed, brilliantly executed and quite extraordinary. We’ve seen many Jokers, including memorable turns by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, so it’s not unreasonable to wonder why we’d need another. One reason is that this is a Joker without his Batman, or any superhero trappings; another, that the ‘origin story’ is Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Soaring some 40 feet up towards the ceiling of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus looks ludicrously out of place – like a Victorian interloper within this cathedral to contemporary art. Resembling those monuments you walk past without giving a second’s thought to what they represent, this intruder isn’t just in the wrong place, it is broadcasting the wrong messages.If history is told by the victors and the function of public sculpture is to enshrine their version of events, the American artist turns the tradition on its head to expose some of the dirty dealings Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s nothing like practising what you preach. “I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish, and indeed a deliberate conning of the public” said the composer Ruth Gipps to her biographer Jill Halstead. And sure enough, her Second Symphony – premiered by the then City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1946, and the opening item in this fascinatingly left-field programme from Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – is unmistakably the work of what Arnold Bax would have called a “brazen Romantic”.It’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Peter Nichols died aged 92 last month, just before the opening of this starry West End revival of his most celebrated masterpiece. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) is based on his own family experience of bringing up his disabled daughter in the 1960s, and it has the reputation of being one of the most ground-breaking plays of its generation. This revival stars Toby Stephens and Claire Skinner as the parents, Patricia Hodge as the mother-in-law, and Storme Toolis, who has cerebral palsy and is familiar from New Tricks, playing the daughter Joe. As a campaigner for the rights of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time has been kind to Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys. It's a stealth bomb of a play that I saw in its world premiere production in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1982 and that has been a regular part of my playgoing life ever since. Yes, the apartheid-era South Africa that Fugard dissects with terrifying force has been dismantled, and we live in (supposedly) more enlightened times. Yet the ongoing lesson of a play first directed by Fugard is that racism and hate start from a place of self-loathing. Roy Alexander Weise's beautiful National Theatre production sends that point Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
English National Opera chose a curiously low-key production to open their season. Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice has only three singing roles and very little action. For this production, Wayne McGregor has reimagined the work as an opera/dance hybrid. That brings a valuable dynamic element to Gluck’s stately discourses, but there are few interpretive insights here, and the almost non-existent sets made more demands on the dance than even McGregor’s sophisticated choreography could sustain.The opera itself contains many ballet numbers, so the dance element makes sense. And McGregor resists the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There was a time when hip hop in a theatre was all about showing off. It was about dancers spinning on their head or their elbow so fast and for so long that the audience gaped in disbelief. Although it had long ago migrated from the concrete stairwells of inner city estates, the culture remained rooted in the idea of a battle, a dance-off, a show of virtuosity.Then along came Kenrick Sandy and Michael Asante, whose work with their company Boy Blue inched towards the territory of psychodrama. The hip hop movement is still there – the locking and popping, the smooth-as-silk floor work – but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Five episodes ago, BBC One's The Capture set off at a cracking pace with the apparent abduction and murder of barrister Hannah Roberts by army lance-corporal Shaun Emery. With Roberts’s help, Emery had been acquitted of killing a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in cold blood, the defence’s case hingeing on a timing glitch in the video taken at the scene by Emery’s body-camera.It didn’t make sense that he’d want to bump off the woman who’d dug him out of a huge legal hole, especially as he’d also become more than slightly enamoured of her. The feeling between them appeared to be mutual. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The themes of food and cookery have already been boiled until the bottom of the saucepan melted, but TV commissioning editors can’t stop searching for new twists in the formula. So how about this one – get a couple of prestigious superchefs, and challenge them to make a perfect copy of that famous mass-produced snack, the KitKat.Our host was French maitre d’ Fred Sirieix (from Channel 4’s First Dates), though could one really expect a Frenchman to grasp the cultural resonance and mythic history of this hallowed name in British confectionary? The four-fingered marvel was originally launched by Read more ...