Reviews
Peter Quantrill
It’s a fair bet that more people now know Harmonielehre as the title of the 1985 orchestral blockbuster by John Adams than the composition manual written by Schoenberg in 1922. Even the title is “typically, ironically John”, as Sir Simon Rattle remarked in a pre-concert interview introducing the YouTube film of the concert. The piece has swallowed up its object of parody.Yet the composer’s old programme note, reprinted for this LSO concert, disavows ironic intent. Adams hides his well-chosen found objects of late Romanticism in plain sight – Mahler’s Tenth, Sibelius’s Fourth, Schoenberg’s own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The porn was a bit disappointing, was it not? Dear old Ted, no longer romantically active, admitted to being a user. The Superintendent Hastings fanclub sighed for sorrow to witness him toss away his status as an essentially decent heartthrob for the Saga generation. Sorry for your loss, ladies. It was also disappointing because the high-risk act of wiping his laptop turned out to have such a bathetic explanation. The 50k lying around in a brown envelope he clearly deemed to have less pressing potential for embarrassment.At least now we know that Hastings is not H because - guess what? - no Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an alternate timeline, Olly Murs - runner-up on a TV talent show a full decade ago - would have faded into obscurity by now. This, as the relentlessly charming performer on stage delights in reminding us, is not that timeline. Some internet commenter remarked, on the release of his first single “Please Don’t Let Me Go”, that it was what Murs would be telling his record company after they dropped him. “Well,” he says, with a gesture a little too rude for the kids in the audience, “I’m still here!”That’s Murs all over: a little lewd, very cheeky, perhaps the personification of the "Lord, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Reginald D Hunter drops the n-bomb near the top of the show. He means no offence, he tells the audience, but it's the vernacular where he comes from in Georgia. And besides, using that word, as well as expressing some trenchant opinions about the differences between men and women, and the politics of race, has sort of become Hunter's calling card. Provocative, controversialist, whatever – as an African American living in the UK for the past 21 years, he has opinions worth listening to even if you don't share them.The genesis for his new show, Facing the Beast, was that anniversary, as well Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Flight is a show by experimental Scottish theatre company Vox Motus, adapted from the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. It’s about two Afghan child refugees making their way across Europe to the fabled land of “London” and is based very directly on her own interviews with asylum seekers as a journalist. So far, so narrartively straightforward but Flight is unlike anything most people will have seen. It is as much art installation as it is theatre, perhaps more so, yet it’s a tale beautifully, economically told and is profoundly moving.In a recent artsdesk interview Candice Edmunds, one Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is underpinned by distress at the parlous nature of the understaffed and overworked NHS.Medical tales (including Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, Christie Watson’s The Language of Kindness, David Nott’s War Doctor, and How to Treat People by Molly Case) hit a nerve. We are fascinated because we have all been there and the NHS is absolutely central to our culture.What sets Hard Pushed apart is that while not all of us are mothers, but we have all been born.We meet all kinds of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bill Evans Trio played London’s Ronnie Scott’s from 1 to 27 December 1969 as a co-billing with Blossom Dearie. The season would have remained less than a footnote if it were not for a French fan identified only as ”Jo” in Evans in England’s booklet. He took an Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder into the club and placed it under the stage-side table he and a friend occupied. It sat on his knees and was hidden under the tablecloth. A Beyerdynamic microphone was hooked up to the Uher.This was no mean feat. The Uher model mostly in use at the time was the Report 4000 (pictured below left). Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The past haunts the present and looks likely to torpedo the future in Rosmersholm, the lesser-known Ibsen play now receiving a major West End revival in welcome defiance of the commercial odds. The protean Sonia Friedman, this venture's producer, was wise to grant the directing reins to Ian Rickson, who has made many a Pinter play land in a similar environment (and directed the National's glorious Translations last year). Blessed with the design team of one's dreams and an ace trio of leads, Ibsen's sometimes-murky psychology here rivets throughout, even Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Komedia is a Brighton Institution and celebrates its birthday tonight in a suitably raucous fashion. The Komedia began in 1994, founded by the directors of the Umbrella Theatre Company, and styled on the cabaret spaces they’d experienced touring Europe. It moved to its current premises in 1999, turning a ramshackle labyrinthine building that housed a hippy-style market (before that a Tesco) into a labyrinthine building housing a bar-venue-cinema complex, with the central hub in the large basement.So much for architectural history! There’s also another anniversary this year, that of the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Why make a feature film about Ted Bundy, the notorious 1970s serial killer when you’ve already made Conversations with a Killer, a four-part factual series for Netflix about him? A charitable explanation would be that it offered documentarian Joe Berlinger a chance to explore aspects of the story that could only be told with drama. A more cynical explanation would be that features outsell documentaries at the box office. Zac Efron plays the law student turned rapist and murderer who became as infamous in America as Jack the Ripper in the UK. It's thought that he killed at least thirty Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Common to the recent spate of films about aspiring singers, the theme of fame’s corrupting influence is hardly new. However, actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux daringly freights this biographical sub-genre with cosmic significance, as he did the history movie with his 2015 directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader. Corbet gambles in likening celebrity crises with real-world catastrophes, but the implication that they stem from the same universal malaise strikes a chord.Vox Lux visits Celeste Montgomery in her early teens, when she is played by English actress Raffey Cassidy, and Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Deft and funny and nicely cast, what's not to like about Other People's Money, the era-defining Jerry Sterner play in revival at Southwark Playhouse? The play's 1989 premiere Off Broadway allowed for a contemporary skewering of the roaring, rapacious, uncaring 1980s. Now it's a period piece, where Amy Burke, playing a pumped-up and pugnacious Manhattan lawyer, sports a swishing pale-grey pantsuit that would have done Paul Smith proud: her hair is as big as her ego.Under Katharine Farmer's direction, the stage is framed by offices at either end, two worlds apart. One desk belongs to Andrew Read more ...