Reviews
graham.rickson
Puccini’s Tosca isn’t a subtle work, and this, Opera North’s fourth production since the company’s founding in 1978, is occasionally too loud and crude. But it’s undeniably powerful. Edward Dick’s 2017 Hansel and Gretel left me a little nonplussed, but this Tosca is miles better, a colourful update which manages to juggle plenty of schlock with sound artistic nous. He’s helped by conductor Antony Hermus, making his Opera North debut and securing some terrific, full-throated orchestral playing, much of it at the upper end of the dynamic scale.Nab a seat near the front of the stalls and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be a sign of the times that the two lead performances in Killing Eve are female, with Jodie Comer fizzing hyperactively as shape-shifting assassin Villanelle and Sandra Oh (from Grey’s Anatomy) as British intelligence officer Eve Polastri (pictured below). Yet simultaneously, the show has a comic campness and air of fantasy that feels Sixties-like, reminiscent of such timewarp delights as The Avengers or Modesty Blaise. Amazingly, they had female leads back then too.My crystal ball (alias BBC Previews) tells me that the cracks start to show as Killing Eve works its way through its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During their original 1980 to 1984 lifespan as a recording unit, Soft Cell issued three albums, a mini-album, eleven singles and EP. There were also compilation appearances, bonus tracks on discs included with albums or singles (such as the 12-inch of Jimi Hendrix cover versions accompanying The Art of Falling Apart) and extended tracks which appeared on 12-inch singles. Everything could probably be collected on six CDs.The new box set Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story features 10 discs, one of which is a DVD. The albums and the Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing mini-album are not Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“What is it about Mozart?” wondered the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter, pointing out the composer's frightening demands of accuracy and lucidity. Even though many pianists today command technique to spare, a Mozart fear factor tends to keep his sonatas off recital programmes. Richter’s longtime protegée Elisabeth Leonskaja once made a disc with him of arrangements of late piano sonatas but she is now more associated with the epic romantic repertoire that she is playing around the world for most of this year, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and the great Schubert sonatas.So an evening of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Annemarie Jacir’s third feature may have picked up a subtitle, “The Wedding Invitation”, for international distribution, but the key to her intimate portrait of Palestinian life seen through a father-son relationship lies in understanding the full nuance of its title. The word wajib, best translated from Arabic as “social duty”, is spoken only once in the film – an invitation is taken to an old lady whom the hosts know will be unable to attend, but they offer it because that is the accepted, the proper way in their society – but its concept pervades the entire film.Jacir has located her story Read more ...
mark.kidel
Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form. But Classic Albums at least avoids the BBC’s slavish reliance on presenters, and makes possible programmes that draw the viewer in closer than when everything is mediated by the wall-to wall ego of an expert or celeb.Although we have the trademark moments when the album’s different tracks are teased apart at the mixing desk to reveal the architecture of a recorded song, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his last show at the Bush, he has chosen a project close to his heart, Vinay Patel’s An Adventure, an epic reading of one Asian family’s global migration story. It’s a typically ambitious choice, a beguiling tragi-comedy whose narrative is original and which, more importantly, makes its political points deftly and unobtrusively, using a three-part Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
So here we are. Over a decade since we all fell in love. So many light years from the rubble to the Ritz. From Sheffield to LA, where half the band is now based. And by the looks of the audience, a fair proportion has been along for the whole ride.Not that it’s always been easy to support them. Never mind the information/action ratio, what perhaps should concern us about the Arctic Monkeys is the genius/dross ratio in evidence since that first life-changing release. They could hardly be accused of churning out all-killer/no-filler albums. And the recent decidedly difficult (almost) concept Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Architecture is notoriously difficult to present in an accessible way and this survey of Italian architect Renzo Piano, who gave London the Shard, does not solve the problem. With 16 tables arranged in rows over two rooms, the Royal Academy show looks more like a busy office or a reading room than an exhibition. Subtitled The Art of Making Buildings, it tells the story of 16 projects from the point of view of the design team. Drawings, photographs, models, letters and magazine articles provide insight into the unique challenges posed by each commission and the solutions arrived at to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A sizeable Off West End success nearly eight years ago looks more than a little exposed in a new, scaled-up production that is one of several shows on now, or imminently, to feature a Game of Thrones actor in a leading role. The particular TV name in this instance is Iwan Rheon, an Olivier Award-winner back in 2010 for the musical Spring Awakening seen here to be rather dramatically changing gears in Dawn King's lumbering dystopian parable about, well, more or less whatever you want it to be about. There's more than a hint of Brexit and the American law enforcement agency ICE in King's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Harry Dean Stanton died in September last year aged 91, and will forever be remembered as the embodiment of the lean, lonely, laconic stranger, a man of few words but imbued with an enigmatic allure. This film, the directorial debut of character actor John Carroll Lynch, has been conceived as both homage to and starring vehicle for the departed Stanton, but doesn’t quite hit the spot on either count.Harry D is the eponymous Lucky, a solitary 90-something living on the edge of a sleepy, sun-baked town in the Arizona desert and trying to understand what his life has meant. Displaying a heroic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Blackout. Dark, the colour of childhood fear. Black, the colour of despair. Black. No light visible; no colours to see. Just pitch black, maybe even bible black. This is how Robert Alan Evans’s The Woods, which stars the brilliant Lesley Sharp and which opened tonight in the Royal Court’s theatre upstairs, begins – in total darkness. Followed by images of desolation, the sound of torrential rain, the devastation of a falling tree. In the crepuscular gloom, the story begins to unfold. Little light visible; few colours to see. But the weird atmosphere is just about to get weirder. Luckily, Read more ...