Reviews
stephen.walsh
When you think of the extravagant, violent, super grown-up subject-matter that stalked the operatic stage round about 1900 - the Toscas and the Salomes, the Cavs, the Pags and the rest of the verismo pack - you might find it strange to contemplate the ageing Dvořák still messing around with fairies at the bottom of his woodland pool, a subject that surely went out with the early Romantics. But you’d be wrong. His Rusalka is just as much a creature of the distressed mind as the heroine of Schoenberg’s Erwartung or, for that matter, Debussy’s Mélisande, who could well also be a stranded Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories is a collection of oral testimonies conducted between 1978-2004 with Soviet and post-Soviet citizens who were children during the second world war. They recount strange and terrible experiences which — even as adults — retain the force and candour of childhood memory.Unsurprisingly, many coalesce around abstract, sensory features which, along with spare brutal episodes, attest to deep sadness and thinned living. “What has stayed in my memory is colour,” says Lenya Khosenvich — a common admission. Faina Lyutsko remembers how “The death Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Belém’s population is one-and-a-half million. Located 100km south of Brazil’s north coast on the east bank of the Amazon feeder river Pará, it’s the capital of the state sharing its name with the waterway. The city is only 160km south of the equator, an entry point into the rain forest and closer to Trinidad and Tobago than Brazil’s cultural magnet Rio de Janeiro.Named after Bethlehem and founded in 1655, Belém’s economy is defined by its role as an incoming and outgoing port and has its roots in an early 17th century Portuguese fort. Its location and the attendant potential for the Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
There’s a moment in Summer Rolls, at the Nguyen family dinner table, when a veil is briefly pulled back on the ugly racism so many Asian immigrant communities must endure in the UK. The treasured son, Anh, who has been rejected for jobs despite his first class degree in mathematics, defends his mother as someone who uses all her resources to survive. The other night at their Vietnamese restaurant, some drunk customers refused to leave and started shouting “go home you fucking foreigners”, while they chucked money on the table and slurped the food. “All mum kept saying Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The festival Summer Music in City Churches is in only its second year, filling a gap left by the demise of the long-running City of London Festival. This year’s festival had the theme of Words and Music and offered an enticing programme of recitals, talks and walks, focusing on English music through the ages, and finding enterprising ways of combining solo performers with resident ensembles the London Mozart Players and the City of London Choir. The closing concert showcased works inspired by Shakespeare plays, presenting them alongside Shakespeare’s words, spoken by actor Tama Matheson.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and reviews by leading lights such as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie. You can see the influence of Japanese prints in the flattened spaces, simplified shapes and unusual viewpoints that give a comic slant to scenes of Parisian life. A sudden downpour sends people scurrying for cover, hats are blown off by gusts of wind and a street is filled Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a clever decision to pair Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The first is all about happily-ever-after, while the second is all about what happens next. The optimistic grime and smog of 1950s London gives way to the shrink-wrapped brightness and professional happiness of the suburban American dream, smiles freeze into toothpaste-commercial grins and love curdles into quiet domestic despair.A Dinner Engagement wrestles its happy ending to the ground by sheer persistence and determination. The parents are poor, the dinner is burnt, the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A rambling portrait of 24 hours in the life of Double Whammies, an American sports bar where the waitresses entertain their TV-watching patrons by dressing in skimpy tops and tiny shorts. Apparently this is categorised as a ‘breastaurant’ (my spell-checker reels at this portmanteau, but there are several well-established chains in the US). Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, acclaimed as the godfather of the mumblecore genre after winning praise for Funny Ha Ha back in 2002, Support the Girls works best if you don’t expect too much story development or a lot of fast-paced gags Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As midsummer night’s dreams go, it would be hard to surpass the darkly enchanting collaboration between Sir Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars that will bring The Cunning Little Vixen to the Barbican again this evening and on Saturday. Janáček’s spellbinding vision of humans and animals caught up in the inexorable cycles of nature and time has its rough and scary side, of course. And you will probably hear and see gentler, more obviously charming, versions of the opera that in 1924 proclaimed Janáček’s late-life burst of untamed creativity.Sellars’s semi-staged production (originally mounted in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the middle of the current decade, there was a mild vogue for reviving a handful of the great plays of the 1990s, such as Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and Patrick Marber's Closer. Now the Donmar Warehouse's new artistic director, the energetic Michael Longhurst, has chosen David Greig's Europe, first staged at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1994, as his inaugural production. Because it's a kind of state-of-the-continent tone poem, this feels like a really excellent choice. After all, competing views about Europe loom large in the news every day, and in Longhurst's majestic production Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Red is the colour, mayhem is the name – along with pestilence and greed. In writer-director Peter Strickland’s exquisite fourth feature In Fabric, the first he’s made in his native England, middle-aged bank clerk Sheila Woolchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, main picture) is terrorised by a haunted scarlet dress she buys in Dentley and Soper’s, a Debenhams-like department store in drearily generic “Thames Valley-on Thames”.Miss Luckmoore, who oversees Sheila’s regrettable purchase, is no ordinary sleek, patronising sales clerk. She’s an Italian or Italianate witch (wonderful Strickland regular Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This well-meaning biographical jukebox musical about icons Gloria and Emilio Estefan, which did two years on Broadway and a US tour, is good summer scheduling, what with its Latin-pop bangers, infectious dance routines and “Dreams come true” messaging. Yet its awkward housing at the austere Coliseum exacerbates this 2015 work’s major flaw: reaching for profundity in a skin-deep, conflict-lite tale, instead of enjoying the party.Gloria (Christie Prades, reprising the role from the US tour) is a talented but shy songwriter. Her grandmother (Karen Mann) eagerly pushes her into the band – Read more ...