Reviews
David Nice
Is the terrifying past of Germany in 1933 also our future? Having had nightmares about the brilliant dystopian TV soap opera Years and Years, which built like all the best of its kind on present fears, I wasn't expecting to be confronted so soon by another pertinent disaster drama. In a sequence of all too unforgettable theatrical images, Ivo van Hove finds the present and the future in the pith of Visconti's's discomfortingly luxurious 1969 fantasia about a family which turns into a 1930s House of Atreus under pressure from the newly ascendant Nazi party.Visconti's Italian title was La Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“You want heavy?” Metallica frontman James Hetfield already knows the answer to that question, and he and his three fellow horsemen of the apocalypse certainly deliver that tonight. This stop on Metallica’s mammoth Worldwired tour is the second of only two UK dates this year – they played an extremely rainy Manchester a few days ago – and they are very pleased to be back. A Metallica show always begins with Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold”, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, so when the lights go down and those unmistakeable notes ring out, the crowd goes nuts before being Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Making it to the fourth film in a series and maintaining quality is a feat pulled off by very few franchises, (see last week’s dreary Men in Black: International). But Pixar has done it with Toy Story 4. It might not have quite as many nifty gags without its originator John Lasseter at the helm, but the quality of animation has reached new heights and the story reduced me both to tears and helpless laughter. The original Toy Story was the first animation feature created entirely digitally; almost 25 years later computer technology has made another huge leap forward. The opening Read more ...
aleks.sierz
John Malkovich is back in town - and he's starring in the most controversial play of the year. Trouble is, it might well also be the worst. When the subject of veteran American playwright David Mamet's new drama was announced as being about a Hollywood mogul, who, like Harvey Weinstein, is accused of abusive behaviour there was a predictable outcry. How dare Mamet write about this? How dare a man write about sexual abuse? How dare fiction trespass on fact? Although the Garrick Theatre in the West End was besieged by autograph hunters rather than protesters at today's press night, twitter has Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Always leave them wanting more, a wise man once said, and there can’t be a single fan of Mum who doesn’t want its creator, Stefan Golaszewski, to change his mind about making the third series the last. But then, when you achieve perfection perhaps it’s best to sign off at the top; the finale was just scrumptious.Over 18 beautifully paced episodes, Golaszewski crafted a study of familial love, bereavement and the prevailing strength of the human spirit as he told the story of the recently widowed Cathy (Lesley Melville), for whom the word stoic might have been invented.Slowly, very slowly, we Read more ...
David Nice
Suppose you're seeing Musorgsky's selective historical opera for the first time in Richard Jones's production, without any prior knowledge of the action. That child's spinning-top on the dropcloth: why? Then the curtain rises and we see Bryn Terfel's troubled Boris Godunov seated in near-darkness, while a figure with an outsized head plays with a real top in the upper room before being swiftly despatched by three assassins. The playback repetitions are the thing to catch the conscience of the tsar-king. Later, chronicler-monk Pimen gives us the back-story about the murder of the heir-apparent Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Lev Dodin has been artistic director of the famed Maly Drama Theatre for some three and a half decades now, over which time the St Petersburg company has earned itself the highest of international reputations. London audiences have been fortunate to see a number of its recent achievements, with a season last year that brought us Uncle Vanya and Life & Fate, and they return now, for just 10 days, with Chekhov's Three Sisters (played in Russian, with excellent English-language surtitling). Dodin's production premiered on the company's home stage in October 2010, and nearly a decade of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The botched 1973 hostage incident which inspired the term Stockholm syndrome comes to flatly comic life here, the strange psychological phenomenon of captives falling for their captors over time being reduced to an absurd caper. Bringing out the insipid worst in Ethan Hawke as machine-gun wielding softie Lars, it remains watchable thanks to Noomi Rapace’s enigmatic, quivering power as the hostage he bonds with.Lars takes over a Stockholm bank one sunny morning, in a city here parodically pastel-coloured and post-hippie, with the radio dial agreeably set to Dylan in his country-rock phase (the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Download is Britain’s premier metal festival, attended by all ages. Theartsdesk’s three person team offer up their reviews of one day each, as they navigated their way between Eighties hair metal, contemporary Viking metal and any other metal you might care to imagine…Friday 14th JuneBy Ellie PorterPictured above: Rob Zombie headlining the Zippo Encore Stage © Matt EachusWell, last year’s uncharacteristically glorious sunshine seemed too good to be true – and it was: normal service resumes this year at Download. Heavy rain in the week before the festival has resulted in glutinous ground and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A Broadway show as melodically haunting and sophisticated as it is niche, The Light in the Piazza has taken its own bittersweet time getting to London. A separate European premiere in 2009 at Leicester's Curve Theatre whetted the local appetite for a show that won six Tony Awards in 2005 but is far from standard musical fare. And here it finally is in the capital, albeit for 20 performances only in a full production, directed by Daniel Evans within the unexpected confines of the Royal Festival Hall. The concert setting grants pole position to Adam Guettel's score and to the distinguished, if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Russell T Davies’s doomsday odyssey reached its endgame on BBC One, feisty grandma Muriel (played by indestructible Anne Reid) got to deliver the moral of the story. With the Lyons clan gathered round that now-familiar dining table, she spelt it out for them. “It’s all your fault,” she scolded, reminding them how they’d all twiddled their thumbs and done nothing while everyone was ripped off by the banks, let themselves be seduced by dirt-cheap globalised manufacturing, and let the evil Vivienne Rook become Prime Minister. “This is the world we built,” she jeered. “Congratulations!”This Read more ...
peter.quinn
Camden’s Jazz Cafe reverberated to the sounds of a 50-year-old spiritual jazz classic last night, as saxist and MC Soweto Kinch and his quintet paid fulsome homage to NEA Jazz Master Pharoah Sanders’ consciousness-expanding album, Karma.Recorded in New York City over two days in February 1969, the album line-up was one of Sanders' finest, including vocalist and lyricist Leon Thomas, pianist Lonnie Liston Smith and bassist Richard Davis, who had performed on a similarly genre-defying masterpiece, Astral Weeks, the year before. The seismic collision of jazz and world music heard in Karma is Read more ...