Reviews
Adam Sweeting
This new legal comedy is based on a well-received book by Alex McBride, but the transition from print to the BBC Two screen hasn’t been an unalloyed success. It stars Will Sharpe as trainee barrister Will Packham, who’s only been on the job for three months and faces cut-throat competition from three eager rivals for a post at a plush London law firm. He’s learning the law under the tutelage of Caroline, played with acidic cynicism by ever-reliable Katherine Parkinson (pictured below).Written for TV by Kieron Quirke, Defending the Guilty is an A-Z of the chaos and pitfalls of the law, where Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Alexander Zeldin continues his devastating analysis of modern Britain in this culminating play of a (very loose) trilogy that started with 2014’s Beyond Caring, followed by LOVE two years after that. These are bleak dramas that show human beings washed up on the edges of a society in which levels of social support have been brutally pared down, even as they contend with change that has drastically disbalanced established ways of life, from zero-hours contracts (Beyond Caring) to homelessness (LOVE). The Dorfman has become a signature setting for the anonymous, dilapidated institutional Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re a farmer who works round the clock to feed sheep, milk cows and so forth, how on earth do you make time to find a partner and reap a harvest of marital bliss? Well you could ask Sara Cox if you can join in her dating game for “lonely rural romantics”, back for its second series on BBC Two, but success cannot be guaranteed.Still, Cox, who grew up on a Lancashire beef farm, makes a cheery and plain-speaking host as she drags together suitors and suit-ees. This week’s contestants were Grace (23), who’s about to take over running the family farm in the Welsh borders when her father Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Kasper Holten left a mixed bag of productions behind at Royal Opera when he left in 2017, but the best of them - though not all my colleagues on The Arts Desk have agreed - is this Don Giovanni, now back for its latest revival.Visually, the production is stunning. The set (designer Es Devlin) is a full-sized house, onto which videos are projected (video designer Luke Halls). The house rotates, and the projections follow, a high-tech effect that manages to keep the eye tricked for the entire length of the opera. The two storeys of the house create a double-tier set. The action typically takes Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rob Brydon, Lee Mack and David Mitchell are the host and team captains respectively of Would I Lie to You?, the long-running BBC One panel game. Now they are touring together in Town to Town, which is family-friendly fun (with occasional naughtiness from the delightfully sweary Mack).Brydon takes the stage first and nicely guys the audience with his trademark insincere flattery of them and the town, and does it while running through a few of his excellent impressions, including Hugh Grant and Mick Jagger. Then Mack and Mitchell join him for a quiz based on how much they know or can guess Read more ...
Ellie Porter
You might think that being first on the bill with a half-hour slot at 1.15pm would be an affront to a band who’d had a 12-times platinum album and ruled the 90s airwaves, but if they are offended Simply Red aren’t showing it. A weatherbeaten Mick Hucknall and his beaming companions are kicking off BBC Radio 2’s annual "Festival in a Day", a highly civilised affair (you can pre-order 80-quid picnics and it finishes at 9.30pm) featuring sets from huge pop names and chatty links by cheerful Radio 2 presenters.Despite the early start, Simply Red have attracted a gigantic crowd, who lustily sing Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
While the Proms were ringing out the old season, the Wigmore Hall ushered in the big celebration of 2020: the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. The venue’s year-long festival (actually longer – the actual birthday is December ‘20) kicked off with a Beethoven weekend with more than just Beethoven in it. What stood out was how astoundingly good Beethoven sounds compared to almost anybody else. I went to the first three concerts of the first day.To begin, the cellist Steven Isserlis and the fortepianist Robert Levin did give pure Beethoven such a run in the park that we could Read more ...
David Nice
Any festival would be proud and honoured to end with the great Elisabeth Leonskaja playing the last three Beethoven piano sonatas. Here the Everest was swiftly scaled as the tenth concert of a packed Wigmore Hall weekend. How I wish I could have heard more than the final two on Sunday evening, all-Beethoven unlike some of the predecessors reviewed above by Jessica Duchen, but they served up the perfect contrasts: breathtaking sheen in the lighter earlier Beethoven from young players alongside the best in their middle years followed by poleaxing profundity. There can be no pianist alive who Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For a band mostly known as a brilliantly ludicrous cocktail of other’s people’s sound-styles, the Simulation Theory tour is proof that Muse have become musical legends in their own right.Yes, their progressive rock is the combined conglomeration that would result of you threw Queen, The Darkness, Prince and Radiohead in the tumble dryer and they came out crackling with static. But while there are intelligent and irreverent references to elements of the above, the bombastic futuristic narrative and preposterously prophetic wisdom of Muse’s lyrics combined with instrumental genius and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Simon Rattle has a knack for unearthing large-scale orchestral works that pack a punch. Olivier Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà … (Illuminations of the Beyond …) was completed in 1991, a year before the composer’s death, and is both a reflection on mortality and a summation of his life’s work. Quotations from the Book of Revelation head many of the movements, and Messiaen envisions the heavenly world through expansive string movements, with muted violins intoning long, plaintive melodies. Huge percussion and brass sections provide weight and colour, though the mood remains serene.Best of all Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pere Ubu are much like The Fall in their dauntless explication of one man’s vision, and commitment to an individual, primal rock’n’roll, initially called punk, but pushing far past its limits. Where Mark E. Smith’s alcoholic dissolution hampered his later years, Pere Ubu’s sole constant, David Thomas, has if anything tightened his focus on a post-industrial, clanking, ruined Americana, all rust, dust and diners, recalled for decades now from unlikely self-exile in Hove. I visited him there 20 years ago, an imposingly vast man ensconced in the corner of a pub, discussing cricket with a whippet Read more ...
mark.kidel
It is a truth perhaps not quite but almost universally accepted that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beloved of GSCE English Lit examiners, and often adapted for the screen, is a part of the canon, waiting to be re-interpreted according to the fashions of the day. The part-musical, part-ironic pastiche, created by the Glasgow companies Blood of the Young and Tron Theatre, written by Isobel McArthur and directed by Paul Brotherston, takes the novel’s proto-feminist theme and concern with social inequality, and conjures a lively yet strangely heartless comic remix, with and all-female cast Read more ...