Reviews
Veronica Lee
Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70 at Battersea Arts Centre – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it does, but it also contains a heartfelt love letter to the health service Thomas was born in and, as a lifelong socialist, hopes to die in. But as he points to creeping commercialisation, what are the chances of that being so?The show, a highly entertaining 75 minutes, is based on a series of interviews that Thomas conducted with leading experts in Read more ...
David Nice
On one level, it's about Biblically informed good and evil at sea, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. On another, the love that dared not speak its name when Britten and E M Forster adapted Hermann Melville's novella is either repressed or (putatively) liberated. The conflicts can make for lacerating music theatre, as they did in Orpha Phelan's production for Opera North. Deborah Warner's ideas are there, but yet confused, to the Royal Opera House audience at least, even after runs in Madrid and Rome. In the bows of the ship, Ivor Bolton's conducting is mostly solid, no more, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Suede finish “Sabotage”. It’s a mid-paced, elegant number set off by swirling, circling central guitar. Frontman Brett Anderson hangs from his microphone stand on the left apron of the stage to deliver it, with the lights down low. Afterwards he paces back to his bandmates, body taut, hair a-flop. He tells the audience he’s been involved in a long ongoing experiment; “standing in front of VOX AC30 amps for 30 years.” The resulting problem, he adds in a rising shout, “is that I can’t hear you.”It’s a showbiz shot, dryly delivered, but it works. He keeps coming back to this, demanding a louder Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the knife crime epidemic seemingly raging out of control, and the government at its clueless worst as it stumbles around hoping for a quick fix, here was a look at a possible solution. Via her Track Academy charity, former triple-jumper and sports journalist Connie Henry aims to use sport as a force for education, personal development and social cohesion.“One of the things that sport does is it gives you a family” said Daley Thompson, a double Olympic gold medallist and one of the celebrity supporters who have pitched in to help boost Henry’s efforts. Daley’s comment struck a nerve, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Superstar Sally Field has come to town. With two academy awards and countless other accolades, the actor who played Forrest Gump's mother and dozens of other roles, from Frog to Mrs Lincoln, in Hollywood blockbusters and on television now returns to the stage to play a delusional and deceitful matriarch in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, part of the Old Vic's continuing tribute to the American playwright. She is joined on stage by Bill Pullman (Torchwood) and Jenna Coleman (Victoria) in a co-production with Headlong theatre company, directed by Jeremy Herrin.First staged in 1947, All My Sons is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This final episode of BBC Four's Looking for Rembrandt, exploring the life and work of the Netherlands’ greatest painter, was a mini-masterpiece in itself. We rejoined the story in the mid-1650s, when Rembrandt found that his days of popular acclaim and patronage by heads of state and the nobility were behind him. Instead, he had discovered to his horror that “my pupils are more popular than me and I’m fodder for the gossips.”It was an inspired move to hire Toby Jones as the voice of the artist. Resisting any urge towards thespian grandstanding, Jones conveyed the varied facets of the painter Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Either side of a doorway, framing a view of Turner’s The Evening Star, c. 1830 (Main picture), Sean Scully’s Landline Star, 2017, and Landline Pool, 2018, frankly acknowledge their roots. Abstract as they are, Scully’s horizontal bands of colour read as landscapes – or rather seascapes – in which the meeting points of earth and sea, sea and sky provide a compositional and conceptual scaffold. This exhibition of new work by Sean Scully is the latest in a series of encounters between contemporary artists and works in the National Gallery. Irish-born Scully pays homage to paintings he Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Sleaford Mods are livid. About everything. But then, aren’t we all? If any single voice could represent this particularly bewildering era, it would be Jason Williamson’s. Outraged, marginalised, furious, he’s determinedly (with the help of henchman Andrew Fearn) dragging the fetid carcass of British society over the coals. Truly, this is a band for our times. And Margate is a fitting place for the post-punk poets to express their wrath.One quarter "Shoreditch-on-Sea", three-quarters the seaside town they forgot to bomb, this is classic Brexit land. Money’s been poured into various (arty Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Based on the 2006 book of the same name, and set in the same universe as the 2013 film adaptation, World War Z follows groups of survivors of a zombie apocalypse in the cities of Moscow, New York, Jerusalem, and Tokyo. The game unleashes hundreds of fast-moving, bloodthirsty zombies able to move and strike as one collective herd as well as break off into individual attacks. You get to choose from six character classes and an arsenal of deadly weapons, explosives, turrets and traps and battle both zombies and real human opponents in competitive, team-based Players vs Players vs Zombies (PvPvZ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A brain tumour isn't usually the subject of a comedy show but Britney, written and performed by comedy duo Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, is just that. It's “the true story of what happens to two best friends when one of them [Clive] gets a brain tumour” – the size of a golf ball, her father helpfully pointed out.Clive's dad is just one of the large cast of characters who appear in Britney. The story starts in 2016 when the two women, who have been friends since they were 14, had both recently graduated, Clive from drama school in New York, Robertson from Cambridge University. Clive Read more ...
Katherine Waters
By fifteen Ummulbanu Asadullayeva — or Banine, to call her by the name under which she wrote and translated — had already lived more than most of us will in a lifetime. She’d experienced great love, married, been both a refugee and returnee, survived a pogrom, become a multimillionaire, been divested of that fortune by revolution, and read nearly the entire contents of her Aunt Rena’s library. By 1924, she was living in Paris, where she settled. Her life was extraordinary, but so were the times.Days in the Caucasus, the autobiography of her childhood, written in French and published in her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Torso Hell tells the story of an American soldier whose limbs were blown off in Vietnam. Amazingly, he and his buddies survived, and in the ensuing medical chaos his arms and legs were re-attached to them rather than him. The narrator says “At the hospital, it’s so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don’t know what from what … they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys. Two guys each get one of his arms … two guys each get one of his legs.” It’s a typically bizarre Terry Allen set-up. Read more ...