Reviews
Florence Hallett
Half organic, half high-tech, a bank of magnet-flowers sways not in response to a breeze, but to a magnetic field. Their uncannily naturalistic movements are coupled with a form that is blatantly functional: an unseen, elemental force masquerades as nature at its most benignly pastoral (Pictured below right: Magnetic Fields, l969). For Takis (real name: Panayiotis Vassilakis), magnetism introduces an extra dimension to sculpture, providing an active component that serves both as material and means. No longer restricted to the mere representation of action, for Takis, sculptures are action.In Read more ...
Tom Baily
Deadpan humour is given new meaning in Jim Jarmusch’s 13th film, a zombie comedy animated by his typical oddball style. Jarmusch has assembled a grand cast comprising recent collaborators Adam Driver and Bill Murray, long-term musician pals Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA, and a swathe of newbies that includes Selena Gomez. It is an orchestrated confusion, lurching somewhere between a joyfully zany tribute and an over-intelligent, at times dark, social critique.Things get weird from scene one in the fictional middle America town of Centerville. Polar fracking has tilted the earth’s axis and this Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Annabelle, the demonically-possessed doll now making its third appearance, makes its intentions clear pretty early here. Scarred by earlier misadventures so no sane child would want it, and sitting balefully in the back car-seat of married demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the latter pictured below), she is soon making vehicles crash and ghosts rise, in a vain effort to prevent her incarceration in the Warrens’ Artifact Room. This chamber of cursed curiosities sits at the heart of the suburban home they share with their young daughter, Judy (Mckenna Grace Read more ...
David Nice
Like Hamlet and both parts of Goethe's Faust, with which it shares the highest peak of poetic drama, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is very long, timeless enough to resonate in a contemporary setting and sufficiently ambiguous in its mythic treatment of the pursuit of self to take a wide variety of interpretations. David Hare's adaptation, moving between Scotland, Florida and Africa, finds its own nuanced language to mix with contemporary colloqualisms but hardly marks a radical break from the Norwegian master; so much the better. His Peter Gynt keeps so many possibilities fully in play and is a gift for Read more ...
Bill Knight
With 50 curated exhibitions spread across the town, there is much to see at Arles. In an effort to whittle it down I asked the man in the press office what was hot. "The weather," he replied deadpan.For this feast we have to thank Lucien Clergue, who founded the festival in 1968 with Jean- Maurice Rouquette and Michel Tournier and whose photographs were shown here some 17 times before his death in 2014. This year we can see some of them again. Clergue & Weston mounts a selection of his images alongside a repeat of Edward Weston’s show which in 1970 introduced him to the Rencontres, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Better than the 2001 film but likely to disappoint devotees of the book, Captain Corelli's Mandolin onstage works best as a reminder of the identifiable stagecraft of its director, Melly Still. Playful, non-literal, and often endearingly physical (the human goat all but steals the show), Still's approach to this tale of love during wartime overrides a reductive and sometimes comically cliché script from Rona Munro full of lusty Italians singing Verdi and the like. As summer filler at a playhouse devoted for most of the last year to Harold Pinter, one could do a lot worse, and the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s the saddest music in the world: the quiet heartbeat and falling melody with which Tchaikovsky opens his opera Eugene Onegin. Imagine a whole society, a whole lifetime of solitude, longing and disillusion, evoked in a single bass note and a few bars of tearstained violin. And then imagine it sustained over three acts. Is there another 19th century opera score that matches music to drama so simply, and yet so unerringly? – repeatedly finding the precise turn of melody or twist of harmony required to distil the poignancy out of a situation, and then letting it trickle straight back into Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The intense relationship between a single parent and a single child is ramped up to its highest level when it involves a mother whose daughter has learning disabilities. From that dynamic, writer Ben Weatherill has crafted a warm, engaging and moving play about Kelly and her mum Agnes. We meet them on their daily walk along the beach in Skegness, poking at a dead crab and discussing what to wear to work. When Kelly (Sarah Gordy) takes too long fussing with her trainers, Agnes (Penny Layden) goes to help her and is met with "I’m 27-years-old, I can put my own shoes on", but she can’ Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Apollo 11 mission remains the most celebrated journey humanity has ever made. It produced some of our most iconic images, as well as the greatest speech gaffe, and a documentary of epic scale could be made that focused solely on the influence it has had on our popular culture. 8 Days has a different aim, asking the question, “What was it really like for those three astronauts over the course of those eight days?” Using real recordings, archival footage and re-enactments, we are given the inside story of what happened inside the lunar capsules.Like other recent film productions (including Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1970 musical had a heavenly resurrection at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre three years ago, with an encore run the following summer. It’s soon heading off on a US tour, but first there’s another chance for British audiences to catch this miraculous stripped-down revival at the Barbican.Director Timothy Sheader blasts the cobwebs off this sung-through rock opera by making it a pertinent portrait of celebrity and fanatical fandom, while nodding to its concert origins via a gig-like setting. Strumming an acoustic guitar, Jesus (Robert Tripolino) has the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There has been a trend in stand-up comedy in recent years for intensely personal shows, confessional even, but it’s the comic’s life that is usually the one being examined for comedic effect. With Arthur Smith’s latest show at Soho Theatre, however, it is his dad’s life being described here, and what a life.Syd is a funny and touching account of a life well lived. Smith bases the show on the memoir he asked his father to write, which described, among other things, his wartime experiences at El Alamein and as a prisoner of war in Colditz. He later became a policeman whose south London beat was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I want to discover how our government could fall apart and the country become bitterly divided in just a few weeks,” historian Lisa Hilton announced at the start of her BBC Four account of the traumatic demise of Charles I. In a mere 50 days in 1641-2, it seemed that the foundations of the state were sawn away as England tumbled towards a calamitous civil war.Well, in outline it was fairly simple. Take one absolute monarch convinced that he enjoyed the divine right of kings and sublimely indifferent to the opinions of his subjects, and pitch him against the leader of the House of Commons Read more ...