Reviews
Bernard Hughes
The Venezuelan pianist and composer Gabriela Montero is an outspoken advocate for political change in her country, using her musical standing as a platform from which to highlight Venezuela’s "hijacking" by "forces of criminality, barbarism and nihilism". She also seeks to express this struggle through her own music and indeed, in this case, through the programming and staging of a whole concert. In this, she was broadly successful, although not unreservedly so.This concert, with the strings of the Scottish Ensemble, was centred around Montero’s 2018 quasi-piano concerto Babel, surrounded by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director, is perhaps best known for the lengthy and explicit sex scenes in La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour). His latest film opens, slam in your face, with a sequence of passionate love-making: well-shot, edited and played by the actors, but almost as raw as porn. We watch, along with Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), the film’s main character, who peers, fascinated through a gap in the blinds.This voyeuristic moment resonates with the filmmaker’s own almost obsessive need to expose without subtlety the details of sexual activity. A kind of voyeurism Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I last saw this Magic Flute, directed by Dominic Cooke, when it was new, some 14 years ago, and I remember it mainly, I’m afraid, for its lack of visual charm. Nothing much has changed: the relentless box sets (designer Julian Crouch), not a leaf or a blade of grass to be seen; the ridiculous, glaring orange suitings, bowler hats and umbrellas for Sarastro’s men (Orangemen, naturally); the dullness alleviated only by some witty animal costumes (Kevin Pollard), and the three charming boys – one of them actually a girl – in sailor suits, riding an aerial bike made out of a fish.Of course, the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Two men called "Massimo" face the audience, one very tall, one very, well, minimo. The tall Massimo (Tom Espiner, pictured below) sports wavy shoulder length blond hair and an exuberant pearl rosary, the minimo Massimo (Hemi Yeroham) has dark hair, a beard and glasses, and intense stare. In front of them are two stands carrying all the paraphernalia needed to create sound effects for one of the gruesome slashing scenes in the Italian giallo film on which they are working, not least several sharp implements and a watermelon. What ensues is probably one of the most diverting sequences of absurd Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Arthurian legend’s tight fit as a Brexit allegory perhaps proves how timeless it is as, buried and bound in the earth by Merlin, Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) senses the land above is “lost and leaderless”, and ripe for her apocalyptic return.This ripped from the headlines quality to The Kid Who Would Be King is largely coincidence, director Joe Cornish has claimed. When he had the germ of this idea as an ‘80s teenager, giddy with the possibilities of splicing E.T. and John Boorman’s Excalibur, Britain and the world were quite riven enough. The myth of a king also buried in the soil, to be Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This year’s unofficial Arthur Miller season – following The Price and ahead of All My Sons at the Old Vic and Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic – now turns to his 1980 work, The American Clock, inspired in part by Miller’s own memories of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and subsequent Great Depression. It’s also based on Studs Terkel’s oral history Hard Times, and the combination is an uneasy one: a Miller-esque American family used as microcosm, but also constant diversions to other people and places in a sprawling three hours.Central to the play is the Baum clan: father Moe, initially a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The power of seeing was the bedrock of John Ruskin’s philosophy. In the bicentenary of his birth, a revelatory exhibition at Two Temple Place in London opens out the idea and makes it manifest through both his own work and the treasures of his collection.Born in 1819, Ruskin was one of the Victorian era's great polymaths. Almost 200 objects are displayed across two floors of a neo-Gothic mansion, a grand domestic setting in keeping with Ruskin’s own childhood environment. Here a Burne-Jones design for stained glass, there a Dürer etching, Victorian copies of Verrocchio and Tintoretto, the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“My first recital in about a gazillion years in London!” wrote Sarah Chang a week ago for her 140,000 Twitter followers. “I usually work with orchestras whenever I'm in town so what an absolute joy+pleasure to be playing a duo program with piano!”There were indeed musical aspects of this recital by the duo of Chang and pianist Ashley Wass which did impart "joy+pleasure", and the Chang faithful who attended – Cadogan Hall was not quite half full – cheered and cooed their appreciation, and clearly loved every moment of it. There were even some very young, impeccably quiet children, taken there Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Women spend a lot of time gazing at themselves in the mirror in the Belgian auteur director Ivo van Hove's latest stage-to-screen deconstruction, All About Eve, which is based on one of the most-beloved of all films about the theatre: the 1950 Oscar-winner of the same name. And well these varying generations of stage talents might want to anatomise every pore. Advancing age kills figuratively, if not literally, in the landscape of a play that may bear the same title as Joseph L Mankiewicz's iconic backstage story but conveys its own entirely (and deliberately) different import and impact. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Monteverdi Vespers are usually a grand affair, but Harry Christophers showed they can work just as well on a smaller scale. Cadogan Hall has a dry acoustic, at least compared to St Mark’s Basilica, so there is little opportunity for billowing waves of choral declamation, echoing through the galleries. Instead, Christophers aims for focus and clarity, with swift tempos and a modest dynamic range. His singers and players respond well, with good balance and ensemble, although the virtuosic demands of the melodic lines were often taxing for the soloists.Christophers (pictured below by Marco Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the third series ended with a car crash, I did wonder whether Catastrophe (Channel 4) should maybe think about calling it a day. The previous half-dozen episodes had gone to a dark place in their exploration of alcoholism, but stealthily, as if the script didn’t quite know whether it was meant to be funny or a gut-wrenching purgative. Well it’s always good to be proved resoundingly wrong. Catastrophe, written by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, returned for a fourth turn of the wheel with the filthy smile restored to its face.The scripts have been to some awkward and icky Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so back to the windswept landscapes of the Shetland archipelago, where stoical DI Jimmy Perez is still keeping the bad guys at bay while continuing to cope with life as an ageing widower. You do wonder, though, how he sustains his commitment to the job in a territory offering such a restricted career ladder.Anyhow, the challenge is keeping screenwriter David Kane on his toes (the original Ann Cleeves novels having been all used up). This opening episode of a new six-part story revolved around the fate of a young Nigerian man called Daniel Ugara (Ayande Bhebe), although it took a while to Read more ...