Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Let me be clear. The agonising process of the UK’s departure, or not, from the EU will be an infinite field of academic study over the decades to come. Road to Brexit (BBC Two) will not be a valuable source of research material, because it was a farrago of misinformation and fantasy, but it least it delivered a reasonable percentage of cheap belly laughs.It was a vehicle for Matt Toast of London Berry, appearing here as the imaginary historian Michael Squeamish. Slobbish, bearded and long-haired, Squeamish exuded a bellicose air of entirely unjustified certainty as he rode roughshod over 60- Read more ...
Richard Bratby
This was a fascinating, unexpected prospect; instantly appealing to anyone who’s ever wondered about the string quartet’s niche in the 21st-century musical ecosystem. Two practically new song cycles for soprano and quartet – Kate Whitley’s Charlotte Mew Songs (2017, but extended earlier this year) and Kate Soper’s Nadja (2015) - framed the Third Quartet (1938) by Elizabeth Maconchy. The performers, the Albion Quartet, have already won something of a reputation for doing things differently. A relatively new ensemble, formed in 2016, they’re led by Tamsin Waley-Cohen, one of an growing number Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Contemporary British theatre loves time travel — and not just to the past. It also enjoys imagining the future, especially the bad stuff ahead. So Ella Road's debut play, The Phlebotomist, is set in a convincingly coherent dystopia where genetic profiling reigns supreme, and one blood test can fuck up all your life chances. First staged at the Hampstead Theatre's Downstairs studio space last year, the play has been well reviewed and nominated both for an Olivier Award and for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. But how does it look on this venue's main stage?Road's Brave New World is one in Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A crash, a scurry, a long, lilting serenade – the overture to Rossini’s Elizabeth I sounds oddly familiar. Not to worry. English Touring Opera has anticipated our confusion. “You may recognise this overture” flash the surtitles, to a ripple of laughter, before explaining that yes: this is essentially the same piece, originally composed in 1813 for Aureliano in Palmira that ended up attached to – of all things – The Barber of Seville. Rossini obviously rated it; in fact the overture’s closing section reappears as part of the chorus that closes Act One of Elizabeth I, which is more than it does Read more ...
Heather Neill
Obstetrician Dr Mary Barton had the best of intentions. As a missionary in India she had observed the poor treatment of childless women and, back home in England, she took positive action to help women who wanted babies. This being the period between the late 1930s and 1967, there was as yet no legal framework for artificial insemination; indeed it was disapproved of and kept secret. More importantly, there was only a small pool of donors, so a very few men – one of whom was Mary's husband, Bertold Wiesner – fathered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of offspring. All records were Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mozart in E flat (the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and in G (the K.453 Piano Concerto), and Schubert in C – the “Great” C major Symphony, no less – ushered spring into the Festival Hall on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon.Slimmed down to a pocket Philharmonia during the first half, the orchestra sounded a touch scrappy and a size too small for the hall during the overture. Having fluffed the concerto’s opening line, they also took a while to settle and attune themselves to the supple and urbane manner of soloist Jonathan Biss.Not yet 40, Biss (main picture) plays with the relaxed and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
No successor has yet been named to Vladimir Jurowski as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic, so it is interesting to note that Edward Gardner is making several appearances with the orchestra this season. The two conductors are similar in their dynamic approach and brisk, efficient tempos. But where Jurowski focuses on detail, drawing exceptional clarity from the ensemble, Gardner seems more impulsive, structuring the music with similar care, but punctuating to greater dramatic effect with surprisingly emphatic tuttis. This concert, of Beethoven, Elgar and Mahler, demonstrated an Read more ...
Asya Draganova
The stereotypical image of heavy metal music suggests it exists in isolation from other musical styles. And while it is true that metal is distinct and re-invents its transgressive nature all the time, the genre has generated commercial success as well as a loyal and diverse global community. The first edition of the World Metal Congress took place over two days in Shoreditch, London, and addressed metal in both celebratory and critical ways, through an impressive range of perspectives.The event included artists as diverse as Barney Greenway of Napalm Death, Sabina Classen of Holy Moses, Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
I am deeply jealous of Miles Jupp's dressing gown in The Life I Lead, the solo play at the Park Theatre. It's a silky-grey patterned number of exquisitely comfortable proportions, and just the sort of thing a chap should wear to tell the story of his life via some genial patter over an hour or two. The story told, though, is not of Jupp but of David Tomlinson, the British actor who died in 2000 and was famous for playing upper-class fumblers, in particular Mr Banks, the irritable banker father whose life is changed forever by Mary Poppins. Like that dressing gown, the play comes with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV has an enviable knack for creating populist historical costume dramas which never seem to wear out, despite a million rotations on ITV3. Once everybody had got over the shock of a young and glamorous Queen Victoria, who had previously existed in the popular imagination as a scowling dowager in a coal sack, Victoria proceeded to take its place in the ITV pantheon with an air of unswerving confidence.The third series dawned with a whiff of gunpowder in the air. It’s 1848, and revolutionary zeal is sweeping across Europe. No royal family is safe, and France’s King Louis Philippe – Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Balsall Heath’s Castle & Falcon is one of the newer live music venues in Birmingham, a city that finally seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance in these otherwise uncertain times. Found in the back room of a revitalised pub that is somewhat off the beaten track and something of a schlepp away from the city centre, it is the kind of venue where bands that are just finding their feet in the live arena might be found.It was, therefore, something of a shock to find My Baby there, a band that have been making a mark for themselves on the festival circuit for a while. However, it Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Around the works canteen, a dozen huge wall-paintings depict, in bright cheerful colours spread across radically stylised forms, happy scenes of women and men at work and play beside a sunlit sea. They till, pick, dance, chat, dream, wander or water flowers. In their shapes and shades, all play their harmonious part in this beautiful, neutral world of elements and creatures and objects which (as Karl Ove Knausgaard puts it) “doesn’t care about us, which doesn’t care about anything, which merely exists”. And that indifference of the universe makes you want, not to scream, but to smile.Painted Read more ...