Reviews
Adam Sweeting
In the final instalment of Dominic Savage’s trilogy of stand-alone dramas for Channel 4, Gemma Chan took the title role of a single woman in her mid-thirties, struggling with awkward choices about motherhood, relationships and settling down. Her mother, despairing of ever having grandchildren, was urging Hannah to “make a plan and stick to it.”That’s all very well, but how? Hannah experimented with online dating, but she felt like a fish out of water and it only confirmed her worst fears. One guy made it plain that he only wanted one thing, and he had no time for Hannah’s ditherings. “I don’t Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra marked the first performance of composer Mieczysław Weinberg at the Proms, an important milestone in the recent surge of interest of his music. When Weinberg, a Russian composer of Jewish descent and Polish birth, died in 1996, he was little known in the West, and had fallen from favour in a post-Communist Russia that associated his music with its Soviet past. But a staging of his opera The Passenger at Bregenz in 2010, sparked a huge revival of interest, especially in Germany, Poland and Russia. This year marks the centenary of his birth, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Being a teenager used to be fun, allegedly, but for the young cast of HBO’s controversial new hit series Euphoria it looks more like a nightmare ride through a theme park of bad trips. Filmed in various Los Angeles locations, Euphoria (showing on Sky Atlantic) follows the interconnected stories of a group of teens battling with issues including drugs, sex, gender and family breakdown.Anyone expecting lightweight escapism should look away now. Euphoria pulls no punches in its depiction of drug abuse, and its graphic, brutal sex sequences (episode one even shows an erect penis) have already Read more ...
David Kettle
Who’d have thought a play about a homophobic hate crime could be so much fun? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a little. But there are certainly lighter moments in La reprise, provocative Swiss-born director Milo Rau’s production with his International Institute of Political Murder at the International Festival, which investigates the torture and killing of 32-year-old Ihsane Jarfi in Liège in 2012.In fact, it’s Rau and his ensemble’s careful judging and pacing of mood that make La reprise so effective, and so memorable too. From its disarmingly jokey opening – complete with barbed Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The thing about Wilderness is that it’s just so jolly decent. Acres of decadence, sprawled safely over the yawning magnificence of Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, combine to create a scintillating country fair reverie – a heady mix of good music, high end food, luxury outdoorsyness and companionable folk.Yes, their fashion choices might be bold, but there is no one here who isn’t game for a laugh, or on hand to help out a neighbour. Plus you’re far more likely to be worried about their judgement of how fine your wine is than whether or not they’ve nicked your camping cooker.Revellers have Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Ben Gernon is only 30 (and looks about ten years younger) but has been Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic since 2017. He really impressed in last night’s Prom but, after an exciting overture, things fell away a bit with an under-nourished Rachmaninov concerto and an enjoyable if not faultless second half of Tchaikovsky.The first item augured very well. Malcolm Arnold’s Overture Peterloo is an odd piece, but gripping. Written in 1967 it shows two sides to the composer at once: first an effortless melodist but also a musical experimenter. The first two minutes have a filmic, Read more ...
David Kettle
You can’t question Javaad Alipoor’s ambition. Ancient Mesopotamian empires, geological layers of chicken bones, the half-life of polysterene cups, Thomas Gainsborough, Susan Sontag, Iranian political history, gold iPhones, mallwave – all that and plenty more gets crammed into the mere hour of his breathless Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran at the Traverse. And that’s even without mentioning the wordy narration, video projections, Instagram feeds, live video and multipanelled set he employs to get his ideas across.It all leaves you more than a bit bewildered. And indeed, if Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Of all the ventures that super-fraudster Anna Delvey might have chosen as bait for her victims, an exclusive art club was surely a masterstroke. Self regard, cunning, greed and snobbery have never been in short supply in the art world, but in the aftermath of the 2012 revelation that New York’s venerable Knoedler Gallery had knowingly been dealing forgeries for more than 20 years, Anna Delvey (real name, Anna Sorokin) was just one more fake in a business awash with them.Delvey arrived in New York in 2014, inserting herself into the city’s most fashionable and wealthy circles, where she passed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Josie Long The Stand ★★★★ It has been five years since Josie Long performed a full run at the Fringe, and in the meantime she has experienced a momentous event. She has had a daughter – whom she welcomed into the world, she tells us, with an impassioned speech about how it’s all gone to hell in a handcart, with a Tory Prime Minister and the climate-change emergency threatening to end the world before the wee one reaches adulthood.Of course she didn’t, but such are Long’s woke left-wing credentials that you could believe that she would.Her new show, Tender, is largely about pregnancy and Read more ...
David Kettle
Below the Blanket ★★★★ There’s a deep vein of melancholy running through Glasgow producing house Cryptic’s promenade installation Below the Blanket, which currently occupies several sites across Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. Bringing together the work of a clutch of artists, and blurring boundaries between the sonic and the visual (a fertile hinterland that Cryptic has made very much its own), Below the Blanket is inspired by northern Scotland’s Flow Country, a spellbinding and little-known landscape stretching across Caithness and Sutherland. Not only a vital environment Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
I’m not quite sure that I should review this Prom, since I performed in it. Before anyone summons the white coats, let me clarify. As the encore to a mind-expanding evening, Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto returned to the stage with his band of folk musicians. He asked the audience to hum a sort of drone, and then sing open-mouthed, as they sung and played a traditional song. How did we do? OK, I thought. It made a fittingly unorthodox finale to a rule-flouting programme which will have delighted many ears but left some concert purists not just with open mouths, but jaws on the floor.How Read more ...
David Kettle
Enough ★★★★ Immaculately turned out in winning smiles, navy and nylon, cabin crew Jane and Toni dispense comforting reassurance and flirty glances to passengers at 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, though, they’re juggling kids, kitchen colour-schemes and semi-rapist boyfriends. And what’s that age-old rumble coming from deep in the ground?Stef Smith’s quietly epic new two-hander at the Traverse might begin as a chucklesome comedy about staying calm, controlled and sexy a mile high in the air. But it ends as a guttural howl of fury and despair – at ancient grievances re- Read more ...