Reviews
Saskia Baron
This gothic yarn set in 1850s Snowdonia stars Maxine Peake as Elen. She’s left alone with two young daughters to manage an isolated farm when her husband goes off to war. Mysterious omens – a sheep’s heart filled with nails festoons the farm door – and ghostly shadows in the night all conspire to alarm her older daughter. Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) begins to doubt that her strict mother has the ability to keep her children safe, especially when Elen starts to have seizures. There’s no help from neighbours or the church and it becomes clear that the local slate mine owner is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I never quite know where I stand with with jazz. The endless, drifting circular loops of sound, subversive grooves and syncopated rhythms are like having the same conversation over and over, with slightly different turns of phrase and emphasis on different points.Brazilian psychedelia band Boogarins’ interpretation of this intimate interchange saunters from soft whistling and the warm murmur of trancey beats, through the casual discourse of bluesy guitar harmonies and synthy chatter, punctuated by harder rhythmic rock.Their singing in Portuguese distances me even further from a full grasp on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s hard to convey in an age of equal marriage and gender fluidity the impact that k.d. lang’s Ingénue had when it was released in 1992. The album, 10 tracks that tell of the pain and pleasure of love and longing, was a huge hit with a generation of gay men and women, closeted or out, who felt it spoke directly to them. Straight people were welcome to the party too, of course; broken hearts don't discriminate.Ingénue remains her finest work, the first, she says, that she wrought from her personal experience rather than simply musical expression. Her previous albums had been influenced Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the glories of contemporary London theatre is its revivals of classic American drama. Year after year, audiences are able to revisit and enjoy the great landmarks of postwar American playwriting from greats such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (recently joined by the likes of Lynn Nottage). Now the latest addition to the West End's glory days is Williams's 1961 masterpiece, The Night of the Iguana, in a great production whose starry cast includes Clive Owen, Lia Williams and Breaking Bad's Anna Gunn.The story is set in 1940, on the veranda of the Costa Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was on 16 July 1969 that Apollo 11 lifted off from Florida en route for the Moon, and exactly 50 years later, as we nervously anticipate the dawn of commercial flights into space, the event resonates louder than ever. Here, Professor Brian Cox called it “the greatest achievement in the history of civilisation.” According to veteran broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, it was “the most magnificent thing that ever happened.”The TV networks have been saturating us in moon-shot memorabilia, and in the cinema we’ve had Todd Douglas Miller’s imposing feature-length documentary Apollo 11, but this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not everybody is on Facebook, yet. So far, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media monolith has only managed to scrape together about 2.3 billion users, roughly one-third of the planet. But as this fascinating documentary revealed, Facebook’s plans are huge and its ambitions boundless.The title alluded to recent problems at Facebook, including the massive 2018 data breach in which the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica acquired information from 87 million Facebook users, and its struggles against online hate crime. These crises temporarily knocked 20 per cent off Facebook’s share price, and Read more ...
Owen Richards
Oh to be inside the head of Wayne Coyne. The frazzle-haired frontman has always been an enigma, persistently quirky, morally dubious, and undeniably fascinating. Perhaps King’s Mouth offers our best chance yet to get in there – the album is an accompaniment to his art installation in which visitors enter a giant metallic head. Rather on the nose for a metaphor, but still a hell of an invitation.King’s Mouth is as conceptual as an album gets: a fairytale about a giant baby that becomes king, sacrifices himself for the city, and becomes a monument. Full marks for imagination, the medieval Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When he gave Martin Dysart, the troubled psychiatrist protagonist of Equus, a line in which he speaks about “moments of experience” being “magnetised”, Peter Shaffer might almost have been talking about theatre itself. It’s a phrase that comes close to catching what we feel when we're transfixed by the hard-to-predict coming-together of play, performance and production that marks the highpoints of drama. And “magnetic” is as good a word as any to describe the impact of Ned Bennett’s remarkable revival of Shaffer’s 1973 play for Theatre Royal Stratford East and English Touring Theatre, which Read more ...
Robert Beale
Who would have thought that a one-narrator show, mainly about projects that never got off the ground, would turn out to be such a satisfying evening’s entertainment?Phelim McDermott, writer, co-director and performer in Tao of Glass, is undoubtedly the star. He tells us about growing up in Blackley, Manchester, and his early experiences of showbiz – some in the very place where we are sitting, the Royal Exchange Theatre. (The Norman Tebbit test of being a true Manc, incidentally, is whether you know how to say "Blackley" correctly: Phel’s the genuine article and we love him for it.)He says Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Thirty-three years ago, at Manchester's Festival of the Tenth Summer, I fumed that New Order had been given top billing over The Smiths, much to the mirth of a couple of reviewers of this very parish. History has proved me wrong, obviously. So, to Italy, and a modest-sized and relatively modern piazza (Napoleonic) in beguiling, ancient Lucca. To see two of Manchester’s most revered bands. This time I don’t have to choose sides.It couldn’t be further from Salford, Macclesfield and Bury in every sense. A balmy evening breeze rustles through the leaves and brings welcome relief from the day Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This witty street-smart play about a white-skinned boy born to a mixed-race mother deploys its narrative with the dexterity of a dance. Two performers move backwards and forwards across the stage, switching through different characters, skin colours, genders and generations, as they tell a story of pride, poverty, passion and prejudice.We’re in Camden as the play starts, where it’s, “Really fucking hot. That inside-an-oven hot you only get in a big concrete city.” Playwright and performer Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s vivid humorous language ambushes you from the outset. A police officer from the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Genius" is a word to be used sparingly, but Django Bates surely is one. “A musical polymath and prodigiously gifted composer” went the citation for his Ivor Award a few weeks ago. “Joyful, insouciant and insanely clever,” wrote Evan Parker in a sleeve-note describing his re-workings of Charlie Parker in Confirmation (2011), the second album with his Belovèd Trio.Last night Django Bates with the regular members of that trio, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun presented a concert billed as “A double celebration: Evan Parker’s 75th birthday and a look ahead to next year’s 100th Read more ...