Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
By some strange alignment of the stars, Peter Sellars’s staged version of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St Peter) arrived at the Barbican Hall just as – next door in the theatre – Pam Tanowitz’s directed her dance interpretation of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Not only does Tanowitz’s choreography come with a commissioned score by Kaija Saariaho – a regular Sellars collaborator. Both works mix their media to present a spare and unflinching journey into age, remorse and grief. Those soul-searing lines of Eliot from Little Gidding about “the gifts reserved for age” – “the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Oh Sees have long been touted of as the perfect festival band. Their racuous, high-tempo rock'n'roll always riles up the drunken swathes, even if no-one recognises the song. However, going to a headline show is a different prospect - these swathes are the loyalists, not ready to accept anything less than carnage. After witnessing a relentless sold out show in Cardiff, maybe it's time to remove "festival" from that opening statement.Oh Sees have appeared under many guises, but their most recent form is pounding prog beast. Two drummers sat centre stage, orbited by guitar, bass and keys. Rhythm Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The first surprise is that this hasn’t been done before. The poems that comprise TS Eliot’s Four Quartets are so embedded with references to dance that presenting them alongside choreography feels inevitable. Perhaps it took an anniversary – 75 years since publication – for Eliot’s estate to grant permission: this is the first authorised production on a theatre stage of that great meditation on time and timelessness, memory and being.The second surprise is that the choreographer, Pam Tanowitz, is unknown this side of the Atlantic. An American whose work builds on the barefoot legacies of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Snowpiercer before it, Bong Joon-ho’s rage-fuelled satire Parasite puts class inequality squarely in its sights. This time however, the story is grounded in the real world and concerns a family of hustlers who will do anything to get by. There are other similarities with his twisted 2013 sci-fi. Joon-Ho’s use of contained spaces once again allows the director to navigate his subject matter very effectively.The film opens in a basement flat, where a young man in his early twenties, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), lives with his sister (Park So-dam), mother (Chang Hyae-jin) and father (Song Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Emily Atack from The Inbetweeners, where she played Charlotte, the object of Will's desire. More recently, she found new fans as the runner-up on 2018's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Now she is performing in her first solo comedy show, Talk Thirty to Me.It's not so much stand-up as a conversational run-through of how she came to be here, 29 and worried about hitting 30, and of her career to date. We see a montage of pictures on the large on-stage screen, ending with a video clip of Atack parachuting into the jungle and screaming every inch of the way. The show Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rokia Traoré’s passage through this year’s Brighton Festival has been central, binding it to her Malian identity in a series of gigs. This hands-on Guest Director’s pulsing Afro-rock Opening Night was followed by the first Dream Mandé show’s recasting of traditional sounds. A Malian Dance Night added FGM protest, Seventies s.f.-soundtracked myth and cheeky wit from young choreographers. But this show is surely Traoré’s cornerstone, supporting all the rest, as she takes on the role of griot to recast Mali as democracy’s secret rock.The griot’s role at the root of West African culture, orally Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You seldom hear a Champions League-level roar of approval at the Wigmore Hall. Last night, though, Igor Levit drew a throaty collective bark of appreciation from the audience after (for once) an awed hush had followed the final dying cadences of the aria’s return in Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Had he earned it? Absolutely. This recital was first of three devoted to the idea of Variations. Friday will see Levit play Beethoven’s Diabelli set, and Frederic Rzewski’s mighty deconstruction of the revolutionary anthem “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. On 27 May, the Russian-born Berlin Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Moments before Quentin Tarantino’s blistering, outrageous work screened at Cannes, a message was delivered on behalf of the director, asking reviewers to avoid spoilers. It’s easy to see why. There’s a lot of pleasure in the film’s initial shock value, So yes, let’s avoid spoilers. But the surprises aren’t what make this film so good. Tarantino has form when it comes to handling ensemble pieces, but not since Pulp Fiction has it been so richly rendered. Yes, there are elements of Inglourious Basterds, and tonally reminiscent of Jackie Brown, but this film is Tarantino at his finest.The film Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Mammon and Yahweh are the presiding deities over an epic enterprise that tells the story not just of three brothers who founded a bank but of modern America. Virgil asked his Muse to sing of ‘arms and the man’, yet here the theme becomes that of ‘markets and the man’: a tale of daring, determination and dollars that chronicles capitalist endeavour from the cottonfields of Alabama to the crash of 2008.The Italian playwright Stefano Massini first released what started as his five-hour long play on the world in 2013, consciously using the rhythmic verse and formulaic techniques of epic to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Manga, the Japanese art of the graphic novel, took its modern form in the 1800s. Illustrated stories already had a long heritage in Japan — encompassing woodblock prints and illustrated scrolls and novels — but the introduction of the printing press by foreign visitors changed the rate at which works could be made and the extent of their distribution.Part of manga’s appeal is its restlessness — it never gets stale. While the 1950s saw distinctions crystallise between shōnen and seinen manga (respectively for boys and young men) and shōjo manga (for girls), the 70s saw the Year 24 Group of Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Maya Angelou’s iconic poem Still I Rise is a good starting point for many things in life. But it’s a particularly good beginning for a piece of contemporary dance choreography, and Victoria Fox has done a great job of bringing the poet’s words to life.It’s a rigidly structured one hour work – definite sections of movement working to a contained pace and spacing, split up by sections of music ranging from intense strings and solo opera voice to upbeat club music.An all female cast dance in formation, side by side, performing detailed intricate, intimate gestures – moving from the softer, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hallelujah! At last the BBC have commissioned a Stephen Poliakoff series that makes you want to come back for episode two (and hopefully all six), thanks to a powerful cast making the most of some perceptively-written roles.His most recent efforts, Dancing on the Edge and Close to the Enemy, were distinguished only by their contorted implausibility and woefully unconvincing characters. This time, he has drawn deeply on personal experiences of himself and his family, which seems to have helped him create rounded individuals it’s possible to identify with, amid a persuasive depiction of the way Read more ...