Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
Tamerlano, tyrannical Emperor of the Tartars, is a burger-munching boor with a golf-habit, a bulbous belly and a crashing disdain for other people’s sensitivities. In Orpha Phelan’s dynamic, gleefully idiosyncratic production of Handel’s 1724 opera, Trump’s shadow looms large, as Tamerlano tries to force Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, to haggle for his freedom by offering up his daughter, Asteria, for Tamerlano’s sexual delight.The opera is one of many that Handel wrote as part of London’s craze for the Italian opera seria form – which featured multiple arias for its virtuoso singers – and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright David Hare is on a West End roll. Not only is his new play, Grace Pervades, about super thespians Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, making its way from Bath’s Theatre Royal to the Theatre Royal Haymarket next month, but his 1976 play with songs, Teeth ’N’ Smiles, now arrives at the Duke of York’s. Both are star-laden accounts of performance, with Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison as the Victorians, and Rebecca Lucy Taylor as Maggie the 1970s rocker. Also known as Self Esteem, she’s an Ivor-Novello Award winner last seen as Sally Bowles in Cabaret a couple of years ago. She also Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards does what it says on the tin. We watch the fêted newsreader from initial online contact with a 17-year-old from Cardiff - called “Ryan Davies“ here - to his arrest three years later, his sense of omnipotence shattered. Edwards’s family are noises off, and his work is represented by one BBC producer; only Ryan’s life is explored in any depth.This partial view is understandable given that Mark Burt’s screenplay is based on exclusive chats with the real Ryan, his family and friends, but not on material provided by Edwards and his family. ( Read more ...
David Nice
Are Seán O'Casey's Dublin plays good for theatre today, or just for the history of Irish drama? My limited recent experience makes it hard to be sure: Juno and the Paycock in London was a liberty-taking mess, and when everyone in a large cast needs to be top-notch - as they are, for instance, in the new production of Gorky's Summerfolk at the National Theatre - any weak performances in The Plough and the Stars scotch O'Casey's experimental ambition as he drops characters for whole acts, introduces others and takes us in unexpected directions, from late 1915 to the Easter Uprising of 1916. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Phil Ellis has been plying his trade for a while and is an established performer at the Edinburgh Fringe, where he has won awards – including the Edinburgh Comedy Award Panel Prize in 2014. And now happily he has come to a wider audience through his appearance on series 20 of Taskmaster.He makes a wry reference to the Channel 4 show during his mock bigging-up introduction by DJ sidekick (played by comic Tom Short) – who points out “loser” Ellis didn’t win. It’s typical of the self-mockery in Bath Mat, his touring show which I saw at the Leicester Square Theatre, in which Ellis paints a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rory Carroll’s previous book, Killing Thatcher, was terrific, and widely praised. It followed the IRA plot to murder the Prime Minister in 1984 and the subsequent police manhunt, telling the story with a journalistic degree of research and a novelistic eye for pacing and drama. For his follow-up Carroll’s gone back further into history to tell the story of the inciting event that ultimately led, along a winding path, to the Brighton bombing: the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA is, in a different way, as gripping as its Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The title is, of course, typically British understatement. This Music May Contain Hope has not just irresistible confidence and optimism but also real originality about it. All the way from a spoken film noir-ish intro, right through to the final track, in which everyone, yes everyone involved in the album is thanked, including every single member of the London Symphony Orchestra, with all of its section members individually named from front to back.Raye’s moment has definitely arrived, and the future looks very bright indeed. “Where is My Husband?”, her co-write with Mike Sabath, first Read more ...
David Nice
Nowhere welcomes Ukrainians (and Palestinians too, for that matter) more warmly than Ireland, and especially Dublin. A standing ovation twice over was guaranteed, and well deserved after their perfect performance of Beethoven's Third, "Eroica" Symphony. Otherwise, no special case needed to be made for these distinguished visitors beyond the perception and beauty of their playing under no-nonsense Artistic Director and Chief Conductor Volodymyr Sirenko.Robert Beale reviewed their programme culminating in Beethoven's Seventh in Manchester. Here the two Delius nature-pictures they so cannily Read more ...
Robert Beale
Harry Fehr’s directorial take on The Cunning Little Vixen is a sound one: keep it simple. Together with set and costume designer Nicky Shaw (with whom he worked on a memorable Buxton International Festival production of La Sonnambula in 2023), lighting designer Mark Jonathan and movement director Ewan Jones, he brings Janáček’s everyday story of country life to the stage with a clarity and innocence that reflect the story’s origins as a newspaper cartoon strip.Of course, as with all good strips, the implications are what really counts: the animals, in the tale of a half-domesticated vixen who Read more ...
David Nice
In one of the loveliest operatic scores of all time, Dvořák makes cruel demands on his eponymous water nymph and the prince for whom she acquires a mortal soul, having them soar above the stave countless times in anguish or ecstasy. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and American tenor Ryan Capozzo are both equal to the challenge. Unfortunately their characters are bent out of shape by director Netia Jones; the Prince is rendered one-dimensional, and Rusalka poisoning him rather than kissing him to death in the great final scene weakens its impact.
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Adam Sweeting
The stern and glowering demeanour of David Morrissey’s character, Michael Polly, looms over this six-part drama like the embodiment of a malignant fate. Polly is the headmaster of St Bartholomew’s private school in Bristol, a vintage establishment replete with cloisters, venerable and palatial buildings and playing fields that seem to stretch for miles (Downside School in Somerset was the actual shooting location.)You might say Polly is married to his job, because he runs the school with a devotion that borders on the fanatical. As well as being the stone-faced figurehead of the establishment Read more ...
Robert Beale
This was a concert of music by living women composers, and I guess you could call all three of its components protest music. Cheerful or sad, smart or overwhelming, each work had a point to make – and a sense of outrage. For those who were there, its impact was something they are unlikely to forget for a very long time. (It also drew one of the smallest audiences I can remember for a BBC Philharmonic Saturday night performance at the Bridgewater Hall in recent times: possibly the result of a series booklet which detailed only one of the three items that were finally performed, and even Read more ...