Reviews
Thomas H. Green
One question springs immediately to mind on hearing that Romesh Ranganathan’s new stand-up show, The Cynic’s Mixtape, is touring: how does he find the time? Ranganathan has overtaken Jack Whitehall as Britain’s most media ubiquitous comic, with a deluge of TV shows and appearances, a column in the Guardian newspaper and even a recent autobiography. However, his TV CV is hit’n’miss, which leads to a second question: can he still cut it in the live arena?In short, yes, he can. With able support from Jake Lambert - who is heckled by that rarest of creatures, a Brighton Brexiteer – Ranganathan is Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The BBC put social and ethnic diversity at the heart of this Last Night programme. The concert opened with a new work, by Daniel Kidane, called Woke, and the first half was dominated by the music of black and female composers. In the second half, mezzo Jamie Barton waved a rainbow flag during her "Rule, Britannia!" The Proms is clearly in the vanguard for inclusivity among classical music organisations, although the fact that Kidane stood out as one of the only non-white members of the huge audience suggests there is still a long way to go.Woke is a dynamic concert opener, energised by Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a book about experiences that go beyond reading about art. Martin Gayford’s 20 short essays about press trips and self-motivated travel concern meetings – in the flesh, in real time and space – with art that includes murals, sculptures and glacier waters, and with artists through interviews and studio visits. For a book whose title is a riff on Nancy Mitford’s touching novel, The Pursuit of Love, it is also a subtle paean to the enormous variety of objects, buildings and paintings that we deem art, as well as its history and practitioners.The reader is of course at a remove and in a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martinů's The Greek Passion is a bold choice as a season opener, all the more so given that Opera North are staging the rarely-seen original version of his 1957 opera. Commissioned for Covent Garden then shabbily ditched, this is faster moving and more cinematic than the radically rewritten edition performed in Zurich two years after Martinů's death in 1959. Based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s bestseller Christ Recrucified, it’s now alarmingly pertinent, a tale of refugees arriving in a small Greek village preparing to stage an Easter Passion play.Christopher Alden’s powerful, spare staging has many Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last week in central London, the Covent Garden branch of the book and music chain Fopp was selling CD sets branded as “5 Classic Albums” and “Original Album Series”. Each collected five CDs of the same number of albums. Amongst what could be picked up were collections by Kevin Ayers, Fairport Convention, Steve Hackett and Man. The asking price for each was £10. There were no bonus tracks and each set didn’t include a booklet. Nonetheless, this is a very keen price.But it’s hard not to have mixed feelings about what’s represented. Have major labels have thrown their hands up and decided that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At first, the opening episode of Sky 1’s enticing new drama Temple looked like it was going to be mostly concerned with a heist gone wrong. A gang of bandits were busily stealing an enormous mountain of money when they were inadvertently locked inside the building they were robbing by their half-witted getaway driver. The sound of approaching police sirens indicated the way events were heading.This had been intercut with shots of Dr Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) making a furtive-looking late night visit to a hospital, ostensibly to retrieve his missing diary. In fact he was nicking a bag-full Read more ...
Graham Fuller
People who idly use the phrase “it’s like living in a war zone” when considering their domestic mess should see Waad al-Kateab’s documentary For Sama.Everyone should see it, in fact. Waad lived in a terrifying war zone – besieged East Aleppo in Syria – and saw babies, children, and adults killed daily as she, her doctor husband Hamza, and their neighbours attempted to go on with their lives as part of the rebel population opposed to Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship. They were inches from death every second. Among friends who perished were the paediatrician who delivered Waad’s first Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An excellent director makes a rare misstep with Amsterdam, in which a compelling if tricksy play is given an arch and mannered production that only distances the audience further. Not to be confused with either Rotterdam or Europe, two similarly titled plays that in name alone form a de facto triptych, Israeli writer Maya Arad Yasur's short, jagged play doesn't so much challenge playgoers as wilfully try their patience: the 80 minutes (no interval) pass very slowly indeed. (The translation is by Eran Edry.) The irony is that Yasur has an important story to tell about the weight of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You’re so meticulous,” says Astrid (Maria Bonnevie) to her teenage daughter Jill (impressive newcomer Yvla Bjørkaas Thedin) as they create a batik artwork together at the kitchen table. Little son Bo (Casper Falck-Løvås) looks on as he munches a jam sandwich. A happy domestic scene? Anything but. “Meticulous” isn’t even really a compliment, coming from this chaotic, mentally fragile mother.This is Norwegian writer/director Camilla Strøm Henriksen’s first feature film (she’s working now on episodes of the TV series Occupied) and she has extracted remarkable performances from these young Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Elizabeth Bernholz, known on stage as Gazelle Twin, comes straight from a line of musical visionaries – rebels and misfits whose influences fleet through her songs like will-o’-the-wisps. Here is the formal, clever ennui of The Stranglers, the wild, cathartic howls of Pink Floyd’s anti-establishmentarianism, and the unearthly arcs of Kate Bush’s otherworldly electro-folk. She chimes too with more contemporary outsiders: the sardonic flat-line of a knowing Metronomy, the spangled freneticism of MIA., Fever Ray’s bleak gut-swell propulsion, and hints of Björk’s operatic, overwhelming Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Shock of the Future is for anyone who's watched a music biopic and thought "that's not how it works!" Directed and co-written by Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague fame, it's perhaps the most realisitic film about recording music ever made. But as anyone who's ever been in the studio will tell you, the legends are much more exciting than the reality.Alma Jodorwsky plays Ana, an aspiring synth wave sensation. She spends her day (which takes up the entire length of the film) in a friend's flat that she's sitting, along with his huge collection of synthesisers, keyboards and recording equipment. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When did Dorothy (Constance Wu) really want to be a stripper? Maybe it’s when she looks with love at Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) during her strutting set piece dance, as she descends to a carpet of cash. If that’s the equivalent of Ray Liotta’s gangster gliding to the best table in Goodfellas, Hustlers is more accurately the Casino of stripper films, sociological and historical, but never salacious, in its depiction of an outré life. Set around the 2008 financial crash, Lorene Scafaria’s film shows how the women’s “side-hustles” with Wall Street clients slipped into drugging them and directly Read more ...