Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Sixes and Sevens is a surprise. A big one. Since leaving Siouxsie and the Banshees in September 1979, John McKay has largely been a mystery. On record, the only suggestion this influential guitarist had continued with music was the EP his post-Banshees band Zor Gabor issued in 1987. Otherwise – nothing.Sixes and Sevens collects 11 tracks excavated by McKay from his personal archive. It is not an unreleased album. Three tracks are from 1980, three are from 1983, and there is one apiece from 1985, 1986 and 1987, and two from 1989. One of the 1983 tracks is titled “Zor Gabor” and, as well as Read more ...
David Nice
Full marks to the Royal Opera for good planning: one first night knocking us all sideways with the darkest German operatic tragedy followed by another letting us off the hook with a short comedy by Wagner’s compatriot Telemann. The premiere of Pimpinone predates that of Die Walküre by nearly a century and a half and we mark its 300th anniversary this year. But is it too slight for resurrection?Initially I wondered. The first of Telemann’s three acts, each originally placed as an intermezzo within the composer’s adaptation of Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano for his polyglot city of Hamburg Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the Stygian darkness of a bare room, a table on a low platform with a light hanging overhead starts to emerge. Then a door briefly opens at the back of the space and the figure that has entered and sat down at the table also begins to emerge. When the stage lighting goes on, this tableau out of a Bacon painting sharpens and we can properly scrutinise the man. He is played by Stephen Rea, who has arrived from Dublin in a Landmark production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, written in 1958 and directed by Vicky Featherstone. Rea is now almost a decade older than the protagonist, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive not only provoked a viewer-stampede towards the world’s most expensive sport, but also triggered a chain reaction of similar behind-the-scenes sports documentaries. Suddenly we had Break Point (tennis), Full Swing (golf) and Tour de France: Unchained (cycling, obviously), hotly pursued by series on rugby, soccer and American Indiecar racing.Thus, a series about Formula E, the electrically-powered baby sibling of Formula One, was a no-brainer (indeed, Formula E previously aired its own show, Formula E Unplugged, on its YouTube channel). Since the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).In 2013, he covered his childhood home in mulberry paper and painstakingly made a rubbing of every single nook and cranny of the exterior. He left the paper in situ for nine months until the drawing had weathered to resemble an old Read more ...
David Nice
Wagner’s universe, in the second of his Ring operas which brings semi-humans on board to challenge the gods, matches exaltation and misery, terror and tragedy – and throws down a gauntlet to singers, orchestra and director capable of going to extremes with due discipline.They did so masterfully last night, thanks above all to Royal Opera Conductor Laureate Antonio Pappano’s close relationship with four remarkable Wagnerian principals and Barrie Kosky’s dark, spare but always perceptive production, offering the revelation that any new Ring cycle has to provide."It's that woman again," declared Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The makers of The Extraordinary Miss Flower are billing it as a “performance film”, a subspecies of the concert-movie and stablemate of the fictive biopic 20,000 Days on Earth, about Nick Cave, from the same film-makers. It’s one part arty documentary to two parts music video, both a daughter’s tribute to her mother and a singer’s elaborate way of promoting her latest album.Its subject, Geraldine Flower, was the aptly surnamed daughter of an Australian father and Dubliner mother who spent the years of her prime – the Swinging Sixties and discontented Seventies – relocating from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's both brave and bracing to welcome new voices to the West End, but sometimes one wonders if such exposure necessarily works to the benefit of those involved. And so it is with My Master Builder, American writer Lila Raicek's Ibsen-adjacent play that nods throughout at the Norwegian scribe's scorching 1892 The Master Builder only to suggest that director Michael Grandage might have been better off staging that classic title instead: his Wild Duck, dating back to his Donmar tenancy, remains the stuff of legend. The onetime Tony winner for Red has certainly given the show a Read more ...
Mark Kidel
On the eve of recording an album at Real World Studios, guitarist Adrian Utley and the American trumpet player Eddie Henderson brought their “project” to the hallowed ground of Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, along with four other top-class British musicians.In a set that included moody arrangements played from a score and freewheeling improvisation, they drew on their individual strengths and wandered between post-bop and free jazz, with touches of noise and rock, in a mix that was at times exciting and at others not entirely convincing, as if drawing on so many influences got in the way of their Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but before poker become a game for mathematical whizz kids. What it reveals as it maps the male psyche seems as pertinent as ever. Into the gladiatorial arena of a weekly poker game among restaurant colleagues comes a (disguised) pro player, and the results are explosive. There are no women here, which is the point. Their disapproving tongues aren’t needed as the combatants are perfectly adept at skewering themselves. These are men who have mistaken risk- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
When Giuseppe Torelli made the journey from his birthplace of Verona to Bologna in the late 17th century, the trumpet was still seen as something of a brash outsider, suitable for military displays but not for sophisticated music ensembles. Within decades, it would seem perfectly natural for both Vivaldi and Bach to write major works featuring the trumpet.But both owed a considerable debt to Torelli who – beyond being Vivaldi’s teacher – put the instrument on the map by composing 30 concertos for it. So it’s not difficult to see why La Serenissima launched its glorious, vibrant celebration of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic. Picking the right players is critical. There’s never enough money, because everything that comes in this season is spent on the next. The media, with a sneer never too far from the old guard and its new version alternately snapping and fawning with little in between, has to be placated.You have to keep going out there, no matter how much it hurts the body or mind, as an audience always awaits. And yet you know, with total certainty, that these are the best days of Read more ...