Reviews
Matthew Wright
In a voice of distinctive, high-pitched nasal whimsy, comic essayist and memoirist David Sedaris finds humour with the precision of a mosquito after blood. British readers will likely have first encountered him through his Radio 4 series Introducing David Sedaris, and may know the voice, and the author’s ability to extract comedy from the everyday. This collection of diaries gives us the first draft of his experiences, before they are crafted into the exquisitely timed and phrased pieces that made his name.Sedaris is most often encountered today in the rarefied pages of The New Yorker; Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.The Washington Post had no interest in her other life as a songwriter. Her song “Teeny Tiny Gnome” (originally titled “Kicking Stones”) was recorded by The Monkees but wasn’t issued until 1987. In Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Imagine that you come across a story by a journalist who, writing for the Daily Mail or The Sun, steals the identity of a real young man from a poor neighbourhood of south-east London. He had died of an overdose, aged 20, in 1984. Not knowing whether this kid’s immediate family still lived, the sleuth hi-jacks the name of an actual individual – just as, notoriously, undercover officers of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad did when they infiltrated protest groups. First, the reporter buttresses this purloined identity with a sheaf of forged documents and an active Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It had been a perfect summer's day and around the stadium denim-clad punters sipped ice-cool beer and discussed how this reunion would sound. Everyone knew how Axl had aced it, right here, a year ago, filling in as AC/DC's lead singer. Many hoped it would be just like when the classic line-up last played London in 1992. Except this time the sound quality would be better.Unfortunately, for many, the latter wasn't to be. As the band launched into "It's So Easy" smiles of anticipation turned into looks of disbelief - the acoustic at the back of the venue felt like sludge. The culprit seemed to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midway through Hamlet a troupe of actors arrives at Elsinore. Coaching them for his own ends, the prince turns director, delivering an impassioned critique: “O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters…it out-herods Herod: I pray you avoid it.” It’s a philosophy director Robert Icke takes as his own watchword. Out goes declaiming, along with anything demonstrative or self-consciously dramatic, and in its place we get a conversational Hamlet that allows its audience to eavesdrop, forces us to turn voyeur in a contemporary palace of CCTV Read more ...
stephen.walsh
A drama of passion for essentially passive characters, Debussy’s one and only completed opera is a masterpiece of paradox. How do you stage a work whose dramatis personae hardly seem aware of their own destructive feelings, and who inhabit their island world like the blind who, according to Pelléas, used to visit the curative fountain but stopped doing so when the king himself went blind?Michael Boyd, in his beautiful but occasionally frustrating production for Garsington Opera, approaches - if he doesn’t wholly solve – this problem by treating each of the 15 scenes as a kind of static Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This show feels like an end-of-the-exams party, and in a way that’s exactly what it is. If the fruits of Emma Rice’s short tenure as Artistic Director at the Globe were a series of tests that she is deemed to have failed, then Tristan & Yseult, a revival of an early hit devised for the company Kneehigh, is her parting two-fingered salute. For here writ-large are the rowdiness and irreverence and – heavens above – microphones and electric guitar that so offended a certain faction of the board that it was persuaded to terminate Rice’s contract, despite having hired her precisely because of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s quite an appealing mini-genre that concerns genius, usually involving mathematics and an outsider who struggles to cope for reasons that include social adaptation (Good Will Hunting), sexuality (The Imitation Game) and mental health (A Beautiful Mind). The clever trick of Gifted is that the genius in question is too young to have any idea of the problems she may face.The result is a family drama that in its broad strokes is like so many family dramas, as an orphan is fought over by relatives with very different ideas of what’s best for her. The added spice is that a girl as Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991. Tate Modern's exhibition opens with a portrait of her grandmother painted by Zeid when she was only 14, which with its delicate touch and finely observed detail, reveals a precocious talent.She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women but, when she was 19, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He may often be voted Greatest Briton in the History of Everything, but are we approaching peak Winston? Scroll down Churchill’s IMDb entry and you’ll find that he’s been played by every Tom, Dick and Harry in all manner of cockamamie entertainments. The key pillars of his filmography are (apart from Young Winston) as follows: The Gathering Storm (Albert Finley) and Into the Storm (Brendan Gleeson), both scripted by Hugh Whitemore; The King’s Speech (Timothy Spall); The Crown (John Lithgow). Then on stage there’s been The Audience (various actors) and Three Days in May (Warren Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
W Somerset Maugham, who knew a thing or two about the dark side, summed up the Riviera as “a sunny place for shady people”. On the evidence of this first episode, Riviera is a funny place for shitty people.The first few minutes flung us between London, Monaco and New York. Bright lights, big titties. The connection between money and sex was made straight away – and in the case of Christos Clios (Dimitri Leonidas, pictured below) in doggy style. Talking about money in Canary Wharf – “there is nothing more rigorous” – turns him on. According to him, the unregulated international art Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We see them returning to the slave labour and death camps, driving through the countryside and contemplating their former home towns and villages where they were rounded up for deportation.Their interviews are intercut with family photographs, ciné film and archive footage. Unlike a history programme made for television, there is no voiceover, no maps Read more ...