Reviews
Nick Hasted
Eugene Jarecki’s forensic investigation concludes that Julian Assange’s character flaws are dwarfed by the high crimes he exposed, and can’t justify the cruel and unusual punishment of his cramped Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary. This reverses what he sees as self-interested manipulation of the official narrative, which stoked personal condemnation as a smokescreen for state slaughter and surveillance.Character has dominated Assange’s evolving cinema persona, which began with fellow Australian Robert Connolly’s admiring Underground (2012), an account of young Julian the teen hacker in the barely Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There were moments during the starry, two-evening Beare’s Chamber Music Festival when the quality of the playing reached such heights, it was tempting to ask if a higher level of chamber music-making can or even could exist anywhere. So, although London already has an incredibly rich and vibrant chamber music scene, this event – in its second edition and planned to take place every two years - is clearly additive to it. The two concerts were vociferously applauded, especially the second, Wigmore Hall concert, in which there were standing ovations at the end of each half.The two Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
JB Priestley’s glorious pot shot at marital complacency in pre-First World War Bradford proves to be a tonic at a time of year where, for better or for worse, many people are forced to play happy families. Written in 1938 – seven years before his markedly different An Inspector Calls – it was so successful that it went on to be the first play ever broadcast live on television. Though you couldn’t imagine it appealing to broadcasting bosses today, that doesn’t detract from Tim Sheader’s assured, mischievous production, which transports us to a confidently hideous drawing room with mustard Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The third of James Cameron’s world-building epics arrives 16 years after the first one, but only three after number two, Avatar: The Way of Water. Apparently proceedings were held up by Cameron and his army of technicians having to adjust to developments in technology, not least the gadgetry required for underwater performance capture.Anyway here it is, and the results (in 3D) are fairly awesome, not least the running time of three and a quarter hours. We find ourselves back on the planet Pandora, a kind of supernatural paradise where human-like beings and an extraordinary array of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A leftfield, Tony-winning phenomenon on Broadway, Cole Escola’s comedy comes to London very much living up to the hype. This is a gloriously eccentric, rude, riotous marvel – laugh-out loud and daft as a brush.While many regard the current White House as a mad house, Escola’s naughty revisionism goes back in time to debunk one of the country’s most genuinely revered presidents. But the chief focus of this breezy 80-minute play is the first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. History has been unkind to Mary, often highlighting her extravagant spending, dark moods and institutionalisation. Cole Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Is there a neuroscientist in the house? I need a latterday Oliver Sacks to tell me about earworms, specifically earworms issuing from the music of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. I should explain. At about this time every year, for days and sometimes weeks following exposure to The Nutcracker, I am plagued by bits of its score playing on a loop in my head. Not the big hummable tunes like the "Waltz of the Flowers" in Act II, nor the massive bass trombone-led crescendo that accompanies the growing Christmas tree, but snippets, linking passages, what might technically be called the score’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a warehouse, Tube trains rumbling below, Noah, his sister Tamara and his (Gentile) girlfriend Maud, live in a disused space, a North London simulacrum of a kibbutz, but with drug dealers at the door, unhinged co-tenants wandering in and out and a Christmas tree in the corner.Their father, Elliot, is visiting this kinda home for a kinda Christmas dinner which is also to be attended by Jack (now calling himself Aaron), Tamara’s kinda ex-bf, who moved to Tel Aviv for its skinny dipping and various other ‘Berlin of the East’ attractions. He brings a suitcase, but he and Tam have far more Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If your heart sinks every time a Shakespeare funny-man enters, here comes the RSC to put an unforced grin on your face. Its latest Feste is the real deal: an emcee with true comedic chops, abetted by a rising-star director who understands exactly how to exploit the innate comedy of both the play and its most anarchic spirit.The actor playing Feste is sweet-voiced Michael Grady-Hall (pictured below, left), whom we first see descending from the flies on a wire, crooning into a microphone. His vertical shock of hair is by way of Eraserhead; his specs and facial gestures recall the much missed Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
“My goal was to take the Messiah as if it had been written yesterday,” the conductor and eminent French harpsichordist Christophe Rousset told Tom Service on Radio 3 on Saturday. “[It would be] as if we had received the score for the first time… [and were thinking] wow, how amazing this piece is and how fresh it can be.”“Wow” was certainly a word that came to mind as the English Baroque Soloists launched into the Messiah’s French-style overture with nimble ebullience, emphasising the beats in bold stripes of tonal colour. It was as if Rousset, one of our most stylish and subversive Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
With teasing timing, the latest revival of a Tom Stoppard play at the Hampstead Theatre arrived just hours after his funeral, a weird echo of his maxim, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” As at its debut in 1995, Indian Ink features a luminous Felicity Kendal, but this time not as perky young poet Flora but in the role of her older sister Eleanor, 65 years on,The plot follows a favourite Stoppard trajectory, of seeing the past as a puzzle demanding investigation. It’s a strategy he used to best effect in the earlier Arcadia (1993); the resolution of the puzzle here is less enigmatic, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHManduria Bite Me (Wild Honey)
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The debut from Milan punkers Manduria is a six-tracker haemorrhaging rock’n’roll cheek and sass. They riff and fuzz and bang about without a care in the world, shouting and revelling in reverb mess, howling like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while cranking up the amps like The Cramps, the rhythm section indulging in a mono-stomp that penetrates the inner brain like Joe Pesci’s vice. There’s a track called “I Hate to Think” and you don’t need to. On “Buongiorno” they slow things down for a dip Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bat away your lurgy, stop that coffin’ and get up to Finsbury Park for a laugh laden, ballad blitzing, sensational spoof starring the toothsome Transylvanian. If that sentence is boiling your blood with its rich vein of bad humour, you’ll be spitting bile in the house; if not, you’ll be so relaxed at the end of the evening, you shan’t be needing your statins before bedtime.Because there’s little we need more right now than laughter, the best medicine, natch and that’s what we get - liberally laced with groans, because no joke is too daddish for Dan Patterson and Jez Bond - with a smattering Read more ...