Reviews
Tom Birchenough
You always wonder about those final scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Are they really needed dramatically; do they work? We understand, of course, that a closing exhalation may add impact to high passions just witnessed. But is it just a romantic idea that tragedy might be better ending with the real bang of (multiple) death, rather than the relative whimper of a new order being established?In his new Antony and Cleopatra, Simon Godwin gives us a double whammy, playing the final scene – the closing tableau, at least, with its pronouncements over the dead heroine – as prelude to the action as Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Perched alone and fearful in her hut as the curtain rises on Die Walküre, Sieglinde clutches and then throws aside a grimy teddy-bear. Story time is over. The nymphs and gold and bickering gods all belong in the past, to the ‘preliminary evening’ of Das Rheingold, or so Sieglinde might think. The real drama of Wagner's Ring begins here. It’s a nice metaphor, one of many that Keith Warner throws into the pot for his Royal Opera staging on its final appearance.Other false comforts and dreams of dominion bind the Victorian age of the Ring’s composition to subsequent eras of industrialised Read more ...
David Kettle
“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years. Concept sketches and art show the games developing as they gradually take their final form. The exhibition also looks at how videogames could be more life-like and give a new perspective on the world.Some of the games cover topics never really seen before in games. Mafia 3 is set in 1968 USA, and addresses racism as an integral part of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. The wholly avoidable tragedy (Ireland exported huge amounts of grain, butter and livestock during the famine) resides still in the modern Irish psyche; it is no coincidence that of all the nations that contributed to Live Aid in 1985, Ireland’s contribution, per capita, was the greatest.Lance Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park.Crystal Moselle’s first feature film (her extraordinary 2015 documentary The Wolfpack, about some Lower East Side siblings whose father closeted them in the family apartment for years, is a hard act to follow) homes in on eight teenage girls who bond through skateboarding. Very different Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There was once a time when grime music was very angry, and very threatening, but that seems a long time ago now. Today, Dizzee Rascal is less a herald of riot and revolt, and more of a national treasure, exuding charm from every pore, even if his music has become increasing predictable and safe. But, as wordsmith and dancer Debris Stevenson proves in her debut play, Poet in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal still can change minds and influence people. Now on the Royal Court's main stage, the electrifying semi-autobiographical show features Stevenson herself, as well as grime MC Jammz and music by Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Awesome numbers: over a million miles, the equivalent of 42 times around the globe, have been traversed by Her Majesty the Queen, enabling visits over the past seven decades or so to 117 different countries. No one has reigned longer nor travelled further.For various reasons, obviously co-incident with the death of the British Empire, she has felt a special attachment to the Commonwealth,which (with the recent return of Gambia) includes some 53 countries, some rather surprisingly with no particular history with Britain. Queen Elizabeth pledged her life to the service of the Commonwealth, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Keith Warner’s production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was first seen at Covent Garden between 2004 and 2006, and is now back for a third and final series of full runs, chiefly to catch the Brünnhilde of Nina Stemme in three of the operas, continuing into November. The designs (by Stefanos Lazaridis) and dramaturgy have mostly aged well, aided by Warner’s high-drama but low-concept approach. The casting for this Rheingold is less starry than before, but makes for a good ensemble – which is exactly what Das Rheingold requires.For the opening scene, the depths of the Rhine are Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’ve just spent four hours in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain. The shortlisted artists all show films or videos, which means that you either stay for the duration or make the decision to walk away, which feels disrespectful. For unlike paintings, drawings or photographs, which allow you to decide how long to spend in their company, the moving image tends to deprive you of agency and hold you captive.Luke Willis Thompson chose specialist macro lenses to film a sculpture by Donald Rodney who died in 1998 from sickle cell anaemia, an inherited disorder particularly affecting Africans Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And breathe. Bodyguard – not, as even some careless BBC broadcasters keep calling it, "The Bodyguard" – careered to a conclusion as if hurtling around a booby-trapped assault course. It turned out that, contrary to a popular theory about Jed Mercurio's BBC One thriller, the Home Secretary Julia Montague was not secretly alive and well and hiding round the corner in a crazy Mercurioso twist. Apparently she really was dead and buried, and for much of the pulsating finale the hunter became the hunted as her lover and protector PS David Budd (Richard Madden) was identified as her murderer. And Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s always been something of a buzz in the air at East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival. It’s the feeling that it’s somehow a special privilege to discover its performances – whether they’re from international names or emerging artists, challenging, provocative and illuminating by turns – across the region’s exquisite and little-known churchs, halls, theatres and other venues. Plus, of course, its timing: there’s no avoiding the fact that the Lammermuir Festival feels like a comforting come-down after the unbridled frenzy of its elder, far more gargantuan Edinburgh neighbour that takes over Read more ...