Reviews
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.The Legends of Them is an autobiographical memory play during the course of which young Lorna grows into Sutara Gayle, told in fragmentary flashbacks which are vivid enough to be Read more ...
John Carvill
What is it about Humphrey Bogart? Why does he still spark interest, still feel relevant, so many decades after his death? It’s a complex question and may be impossible to satisfactorily answer, but there’s no doubt that Bogart being one half of Hollywood’s most famous love story has had something to do with it.There have been numerous Bogart biographies, and even the idea of telling the story through the lens of the Bogie and Bacall romance has been done at least twice previously. Well, there is nothing new under the Klieg lights; what’s important is not the tale but how it’s told. William J Read more ...
James Saynor
Lauded by Auden, detested by Edmund Wilson, the Tolkien sagas have divided many from childhood onwards: for kids, they’re not quite pulpy enough to be the first choice for a Halloween costume, for grown-ups not quite literary enough to be literary.They’re written in an adventure-rich, psychology-light middle style, full of dorkiness and idyll, and serenely suited to post-CGI cinema, where complexity of story takes precedence over complexity of mind. They’re perhaps best viewed – and this may be how the enigmatic Tolkien saw them – as a compost-turning of history, except that history never had Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Jesus and Mary Chain may have been around for some 40 years (albeit on and off), but the Reid brothers clearly have no intention of setting up camp in the heritage music industry just yet. This was emphatically stressed this week, as they hit the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Institute and ploughed straight into a fierce “JAMCOD”, the lead single off their recent Glasgow Eyes album – and proclaiming “the monkey’s organ grinder isn’t grinding anymore”.Wrapped in a storm of back-lit dry ice, the shadowy five-piece then fired out hits like the hip-swinging power pop of “April Skies” and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Death of Music was created in Estonia. Despite the English lyrics, directness is absent. Take the title track. “Drop the music” exhorts Mart Avi over its pulsing five minutes. “Fight the music” he declares. The word “execution” crops up. There is reference to a “rope ladder.” The specific meaning of this torrent of imagery is unclear. Nonetheless, it is certain the untrammelled outpouring confirms Avi’s total surrender to the music.This duo album is partially about its impact. However, as it unfurls over its 66 minutes it is increasingly clear that – whatever the lyrical opacity – Death of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.Swastikas are everywhere, even on the backs of pigeons; there’s a man dressed as Jesus serving a tray of champagne, a bearded Hasidic dancer brandishing a prayer roll who wafts in and out of the routines, geriatric humping and prolific swearing; even Michelangelo’s David turns up, created by a dancer in a white bodysuit and wig, his “marble” tackle prominently to the fore. If you Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are no battlement leaps or murderous vows, no pistols or daggers, not so much as a slight cough disturbs the serene plot of La rondine – the Puccini opera once labelled a “poor man’s Traviata”.And yet it’s all the better for it. This is a voluptuous femme fatale of a score dressed up in a shy smile and a coy over-the-shoulder glance of a plot: pure musical emotion in search of a dramatic outlet. No wonder Merchant and Ivory found the soundtrack for A Room With A View’s unspoken yearnings and repressed passions in its “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta”.If repression is in Antonio Pappano’s Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at Stratford-Upon-Avon – is no straightforward Eighties tribute, but a psychedelic mashup that’s as ravishing as it’s gritty.Lucy Osborne’s versatile design whisks us from the sinister grandeur of the opening – in which a sun resembling a military flag hangs over the stage to remind us that Theseus has wooed Hippolyta by force – to the hallucinogenic Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.Refitted with a largely fresh creative team, the show ticks all the boxes that devotees of the movie will want and expect, while never really establishing a reason for being of its own, as Kinky Boots, from the same director (Jerry Mitchell), managed so triumphantly some while back.Mitchell's latest has a vaguely Primark feel where it ought to feel haute couture Read more ...
Robert Beale
Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’étoile is not exactly a French farce, but it comes from a post-Offenbach era (1877 saw its premiere) when cheerful absurdity was certainly expected, especially at Offenbach’s old theatre, the Bouffes Parisiens.In some ways it resembles Gilbert and Sullivan’s later creations – a topsy-turvy land of eccentric royal customs, where public executions must be routine and the titled and privileged are out to keep their wealth and status through convenient marriages (shades of The Mikado and The Gondoliers in the plot-line).In this case King Ouf’s birthday is to be celebrated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s rare to spot Keira Knightley in a TV series, and it’s no doubt a sign of changing times that she’s starring in this six-part spies-and-guns caper, penned by Joe Barton (of Giri/Haji and The Lazarus Project fame).Set in a seasonally Christmassy London, it’s a twisty and fairly daft yarn about a dead Chinese ambassador, his missing daughter who has a heroin habit, a ruthless professional trigger man with a sentimental streak, and some murky Westminster chicanery. Then throw in the CIA and watch it all go off.Keira’s character, Helen Webb, is married to the Defence Secretary, Wallace Webb ( Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
When Vampire Weekend arrived onstage they numbered only three and were bunched together at the front with a large curtain draped behind them, obscuring their backdrop. By the time this marathon set ended two and a half hours later, they’d more than doubled in number and had made full use of their surroundings, a shift which summed up a constantly changing, often contradictory show.One of those paradoxes was the setting itself. Vampire Weekend are an expansive band, but they still seem a strange fit in large arenas, and going by the amount of sections tarped off they’re not the easiest sell to Read more ...