Reviews
aleks.sierz
Creatives – or creatures? In the 1660s, women – having been banned from working as actors in previously more puritanical decades – finally arrived on the stage in London theatres. Although they were sometimes scorned as “playhouse creatures”, often condemned as monsters and whores, they were also seen as demi-goddesses, capable of enchanting their audiences.Their multi-faceted world is well evoked in April De Angelis’s 1993 play, now revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, which gives a robustly feminist account of thespians in the Restoration reign of the Merry Monarch, Charles II Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago.We’ve reached 1775, and thus last night saw a concert performance at Cadogan Hall of La finta giardiniera, written by already-accomplished late-teenager for the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.But if the trailer is a tightly-edited taster that whets the appetite, the film itself shows little evidence of the director’s ability to exercise similar restraint in the cutting room. At 139 minutes, La Cocina somewhat outstays its welcome, particularly with a series of false endings. To overcook this metaphor, it’s like going to a restaurant Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know something about how to play Liszt’s music.Her performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Hallé and Kahchun Wong – and her solo encore after it – proved that she does. It’s not just that she can play all the notes, all in the right order, and at times with phenomenal speed: it’s her portrayal of the music’s essential characteristics in its Read more ...
David Nice
So much looked promising for Irish National Opera’s first Wagner: the casting, certainly, the conductor – Music Director Fergus Sheil knows and loves this music – and the venue (the Libeskind-designed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, proven ideal for Richard Strauss). How could a production go wrong with such a theatrical romantic tale, a pioneering music-drama for its time (1843)? All too easily, it seems, by either coming up with inappropriate business or letting the singers stand and deliver.Yes, we had blood-red sails and the deck of a ship for Wagner's Act One, which will come as a relief to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the clock back to more innocent times, while full of contemporary pizzazz. The latest series to drop, a Netflix coproduction, is the most accessible yet, and the funniest. Having said that, The Potato Lab sounds as if it comes from the People’s Republic in the north. It’s a variant of the workplace comedy that’s been in TV’s DNA since The Rag Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It took until the last song before Lauren Mayberry started to well up onstage, which was good going. The singer had mentioned early on the prospect of a hometown Glasgow gig for her solo career had left her emotional all day, both with joy and fear. Hopefully she hadn't popped her head out for a look at the venue around an hour before stage time, though, because there was considerable empty gaps across the dance floor. In addition, the fact one of the venue's bars was sealed off indicated demand for Mayberry on her own didn't match that for her day job with synth popsters Chvrches, who sold Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.It’s clear from the album’s second track that Wooff is aware of dark Texas country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. “Lefty's Motel Room” is an open nod to his totemic composition "Pancho and Lefty.” As Wooff’s song picks up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The thrill of hearing “Crawdaddy Simone” never wears off. As the September 1965 B-side of the third single by North London R&B band The Syndicats, it attracted next-to no attention when it came out. The top side of the flop 45 was “On the Horizon,” a version of a Ben E. King B-side. After this, The Syndicats’ time seemed to have passed.Then, in 1982, a compilation album titled The Demention Of Sound turned up in shops. “Crawdaddy Simone” was on it, alongside tracks from singles by relatively well-known UK Sixties mod/R&B bands The Bo Street Runners (members of whom went on to Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.In fairness to Egarr, he did nothing more than what he does with the Baroque music for which he is so renowned: he played it with the clarity, shape and the expression it needed to come alive. Shape, in fact, was critical Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Brief History of a Family is a psychological thriller with a story familiar to anyone who has seen Ripley, Saltburn or Six Degrees of Separation. A clever young man with low social status infiltrates a far more privileged family, with devastating results. The difference here is that it's set not among American or European elites but in the booming economy of China with its high-tech citadels and international aspirations. The Tu family live in a luxurious apartment in an unnamed city; they want their only son, Wei (Muran Lin), to go to an Ivy League university but he’s more interested in Read more ...
David Nice
Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting - Jamie Manton’s production of Mozart's adult fairy-tale looks distinctly unpromising. But by Act Two, it becomes one of the most moving Magic Flutes I’ve ever seen. Glorious singing and youthful energy help to make it so.So do the high-tech design of Justin Nardella and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable lighting of Charlie Morgan Jones. Neon Read more ...