Reviews
Katherine Waters
One of the questions that can be asked of Brecht is whether for a modern audience his Verfremdungseffekt — or alienation effect — still works as intended, provoking genuine reflections on justice by distancing audiences from emotional entanglement with the characters. At a time when verbatim and community theatre is accomplishing just that with exactitude and force, it appears that inducing audiences to think morally is most effective when delivered in unexpected ways. Deeply though Brecht’s work may have influenced these pieces, audiences’ capacity for surprise remains a good Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Tate Modern exhibition features an installation made in 1985 of a Moscow bedsit, its walls lined with political posters. There’s a gaping hole in the ceiling made when the occupant apparently catapulted himself through the roof to escape the incessant clamour of propaganda bombarding Soviet citizens on a daily basis.Focusing on these same images, Red Star Over Russia: a Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55 reveals the incredible range and versatility of the posters, pamphlets, postcards, magazines, books and banners designed to spread the word about the 1917 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is Buddhism a path to finding spiritual enlightenment – or just an excuse for not facing your personal problems? Given that this question is implicit in the debut play by Sam Bain, script co-writer of nine series of Channel 4’s Peep Show, as well as having other credits on Fresh Meat, Babylon and Four Lions, you’d expect the answer to be the latter. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But, as The Retreat opens at the Park Theatre, can Bain – with help from director Kathy Burke – transfer his sitcom skills from the small screen to the stage?Set entirely in a one-roomed hut in the Scottish Highlands, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
At its weakest The A Word is just Emmerdale with a twist of autism, especially when the drama swivels away from the little boy to focus on adult infidelities, a grumpy patriarch, sibling rivalries and comedy Poles wisecracking in subtitles. But at its best it captures accurately, if depressingly, the difficult feelings some parents go through when they’re coming to terms with the knowledge that their child is not standard issue.With huge viewing figures (seven million in the UK on BBC One for the first series) and mainly excellent reviews, The A Word is bound to be enormously influential on Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of all the stories Arthur Pita could have chosen to wrangle for his new narrative ballet, he chose one about wind, perhaps the trickiest element of all to represent on a live stage. Tricky because of course you can’t see wind, you can only see its effects. Tricky, too, because – in extremis, as this is – it does mad things to hair-dos, costumes, and the ability of the cast to keep a grip on props and even dance the steps. But it’s precisely that craziness that gives Pita’s first main-stage commission for the Royal Ballet – accorded the prime central spot in a contemporary mixed bill – its Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes things clearer: this is really an examination of cross-channel conversations occasioned by the drastic military and political crisis in France in 1870-1871 – the Franco-Prussian war, followed by the Commune.Not only did some 230,000 or more combatants and civilians die, but many a familiar landmark was pulverised as central Paris was profoundly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Amen. The end – of a prayer, a service, even the Bible itself. But what, asks Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No 3, Kaddish, if “Amen” is the beginning and not the end, the start of a conversation that hears the divine word and doesn’t say “So be it” and accept, but instead answers back?The result is the composer’s least-performed symphony, a puzzling piece, torn between moods, even genres. As the centrepiece for the opening of the LSO’s Bernstein 100 celebrations it was problematic, but as the musical epilogue to a weekend marked by yet another American atrocity, to a year haunted by the same Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sky Atlantic’s German import is an intoxicating mix of intrigue and betrayal, set in the excessive days of the Weimar Republic. Gripping stories and extravagant production meet in the opening two episodes of this brilliantly promising Euro-noir.Babylon Berlin lays its cards on the table from the opening moments – a montage in reverse of gun fights, riots and war, no doubt all to come in the show’s upcoming eight episodes. It’s tense, engaging, and a serious marker that Germany is ready to carve its place in the television landscape.Inspector Gereon Rath is a recent transfer from Cologne, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was to have been conducted by Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who died in February. Though futile, it’s hard not to speculate about what could have been, especially given his spectacular Bruckner performances with the London Philharmonic in recent years. But life goes on, and in his place we heard Lawrence Renes, whose account of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was solid and dependable, even if it was more memorable for the quality of the orchestral playing than for his interpretive insights.Renes is a Dutch/Maltese conductor, well established in both of those countries and a regular visitor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Bishop was last on tour three years ago and he tells us that this show, Winging It, was inspired by two things that happened in the intervening period. Not the obvious Brexit (although it does make an appearance), but in that time he has passed the 50 landmark and his three sons have all left home.Bishop's calling card is laidback observational comedy, and as befits someone who started late at this comedy lark – he's celebrating 10 years as a full-time stand-up, having made the jump from being a rep for a pharmaceuticals company – he never forgets where he came from, a Liverpool council Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A woman gives birth alone two months early in a frost-bound village in the Korean countryside. In Poland, a solitary woman washes down white migraine pills and concludes she must write. The child that is born dies. The finished book commemorates her death by according her an imagined life.Last year Han Kang won the Man Booker International with The Vegetarian, a slim novella about a woman who decides to give up meat — a deeply subversive action practically unheard of in her home country Korea. In her new work The White Book, also translated by Deborah Smith, she transgresses literary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Here we go again then. The “first series”, as the BBC are calling it after the fact, of I Know Who You Are slammed the brakes on and juddered to a bewildering halt back in the middle of August. Almost everyone who’d sat through the plot dodgems of those 10 episodes will have had the same reaction: eh? With no information to indicate otherwise, it looked as if the hatchet-faced procedural melodrama featuring the Elias-Castro axis of evil had chosen to commit hara-kiri in the middle of an uncompleted plotline. It was like Schubert’s Unfinished or Edwin Drood all over again, only less so.In the Read more ...