Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Whips, scourges, sinews, blood and pus: where Bach’s two Passions lament from a contemplative distance, Handel’s plunges right to the bone, to the cruel, tortured death that is the heart of the Easter story.Perhaps that explains the work’s recent neglect. While Easter Week in London annually offers more Bach Passions than you can count on both hands, Handel’s – a model and influence for Bach’s later works – has been all but silent. But with this performance from the Academy of Ancient Music maybe the tide is turning – troubled times finally bringing the beautiful horror of Handel’s Passion Read more ...
David Nice
While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final instalment of their three Matthew Passions this Holy Week, Ex Cathedra gave a large scale performance of Bach’s oratorio in their home town on Birmingham, after dates with lesser forces in London and Bristol. With an augmented orchestra and their regular chamber choir and orchestra joined onstage by Ex Cathedra’s Academy of Vocal Music - Ex Cathedra’s strand for young singers - and members of various community choirs in and around BIrmingham, the collective masses on stage made a full, fabulous sound, which filled Symphony Hall. That’s not to say that the increased number of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The decades-long stage relationship between Judi Dench and Trevor Nunn translates to surprisingly little with Red Joan. This is veteran theatre director Nunn's first film since Twelfth Night in 1996. Top-billed in a supporting role, Dench brings her customary rigour and a continually fretful mien to this semi-fictionalised retelling of the plight of the so-called "granny spy", Melita Norwood, who was charged in 1999 with passing secrets to the Russians in their efforts to build an atomic bomb. (The film's actual source is Jennie Rooney's 2013 novel of the same name.) Caught unawares by Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
This year, says Gary Barlow, marks 30 years since five boys walked into a room in Manchester and auditioned for what would turn out to be the UK’s most successful pop act. It is fitting, then, that what they are billing as the Odyssey tour features 25 hits from across three decades - and more than a few callbacks.The trio - Barlow, Howard Donald and an increasingly hirsute Mark Owen - may keep promising to take us “back to the 90s”, but there’s a decidedly futuristic look to the stage with a giant, glowing orb proving the pre-show focal point. As their band take their places in the shadows, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Peer down the glassy dark and you’ll see them. White bubbles trapped in the frozen lake which appear to be rising to the surface. Look through the permafrost this way and you’re seeing into the past: as the ice melts, gas which was captured and stored tens of thousands of years ago when woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats stalked Alaska is released into the atmosphere. Each slick of melt water is another decade returning to the rivers. A scientist pokes a flare towards a hissing vent and the lake burps fire. It is methane, a gas with 21 times the smothering effect of carbon dioxide which Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tommy Tiernan is something of an institution in his native Ireland, as a stand-up comic, newspaper columnist, sometime chat show host and full-time controversialist. Now his appearance as Da Gerry in Channel 4's Derry Girls has brought him to a wider audience – both geographically and generationally – and deservedly so.Tiernan arrives on stage with little fanfare, and proceeds to do what he does best, sharing stories with the audience as if we're just having a chat over a pint. From small beginnings he builds fantastical tales, but ones that often have an underlying serious point to make, Read more ...
David Nice
"Them" - the "loro" of the title (with a further play on “l’oro”, gold) - denotes the mostly sleazy opportunists willing to use and be used by "him" ("lui"), "Presidente" Silvio Berlusconi in his septuagenarian bid for an extended sexual and political life. "Us," it's implied, are the crowd and the workers present at the salvaging of a Christ statue from the ruins of the earthquake in L'Aquila at the very end of the film, an image that especially stuns in the light of the Notre Dame fire. Paolo Sorrentino is too magisterially fluid a filmmaker to suggest anything as pat as a moral comeuppance Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Get The Blessing are a band whose music never fails to conjure up images of someone like Steve McQueen driving along a coastal Californian road, looking cool as you like in very dark shades, sat in an open-top sports car from a seriously stylish cops and robbers film from the mid-Sixties. This is despite the fact that their first album was only released in 2008 and they hail from Bristol.Born from the rhythm section of Portishead’s touring band, Get The Blessing play cool jazz that has hints of Hard Bop, lush cinematic soundtracks and even post-rock textures. While it’s a sound that is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times. When it opened at the Almeida back in 2013 – a West End transfer followed, along with an Olivier award for Best New Play – Lucy Kirkwood’s drama was (very loosely) about the geopolitical symbiosis between the world’s two largest economies, China and America (hence, the title). It was seen through the prism of a story that began back in 1989 on Tiananmen Square and continued through to the present day.Channel 4’s new four-part drama, adroitly directed by Michael Keillor, retains the original’s sense of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For her swansong, departing Donmar Artistic Director Josie Rourke goes Swinging Sixties in this stylish but flawed revival of the Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon musical. From the numerous Andy Warhol homages to Charity’s silver minidress and the cigarette haze, it’s a period dream, but the production shimmers more than it grips.Anne-Marie Duff stars as the eternally hopeful New York taxi dancer, making a pittance at her “temporary job” at the Fandango Ballroom; she’s been there eight years. Too quick to trust, Charity has been let down by numerous boyfriends, but she finds a real Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mel Gibson’s vile drunken rants a decade ago, his 63 years and the price of both inform his role as cop Brett Ridgeman. Writer-director S. Craig Zahler won’t comment. But as Ridgeman and patrol partner Anthony (fellow Hollywood right-wing rarity Vince Vaughn) discuss the “hypocrisy” of news channels “treating every perceived intolerance with complete intolerance”, and media exploitation of “a private phone-call”, the script clearly lets Gibson vent. This doesn’t stop the pair’s suspension for brutalising suspects, much as Gibson was thrown into exile.When we follow Ridgeman home to his sick Read more ...