Reviews
Robert Beale
Anna Clyne’s This Moment had its UK premiere at Saturday’s BBC Philharmonic concert. She’s the orchestra’s composer in association, and this seven-minute piece was first played by the Philadelphia Orchestra last year.Inspired by the calligraphy of the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, it’s (in the words of the composer) “a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years” and very much a meditation on death. Not too cheerful a subject, you might think, but Thích Nhất Hạnh said that when you meditate on death you love life more, and that was Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s:“A botched independence swiftly followed by army mutinies and attempted secession by two renegade provinces, egged on by a colonial power. A charismatic black leader who comes to a sticky end, aged just 35. A first-of-its-kind UN military operation climaxing in a mysterious plane crash and the secretary-general’s death. Cold War skullduggery of the most nefarious kind, with a poison vial stowed in a safe. Not one, but two, coup d’états.”These Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It has been nearly 25 years since Russell Crowe enjoyed his Oscar-winning finest hour as Maximus in Ridley Scott’s thunderous epic, Gladiator, and now Sir Ridley has brought us the next generation. Stepping up to the plate is Paul Mescal as Lucius (now known as Hanno), who finds himself an enslaved gladiator in Rome after an Imperial fleet has conquered his homeland of Numidia (Algeria, more or less).Like the original film, which is specifically quoted several times, this one opens with a spectacular set-piece as Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) leads his massed triremes towards Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Let's walk down memory lane the Magazine way. Let's regurgitate fifth-rate Low [the David Bowie album] period pieces. Let's plonk plonk plonk with ponderous sub-Pink Floydery. Let's do the wallpaper waltz. This is not pushing back the barriers. It's frighteningly bland conservatism.”So said Garry Bushell in his March 1979 Sounds review of Magazine’s second album Secondhand Daylight. He went on. “'Silly Thing' [the single by the rump Sex Pistols] is one hundred times more exciting. 'Unconventional People' [the then-recent Royal Rasses single] is one hundred times more relaxing. [Sham 69’s] ' Read more ...
mark.kidel
Will Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour ever come to an end? Two years on from the last UK tour, he’s returned, with substantially the same band, once again mostly featuring material from his brilliant album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). He’s a little less steady on his feet, but remains as present as ever, clearly enjoying being on stage and contact with an audience that welcomes him with love as well as uncritical adulation.There is a routine: he mostly starts out standing beside Tony Garnier, his wonderfully supple root of a bass player, with a handheld mic, but not for long. He soon moves over Read more ...
David Nice
Sparkling Italian comic opera might have been just the tonic at this time. Trouble is, the bar was set so high recently by Wexford Festival Opera’s Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali, aka Viva la Mamma, that this better known, less malleable if more romantic Donizetti comedy came across as flat, one-dimensional and not very funny (I laughed out loud once; maybe I need to get out less). Which is a shame, because the singers deserved better.They already faced three big problems. First, the spaces at the Coliseum – too big an auditorium for an intimate comedy, albeit with a major role for Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Valiant souls who have recently read the Margaret Atwood trilogy on which this new Wayne McGregor piece for the Royal Ballet is based will be at home with its time-shifting eco-sci-fi narrative. The rest of us, not so much.The appeal of the basic plot is clear: how big pharma coped with a devastating pandemic that has wreaked havoc on an increasingly plundered Earth. (NB the novels appeared between 2003 and 2013, long before the pandemic; and McGregor’s first planning, collaborating with the National Ballet of Canada, to create a piece on them, began in 2017.) Restocking the world with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest incarnation of composer Hannah Conway’s project is as “immersive digital opera performance installation”.Down in the bowels of the Royal Opera House, as far away from the hum and chatter of the foyer crowds, the massed voices of the main auditorium, cocooned in an artificially darkened, shrunken Linbury Theatre, we’re invited to meet people whose voices Read more ...
Justine Elias
Marie Curie excepted, movies about female scientists remain scarce, not just because STEM careers and Nobel Prizes still favour men. Now comes the British-made Joy, which explores women’s contributions to a decades-long quest to cure infertility.This cozy historical drama traces the leadup to the birth of so-called “test-tube baby” Louise Brown, the first person conceived outside the womb, with an emphasis on the behind-the-scenes work of a woman who helped make it happen. Along with Dr. Robert Edwards, an embryologist, and Dr James Steptoe, an ob-gyn, Jean Purdy, a nurse and laboratory Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Cryptocurrency is like the myth of El Dorado – a promised land made of fool’s gold. Despite its liberatory potential, it frequently attracts sharks or, as the title of Beru Tessema’s new play indicates, hungry wolves that gobble up defenceless sheep.After the success here of his 2022 play, House of Ife, the playwright returns to the Bush Theatre with a subject which is original and a cast which includes a cameo by Jamael Westman, star veteran of the original West End production of Hamilton. This time, however, some slack plotting and predictable consequences undermine the drama of a slightly Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It appears Rachel Chinouriri has a good memory. “I remember you!” she yelled excitedly to one fan early on, highlighting that she currently sits in a nice position – popular enough to be playing busy shows in decently sized venues, but at a level where she can still see the eager faces looking back at her.At one point those fans all had their eyes shut, after the British-Zimbabwean singer instructed everyone to close them and imagine they were in Hereford during the pastoral strum and hum of “Pocket”, one of the night’s most laid back moments. The fact the audience agreed so quickly with Read more ...