Reviews
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 ...
Kieron Tyler
Until now, Rema-Rema’s only release was a 12-inch EP released in August 1980. It had hit shops after the band fell apart at the end of the previous year. Negotiations with 4AD, a new offshoot of the Beggar’s Banquet label, were underway towards the end of 1979 but then guitarist and future Adam and the Ants-man Marco Pirroni left. They rehearsed without him but called it a day in November. Yet 4AD issued that EP, titled Wheel in the Roses.Pirroni’s presence is partly what rescues Rema-Rema from being a post-punk footnote. Over their lifespan – the band formed in May 1978 – the band played Read more ...
Matt Wolf
London's impromptu mini-season devoted to the work of Athol Fugard picks up real steam with Blood Knot, Matthew Xia's transfixing take on one of the benchmark titles of the apartheid era and beyond. I first encountered this play during its Tony-nominated Broadway engagement in 1985, in which Fugard and his great South African friend and colleague, Zakes Mokae, returned to roles they had originated in Johannesburg in 1961. Now 86, Fugard continues to proffer a theatrical call to conscience which Xia and his exemplary collaborators at the Orange Tree Theatre understand to their core. And if the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
London performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir are like Meaningful Votes: you wait a long time for one, then they come in clusters. After last night’s Vasari Singers performance, there is only three weeks till the London Concord Singers put this choral monster in front of the voting public again. It remains to be seen if John Bercow steps in to prevent even more.It was still a treat to hear the piece last night in the capable hands of the Vasari Singers. The Concerto for Choir is a challenge on so many fronts: the stamina required for its great length, the need to pronounce lots Read more ...
David Nice
When "Maestro" Riccardo Muti left the Royal Opera's previous production of Verdi's fate-laden epic, disgusted by minor changes to fit the scenery on the Covent Garden stage, no-one was sorry when Antonio Pappano, the true master of the house then only two years into his glorious reign, took over. He's now unsurpassable in the pace and colouring of the great Verdi and Puccini scores. Signs from his previous collaborations with once radical director Christof Loy and the glorious cast assembled were that this time round Forza would be a total triumph. In the end, several mountains gave birth to Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
NYC, 1987. AIDS is ravaging the city, Reagan’s in power, Trump is in his tower. The American dream is available - to some. And for some of those to whom it’s not, there’s the world of balls, vogueing and competing for trophies. If your family has kicked you out for being gay or trans, the balls are a place where you can strike a pose, find acceptance and make your legendary mark. Even if you're homeless and haven’t eaten in days.Pose, partly based on Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, (she acted as consultant on the series) is ground-breaking because trans people play Read more ...
Owen Richards
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap. Perfectly balancing perspective and curiosity, it’s perhaps the most unexpected achievement on the year.Liu has apparently always been the one behind the camera. From his early teens, he’s been pointing the lens towards his friends, primarily Zack and Keire. They’re both friends we recognise: Zack is the joker, always up for partying hard, and Keire Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Emilia Bassano Lanier is not a household name. But maybe she should be. Born in 1569, she was one of the first women in England to publish a book of poetry. And she was also a religious thinker, a feminist and the founder of a school for girls. Oh, and a mother too. And maybe, just maybe, at a long stretch, she was also the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets. Anyway, she's a fascinating Elizabethan cypher and you can easily see why Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's account of her life and times was such a hit when it opened at Shakespeare's Globe last August. Now remounted in the West End, the play Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Some monsters are real," notes a retribution-minded wife (Matilda Ziegler) early in Downstate, Bruce Norris's beautiful and wounding play that has arrived at the National Theatre in the production of a writer's dreams. But by the time this restless, ceaselessly provocative evening has come to its reflective close, you may find yourself reconsidering the efficacy of the word "monster" to describe any human being. Telling of four paedophiles sharing a group home in "downstate" Illinois, 280 miles south of Chicago, Norris all but demands that an audience see humanity in the round. So successful Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Genius is as genius does, and Rudolf Nureyev made sure nobody was left in any doubt about the scale of either his talents or his ambitions. Based on Julie Kavanagh's biography Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, The White Crow pairs director and actor Ralph Fiennes with screenwriter David Hare to deliver an involving and often thrilling account of Nureyev’s rise to fame as a ballet dancer and his sensational defection to the West in 1961. It pulls off the tricky feat of being both successful drama and a plausible depiction of the rarefied world of ballet.In its recounting of Nureyev’s life from Read more ...