Reviews
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra has a good track record when it comes to bringing in young talents with exciting prospects, and its 2019-20 season begins with the newly appointed Finnish chief conductor designate of the Oslo Philharmonic, Klaus Mäkelä, on the rostrum, and the young Icelander Víkungur Ólafsson as solo pianist. The bespectacled, besuited pair look almost as if they might have stepped off the set of The League of Gentlemen, but their music making was top-class and, in their shared Beethoven concerto in particular, impressive indeed.It opened with Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Permanent Way first roared its way into the national consciousness in 2003 when, after a triumphant opening in York, it toured the UK before transferring to the National Theatre. Under theatre director Max Stafford-Clark’s characteristically rigorous, intelligently exacting prescription, playwright David Hare collated a wide range of interviews with individuals ranging from politicians to train accident victims, to conduct an excoriating survey of the consequences of privatising Britain’s railways. Twenty-two years after the Southall train crash – one of the four major accidents Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Cameron has been a recluse since the fateful days of June 2016 when the referendum on EU membership didn’t go quite the way he’d hoped. He’s probably been living through a private purgatory. “I think I will think about this forever,” he murmured to the camera in this first instalment of BBC One’s two-part doc.Finally, though, his inevitable (though surely not “long-awaited”) autobiography is hitting the shops. Dave, who now looks like a slightly melancholy hedge fund manager or the kind of chap who skippers a 40-foot gin palace down the Solent on the weekend, has dragged himself out of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s “refugee musical” – now there’s a phrase you don’t expect to write – is a treat. Harking back to the early 20th century pogroms of Eastern Europe, it’s darkly steeped in history, conveying the sorrows of leaving behind an old world as well as the slow, painful process of integration into a new one, in this case Canada. In case that sounds too serious, it’s also a delight of performance and music, liberally – and rather often, illiberally – infused with a Jewish humour that is sardonic and survivalist by turn.It’s the work of the 2btheatre company from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Count Arthur Strong, the character created by Steve Delaney, started life in the late 1990s and became a cult figure at the Edinburgh Fringe over several years. Radio shows and three series of a television sitcom (written with Graham Linehan) followed and now he’s taking the character back on the road with Is There Anybody Out There?The Count is a meticulously constructed character, a cantankerous, pedantic, mostly out of work former variety artist whose world view - of his talent, his intellect - is gloriously wide of the mark, and whose hopelessly confused syntax and malapropisms are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The cancer weepie is knocked off its tear-jerking axis by Lulu Wang’s sly and heartfelt autobiographical tale. Drawing on the first-generation immigrant, internal culture-clash she experienced after her Chinese grandmother’s terminal diagnosis, and the absurdly elaborate lengths their family went to hide it from her, The Farewell is a funeral-com with a fable-like structure, and a highly personal tone. Billi (rapper-actor Awkwafina) is Wang’s alter ego, a 30-year-old, Chinese-American scuffling writer, who we first see on the phone telling relentless, reassuring white lies about her New Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been a number of excellent science fiction films of late – Gravity, The Martian, Annihilation among them. But Ad Astra may be the most complete and profound addition to the genre since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s masterwork has set the bar for 50 years now and its proposition – from prehistoric ape to star child – remains in a league of its own for imaginative bravura. So it’s striking to what extent the new film, directed by indie stalwart James Gray and starring a scintillating Brad Pitt, has similar ambitions and narrative trajectory Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connoisseurs of gnarly Boston-based crime sagas like The Town, The Departed and Black Mass will quickly find themselves at home in this sleaze-ridden new show, made by Showtime and brought to us by Sky Atlantic. Created and largely written by Chuck MacLean, it’s umbilically linked to the aforesaid movies in various ways, being produced by Boston’s finest Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (from The Town and The Departed) and starring Kevin Bacon – an FBI man in Black Mass – as another FBI man, Jackie Rohr.It’s 1992, and though there’s change in the wind, the Boston police are an incestuously-knit Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Celebrating the friendship between the two great 20th-century composers, the Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra launched this year. Founded by British conductor Jan Latham-Koenig and British Ambassador to the Russian Federation Sir Laurie Bristow, it’s a way to leave a lasting legacy for the 2019 Year of Music between Britain and Russia. 87 of the finest young musicians from both countries were selected by audition, and after a week’s residency at the Sirius Park of Science and Art in Sochi, where they received coaching from a wide range of musicians drawn from major orchestras and opera Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster. Strange that the only operatic version is by Jules Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Three women decide to take over their husbands’ criminal activities, proving more than a match for the men who dominate the underworld. If this outline of The Kitchen sounds familiar, it’s because it was just last year that Steve McQueen’s lauded crime thriller Widows had much the same premise. That said, screenwriter Andrea Berloff’s first film as a director is a very different animal, far less polished but an entertaining thriller in its own right.The differences are instructive. Widows was based on a highly regarded British TV series, relocated to contemporary Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The work isn't finished on Big, if this stage musical of the beloved 1988 Tom Hanks film is ever to, um, make it big. A Broadway flop in 1996 where it was among the last shows directed by the late, much-admired Englishman Mike Ockrent, the material finds a sweetness in its West End incarnation that eluded it Stateside. But even with onetime boyband member Jay McGuiness adroitly capturing the manchild played by Hanks onscreen, the show remains awkwardly positioned between the satiric and the sentimental. And a ruthless pruning wouldn't go amiss either: by the time we'd got to the long-aborning Read more ...