Reviews
Marina Vaizey
In this memoir, subtitled “Paris Among the Artists”, Michael Peppiatt presents his 1960s self as an absorbed, irritatingly immature and energetically heterosexual young man let loose in Paris to find himself (or not). The young art historian, already a bemused platonic acolyte of Francis Bacon, whom he had met when interviewing the artist for a student publication, had been pushed by his Francophile father to cross the Channel. Paris was to define his life, loves and profession for at least a quarter of a century. He seemed relatively clear-sighted early on about the city’s allure and its Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“Don’t love me yet,” replies Patti Smith to the first of tonight’s many excitable shout-outs. “Who knows, after 20 minutes you might be gone!” An unlikely scenario, given that this show – part of the Roundhouse’s annual “In the Round” series, which also features Ronnie Spector and Shirley Collins – sold out in nanoseconds and is packed with rapt fans. It’s billed as “An Evening of Words and Music”, but if you’ve ever seen Patti Smith before you’ll know that this combination is pretty much a given (I don’t think I’ll ever forget Smith's furious performance of Allen Ginsberg's “Footnote to Howl Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Baggage can weigh a movie down. The Mule comes with quite a bit of baggage, and not just the kilos of coke stashed in the car’s trunk. Clint Eastwood’s fifty plus years as a screen icon turned director, his dodgy love life and libertarian politics all make it hard to walk into a cinema showing his latest film without dragging along a whole load of preconceptions. If an unknown director (who was not also playing the lead) had made this well-crafted and enjoyable shaggy-dog story of a film, this would be a different review. But it’s Clint, so every frame is coloured by his legend and sometimes Read more ...
Katherine Waters
For an artist whose cerebral and frequently playful works reference physics, myth and music, Fausto Melotti’s artistic education was appropriately heterogeneous.The foundations were laid early on at the Elisabettina School in his hometown of Rovereto, an institution well-regarded for bringing together the applied and fine arts with theatre and music, the sciences and the humanities. Later, having enrolled at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Pisa he graduated from Milan Polytechnic in electrical engineering. This was followed by studies in music and art in Turin and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Satire was once thought in America to be that thing that closed on Saturday night. Not here: filmmaker Adam McKay goes the distance with Vice, a hurtling examination of realpolitik that puts Dick Cheney under a spotlight at once satiric and scary. Do we have Dubya's onetime veep to thank for the subsequent rise of Trump and the parlous state of affairs Stateside since then? Perhaps, and one of the many strengths of this eight-times-nominated Oscar hopeful is its ability to cover the historic and thematic waterfront whilst keeping a keen eye on the slippery if malign presence at its centre. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Its a preposterous act of hubris, isn’t it? Pairing large scale video installations by American artist Bill Viola with drawings by Michelangelo can’t possibly illuminate our experience of either art form; or can it? Are we meant to conclude that Viola is the contemporary equivalent of the Renaissance master or, conversely, that Michelangelo would have embraced video had it been available to him some 500 years ago? Both propositions are stupid and unhelpful and the idea of trying to update Michelangelo or big up Viola is distasteful. Yet despite these reservations, the juxtaposition is Read more ...
Owen Richards
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still. On Her Shoulders shows this exhausting commitment, simultaneously in the public eye yet seemingly ignored when action is required.As we’re introduced to Nadia, we quickly understand the strain this touring causes, constantly made to relive her horrifying experience for interviews. Her work is valuable for the public to Read more ...
Robert Beale
No one worried about melting icecaps and homeless penguins when Vaughan Williams wrote his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic around 70 years ago. (They do now, as a new music theatre piece by Laura Bowler to be premiered by Manchester Camerata next week will show). It was the challenge of the frozen continent and a heroic effort to reach its heart that counted.The film, starring John Mills, tells the story of Captain Robert Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1912, which ended in the deaths of all his team. Vaughan Williams provided music depicting tragedy amid the icy wastes with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When it was announced that Cate Blanchett was making her National Theatre debut with Martin's Crimp's new play, When We have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, its website exploded with people wishing to buy tickets. To those many thousands disappointed, I say: “Well done, you!”The play's subtitle is “Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson's Pamela”, so it certainly starts from an interesting place. The epistolary novel from 1740, subtitled “Or, Virtue Rewarded”, concerns a young maid, Pamela, whose master, Mr B, makes frequent and unwanted sexual advances to her. After many refusals, he Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How does an unassuming 36-year-old with a terrifyingly sensible haircut and a mildly flamboyant taste in jumpers become the political playwright par excellence of his generation? That’s the question that Alan Yentob sought to dissect in this first episode of a new series of Imagine, subtitled "In the Room Where It Happens", which deftly anatomised James Graham’s off-the-Richter-scale success in repeatedly making the political both profoundly and compellingly personal.Graham most recently made watercooler conversation sizzle with his Brexit: The Uncivil War, broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Following Caroline, or Change and Fun Home, the UK is blessed with another work from American composer Jeanine Tesori; this is the British premiere of her 1997 musical Violet, which had a Sutton Foster-starring Broadway production in 2014. If not as refined as that exquisite duo, it’s still a compelling piece, thanks to a ravishing score and a dynamite central performance.It’s 1964, and Violet (Kaisa Hammarlund, pictured below right) is travelling on a Greyhound bus from her small town in North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in hopes of having her facial scar – caused by a loose axe head – Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Endellion Quartet first rehearsed on 20 January 1979, deep in the throes of Britain’s so-called “Winter of Discontent”. That longevity – with three of the original players still on the team after four decades – makes the acclaimed ensemble roughly as old as Spandau Ballet, and senior to REM. While fashions in pop, and indeed politics, may change with the seasons, the quartet has matured and developed without losing touch with the qualities of sensitivity and solidarity that still make for so many exemplary performances.At 40, they now match the greatest age attained by the Amadeus Quartet Read more ...