Reviews
Veronica Lee
You may be having a moment of déjà vu, as Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s new play (which lands in the West End after a UK tour) was previously a BBC film (shown in 2013), and a very fine one too, covering as it does a true story from the First World War. Now, with added music by Nick Green, they have turned The Wipers Times into an intimate stage piece.In the mud and mayhem of Flanders, in a bombed-out building in the Belgian town of Ypres (mis-pronounced Wipers by British Tommies), two officers – Captain Fred Roberts (James Dutton) and Lieutenant Jack Pearson (George Kemp) – discover an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The annual London Handel Festival is dutifully working its way through every one of Handel’s operas in a cycle that will eventually take us from Alcina to Xerxes before, presumably, starting all over again. But each year, alongside these headliners, we also get a pasticcio – an opera stitched together by Handel from the shiniest and most decorative musical scraps by his European colleagues. It’s these unknown works that often throw up the biggest surprises, giving us a wide-shot of a broader musical landscape now all but obliterated by Handel’s popularity.The term "pasticcio" originally meant Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
The latest instalment in this massive open world sci-fi role-playing game joins the 2017 party in full swing, with both Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild raising the bar for the RPG genre. But with the Mass Effect games considered the very cream of the crop, the pressure to perform at a new zenith appears a little too much for a trilogy that looks like it has seen better days.To understand the flaws in this fourth Mass Effect title, you must first take a 600-year commute, from the early 22nd century, aboard an intergalactic pathfinder en route to the Andromeda Galaxy, where humanity Read more ...
David Nice
"Late Style", the theme and title of pianist Jonathan Biss's three-concert miniseries, need not be synonymous with terminal thoughts of death. This recital ranged from introspection (Brahms), radiant simplicity (Schumann) and aphoristic minimalism (Kurtág) to robust self-assertion (the end of Chopin's Polonaise-Fantaisie, Brahms again), all of it guided by strength of intellect. Unfortunately the crespuscular, coffin-like interior of Milton Court's Concert Hall, even less attractive than the Queen Elizabeth Hall of memory and devoid of any floral touch, made any struggle for the light Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We like to think of Georgian England as a wellspring of elegance: the Chippendale chair and the Wedgwood teapot, the landscaped vista and the neoclassical townhouse. But, as subversively embodied in the mock heroic couplet, the seemly Age of Reason had a seamy underbelly. There was order, but also ordure.Take Harris’s Life of Covent Garden Ladies, published in 1789 and updated four years later, advised on the services available to gentlemen of leisure. Miss All-s-n of No 4 Glanville Street, it reported, is “now just in her prime… rising seventeen… can trot, amble, & even gallop, if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now promoted to the exhilarating landscapes of BBC One as a reward for previous good behaviour, Line of Duty set off at a scorching pace into the murky shadowland where crime, punishment, ambition and corruption mingle treacherously. Stretching back to Lennie James’s DCI Gates in the first series, the show has a great tradition of hiring guest stars and then treating them very badly indeed. For this fourth season, it’s Thandie Newton as DCI Roz Huntley, who’s been looking for a breakthrough in an ongoing investigation called Operation Trapdoor.So far this has encompassed one dead woman and Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Seattle-based rockers Car Seat Headrest finally burst their cult bubble with their 13th album, last year’s Teens of Denial, which found veteran songwriter Will Toledo combining Nineties indie, post-punk nihilism and psychedelic vocal harmonies in a collection of sprawling lo-fi jams. Inside the sold out 1,100 capacity Electric Ballroom, expectations are subsequently set extremely high.The formidable TRAAMS are supporting Car Seat Headrest for their whole European tour, and as one of the most prolific bands in the south of England, they’ve become notable for their live performances. TRAAMS Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“My mother has always been a bit of a mystery to me not only as an artist but also as a mum,” declares Nick Willing by way of introduction to his film for BBC Two on the painter Paula Rego, who turned 82 in January. What follows is as far removed from a traditional biopic as you could hope to find. There are no experts wittering on about Rego’s importance to contemporary British art or analysing the meaning of her strange, narrative pictures and the powerful women who inhabit them. There’s no bigging up of her career; you have to wait until the end to learn that in Portugal, where she Read more ...
Peter Forbes
Two pernicious practices dominate Christian Madsbjerg's Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm: algorithm addiction and fake philosophy. The author thinks one is the answer to the other, thus cancelling out most of the argument, but when his guard drops a few chinks of wisdom do peep through.In the managerial motivation industry in which Madsbjerg operates, you coin a plausibly vague word or acronym and claim novelty for the mixture of banality and tendentiousness that results. “Sensemaking” is pretty routine in this respect: the best example I’ve Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over 1972 to 1975, Finland staged a small-scale invasion of Britain. A friendly one, it was confined to music. First, the progressive rock band Tasavallan Presidentti came to London in May 1972 and played Ronnie Scott’s. The Sunday Times’ Derek Jewell said they were “frighteningly accomplished” and that readers should “watch them soar”. The next year, they toured and appeared on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test. Their albums Lambertland and Milky Way Moses were issued here.Richard Branson was hip to the Finnish prog tip, picked up their countrymen Wigwam and issued their fifth album Nuclear Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement that Rousseff would be thrown out of office and impeached.Given that Aquarius tells the story of Clara, a spirited matriarch in the coastal city of Recife – Filho’s hometown is the capital of Brazil’s Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Is English National Ballet's current predilection for acquiring European repertoire some kind of anti-Brexit statement, or just smart brand positioning? Last night's performance at Sadler's Wells, a sequel in all but name to the programme called Modern Masters they performed two years ago, put William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (famously created for the Paris Opéra Ballet) alongside eminent Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen's Adagio Hammerklavier and - coup of coups - Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, still performed almost exclusively by her own company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. Read more ...