Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
For a few seconds last night, the Royal Albert Hall turned into London’s biggest – and cheesiest – disco. At the end of the Ball movement in the Aurora Orchestra’s dramatised version of the Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz’s tipsily lurching waltz climaxed in a lightshow that sent a galaxy of glitterball stars swirling through the auditorium. You can’t exactly stage a symphony – even one as theatrical as this – as you can an opera. Still, conductor Nicholas Collon and directors Jane Mitchell and James Bonas – abetted by designers Kate Wicks and Will Reynolds – did their utmost to make the work’ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In March of this year Edwyn Collins released his ninth studio album, Badbea, his fourth since two life-altering cerebral haemorrhages derailed him in 2005. It’s a vivacious collection that runs the gamut of what guitar pop can be, from acoustic strumming to psychedelic riffing to lo-fi punkin’, all catchy as burrs. His set is peppered with it. By the time he reaches the encore, even the slow, elegiac title track, with its gloomy references to “a ruined monument to life and death”, holds the audience rapt.Clad in a Fred Perry-style white shirt with red trim, Collins initially appears on stage Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s now Edinburgh Fringe transfer season in London, but here’s one they made earlier: Cora Bissett’s Fringe First-winning autobiographical play from the 2018 Festival about her time in 1990s indie band Darlingheart. Though the broad shape of this tale is familiar, Bissett’s gig-theatre approach lends it a raw authenticity and engaging confessional quality.Bissett (pictured below) was still at school when she replied to an advert in the local Fife paper and became the lead singer of Darlingheart. She was driven less by musical ambition – though Patti Smith was already a favourite – more Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s new documentary, Honeyland, is a lament for a vanishing world. Captured with the delicacy of honeycomb, it focuses on the last wild beekeeper in Europe. Hatidze Muratova lives in rural Macedonia on a craggy farm without running water or electricity. Her ailing, aged mother, Nazife, is her only company. They may bicker, but there’s a great deal of love, shown in the way Hatidze spoon-feeds her yoghurt and honeycomb, or washes her hair over a basin. Despite the hardships of her lifestyle, Hatidze is content. She is the wild bee’s caretaker. As Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New artistic directors are popping up all over British theatre. Every week seems to usher in a refreshingly versatile talent taking the reins of a major theatre. Tonight, veteran new writing advocate Roxana Silbert, the new head of Hampstead Theatre, opens her first season, as well as the celebration of the venue's 60-year anniversary, with American writer Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's The King of Hell's Palace, a revelatory story about corruption in China in the 1990s, here given a tremendously vivid production by Michael Boyd. But while it is great to be able to witness theatre about this super- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Ailey company is that rare thing – a dance legend that’s even better than you remember. While no one forgets their first encounter with America’s No.1 touring troupe and its unique mix of ballet, modern, jazz, street, and all-round athletic fabulousness, repeat viewings only increase one’s respect. The opening night of Programme C at Sadler’s Wells notched up my own 13th exposure to Revelations, the company’s barn-storming calling card inspired by Ailey’s early experience of segregated rural Texas. And it’s still fresh. Try as I might to spot a pasted-on smile in “Rocka My Soul”, there Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the fact that the Downton Abbey 2015 Christmas special wrapped the series up with a seemingly watertight bow, a cinema offering of Julian Fellowes’ much-loved creation was perhaps inevitable. And so virtually all of the series cast and a few new ones descend upon the fictitious Yorkshire pile for more misadventures upstairs and down. With no loose ends, Fellowes needed to devise a new dilemma to unite the Crawleys and the many staff who keep their privileged lives on track in 1927. Cue a letter from Buckingham Palace that heralds the imminent visit to Downton of King Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Blame it on the box set. The four Bach Orchestral Suites fit neatly together as a recording project. They used to fill out the four sides of a double LP back in the early stages of the baroque revival. Completists and collectors could rejoice then, and with many more versions to choose from, they still can now. But are these pieces, which were never intended to be played one after the other, varied enough to make a satisfying and convincing concert? Not really.The first problem is a nagging propensity to hang around in D major. Two of the four suites – so half of the set in the versions Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“I don’t think I have the right to influence her,” says an older character of her daughter in For Services Rendered, W Somerset Maugham’s 1932 anti-war drama. If only all elder statesmen and women felt the same about the youth. Tom Littler’s revival at the Jermyn Street Theatre makes great use of an intimate space, but the first half is a slog and only a few of the large cast make their mark. The setting is appropriately idyllic: a garden in rural Kent (the village’s name is Ramblestone, naturally), late summer 1932, the gentle thwocks of a game of tennis drifting over the fence. Eden Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Where does music come from? That’s the vital question posed to Sergei Rachmaninoff in Dave Malloy’s extraordinary 2015 chamber work, as the great late-Romantic Russian composer – stuck in his third year of harrowing writer’s block – tries to relocate his gift. It comes from others and from himself; from past and present; from everything and nothing. It is ephemeral, and yet it is at the core of his very being.Rach (Keith Ramsay, pictured below with Tom Noyes), traumatised by the failure of his first symphony in 1897 – mangled by a drunken conductor and finished off by a sharp-tongued Read more ...
Heather Neill
Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking heroine, her story reimagined by prolific playwright Tanika Gupta? Ibsen's understanding of the fears and frustrations of women in the Nineteenth Century stood out among writers and thinkers of his time and modern women writers are likely to warm to him. Stef Smith's version of A Doll's House, offering three manifestations of Nora and bringing her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, and Channel 5 marked the occasion with this sobering documentary. Focusing on male suicide – incredibly, now the UK’s biggest killer of men under 45 – it studied six patients at the Riverside Mental Health Centre in Hillingdon, west London. The results were both harrowing and heartbreaking.Director Rachel Harvie stood back and let her interviewees tell their stories, which served as both therapy and confessional. Charlie, a sad, mild-mannered boy of 18 covered in self-inflicted scars, has been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, social anxiety and “ Read more ...