Reviews
Helen Hawkins
Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. The opening scene was Four Weddings by way of Mamma Mia!, as the tribe of Defoe women, led by divorced Hannah (Nicola Walker) and accompanied by her ex-husband Nathan (Stephen Mangan, pictured below, with Annabel Scholey) though not his new wife, descended on Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“O stay and hear,” sings Twelfth Night’s jester Feste in his song “O mistress mine”, “your true love’s coming,/ That can sing both high and low.” And loud and soft, earthbound and airborne, Heldentenor-grave and night-club frivolous: Nicky Spence’s wide vocal span and stylistic versatility made him the ideal soloist for this cheerful post-Christmas canter through several centuries of Shakespeare songs.Roger Quilter’s urbane yet melancholy take on “O mistress mine” (one of a trio of items from the composer) represented just one stop on a musical journey that began with William Byrd and ended Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Looking back over the past 12 months, it struck me how it has been the shows fashioned from personal stories that have stayed with me. It wasn't simply that the comics could make very good jokes about their travails or embarrassments, but that the material had a strong ring of authenticity. There's nothing wrong with delivering other people's gags (plenty of top-flight performers do it, of course) but when it rings true, it's somehow funnier.So among the comics whose shows I've liked most were Kiri Pritchard-McLean's Peacock (tour restarts 25 January), in which she talks about her experiences Read more ...
theartsdesk
They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be entirely certain that it really was Colin Farrell inside all those prosthetics as he romped his way through the gripping second season of The Penguin (Sky Atlantic).Then we had Eddie Redmayne as the titular character in Sky Atlantic’s rather ponderous revamp of The Day of the Jackal (“The Day of the Jackal feels like a month,” as one sceptic noted), Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.In that spirit, this column has looked at straight vinyl reissues of albums of varying styles, from various periods; from the well-known to those which attracted barely any consideration when they first surfaced. In the latter category, there is the reissue of Horizoning by the Canadian folk-inclined singer-songwriter Stefan Gnyś whose sole album had, until 2024, never advanced beyond the 12 two-sided acetate discs which were specially cut in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The most hyped special of the season came to a cosy comedy ending with pairings accomplished, evil witch Sonia and her coven dispatched and the usual everyday chaos reinstated. Tidy.Except that I almost wanted Ruth Jones and James Corden to put a bomb under their famous creation and blow it apart with key expectations unmet, Nessa (Jones) literally at sea, Smithy (Coren) rebuffed and big questions left unanswered. It worked for Gone with the Wind, after all. But even with the feelgood factor on overdrive, it was a hilarious, satisfying last outing.Not that it’s a really big question, but Read more ...
David Nice
Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while Irish National Opera gave us a world-class Salome, a Vivaldi rarity strongly cast, a Rigoletto featuring my favourite performance from a Manchester-born Irish-Iranian soprano, and the perfect solution to Berlioz’s half-Shakespearean Béatrice et Bénédict, thanks to Fiona Shaw and three more sensational Irish women.Before we deal with those, let’s celebrate another Irish soprano in English National Opera’s most gripping offering of the year. We’ve sorely Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In April 2023 the actor and comic Jamie Foxx had a stroke and was lucky to survive. In his latest Netflix Special, What Had Happened Was... he tells us about it, and his recovery. It's fitting, he tells us, that the show was recorded in Atlanta, just 400 yards away from the hospital he was taken to by his sister, who knew something was seriously wrong.The show is a curious – and undoubtedly unique – mix of comedy, music and thanksgiving that at times feels more like a revivalist meeting as Foxx attests repeatedly that God saved him. The religiosity – and there's a lot of it – may be off- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's the images that linger in the mind as I think back on a bustling theatre year just gone. Sure, the year fielded excellent productions (and some duds, too), but as often as not it's a particular sight that sticks in the mind.I shan't soon forget Patricia Clarkson (pictured below in rehearsals by Johan Persson) descending at play's end on the men in her family in Jeremy Herrin's West End revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night, a ghostly relic almost passive-aggressive in her anguish. Or the astonishing Lesley Manville clambering across the body of Mark Strong in Robert Icke's dazzling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since its revival in 2020, All Creatures Great and Small has drawn big audiences internationally and become Channel 5’s biggest hit, even if there have been occasional grumbles about how it takes liberties with James Herriot’s original books.The show works because it gets the simple things right. It’s built on sound principles of solid plots and well-drawn characters, with the result that the ensemble at the core of All Creatures… ticks along like a piece of old-fashioned but lovingly maintained machinery.The role of grumpy but kind-hearted paterfamilias Siegfried Farnon now suits Samuel West Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Travis arrived onstage with the theme tune from classic sitcom Cheers as an accompaniment. The cavernous OVO Hydro might not be a place where everyone knows your name, but a Glasgow homecoming by local lads made good certainly tapped into a festive vibe of friends and familiarity, with singer Fran Healy making ample reference to the group’s roots during their set.That fondness for the quartet is partly why they were able to play such a large venue to begin with, given the rest of their tour visited more compact, if still decently sized, buildings. Of course, the group’s late 90s and early Read more ...