Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
It took a while for journalists to identify the chain-smoking, Machiavellian figure who was a permanent presence at early international gatherings to hammer out a strategy on climate change. When Time Magazine nominated “endangered” Earth as its planet of the year in 1989, politicians and climate campaigners leapt into action – but so too did the fossil fuel lobby, with the US lawyer Don Pearlman appointed as “High Priest” of this sinister “Carbon Club”.Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s blistering, darkly witty play for the RSC about the negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 – the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Most Brits don’t know much about South Africa today, but we do know about house values, so this new comedy by South African playwright and screenwriter Amy Jephta is comprehensible – even in its incoherent moments (of which there are several). Grabbing the chance to expand this venue’s horizons internationally, David Byrne – Royal Court artistic director – has chosen A Good House, billed as an “explosive exploration of race, resentment and community politics”.Marketing hype aside, this 100-minute single-act drama was originally commissioned as a co-production with the Fugard Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ben Elton loves a scrap. The Motormouth of yesteryear, who made his name attacking Margaret Thatcher and her policies (and being attacked by the right in turn) now wades into so many frothing hot topics – gender politics, assisted dying and the age divide among them – that one has to assume he loves pushing people's buttons. For all the shouty delivery though, what he has to say is closely argued and passionate as he posits that, among all the fears about the growth of AI, the dangers of climate change and Donald Trump going back into the White House, what we should fear most is.... Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 26 September 1966, The Twilights set-off from Australia to Britain. The journey, on the liner the Castel Felice, took six weeks. A day after boarding they learned their sixth single, “Needle in a Haystack,” was an Australian number one. There was nothing they could do to promote the hit, so after disembarking at Southampton they looked for work.The trip was the prize at Melbourne’s Battle of the Sounds competition. They won and, as well as the travel, the accolade included a recording session with EMI in London. As The Twilights records came out in Australia on EMI’s Columbia label, this Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What better way to start a season about the Earth than by looking back on it from an astronaut’s perspective? At a time when the activities of assorted billionaires and emerging superpowers are making the space race topical again, it feels more than appropriate for Kings Place to begin its Earth Unwrapped programme with Terry Riley’s Sun Rings.As one of the deities of minimalism and experimental music, Riley was an obvious choice when NASA was looking for a composer to celebrate 25 years since the launch of the Voyager space programme. His ten-part composition – liberally punctuated with high Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the role of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, having first presented himself to the world under the alias of “Bob Dylan”.He was played by six different actors in Todd Haynes’s aptly named I’m Not There, and appeared as Jack Fate in the equally apposite Masked and Anonymous. He’s like TS Eliot’s Macavity, the Mystery Cat – “it’s useless to investigate – Macavity’s not there!”However, Dylan has been closely involved with James Read more ...
Robert Beale
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical from 1948, it’s all the same country. The couple whose marriage is at the centre of it all are seen in different eras of US history, and while they hardly age, the country changes vastly.It's an extraordinary piece for the Broadway of its time. Credited with being the first “concept musical”, it frames its story as a piece of vaudeville (by 1948 already a thing of the past), with a Magician whose act introduces Sam and Susan Cooper by having him suspended in the air and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a woman faking sex but the angelic breathing of three young sisters sharing a bed in the snowy Alto Adige.It’s 1944, and Italy’s conscripts are starting to desert. Two such arrive in a mountain village in the Vermiglio comune: local man Attilio, who is borne there on the back of a Sicilian, Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico, pictured bottom with Martina Scrinzi). Attilio’s extended family ignore the mutterings of local men who see Pietro as a shameful deserter, a “mummy’s boy Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling account of Mahler’s Third Symphony, his great exploration of the cosmic order, ascending from raw paganism to sublime transcendence. It's technically the longest symphony ever composed, and here it swept the audience through an epic journey that tilted between passages of gossamer-like intimacy and outbursts of apocalyptic rage.The orchestra is renowned for its full-blooded performances, yet yesterday evening it felt that the stakes were higher than usual for the Read more ...
David Nice
This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.From the opening rattle of Janáček's rural mill-wheel – the xylophone used in the first production apparently imported from Czechia, such is his sense of detail – via the strings which flame around the Kostelnička’s terrifying decision to give her stepdaughter a better life by drowning the girl’s baby, to the affirmative brass of the great final scene, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This concert was an effusion of pure joy. Billed as the German National Orchestra, the Bundesjugendorchester (Federal Youth Orchestra), all of whose players are aged from 14 to 19, make a glorious, powerful sound. Just over 100 teenage musicians packed the extended stage at Cadogan Hall last night, and played to a nearly full house.It was the orchestral players' smiles and their occasional unrestrained giggles which caught the attention, and told the story of quite how much they were all enjoying this concert and the whole experience of being on stage in London to make music. Their Read more ...
Veronica Lee
By all accounts Chris McCausland had to be persuaded to take part in the most recent series of Strictly Come Dancing, which he won with his professional partner Diane Buswell. It would be a commendable achievement for any non-dancer, but for a blind man it was remarkable, and made a huge emotional impact with viewers who warmed not just to his efforts but also his cheerful demeanour. Now, McCausland is back to the day job as a comic.He starts by referencing the BBC programme, telling us it interrupted the tour of Yonks!, his latest show: “I developed a rather unnatural interest in ballroom Read more ...