Reviews
Hugh Barnes
In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and location furnish the setting of the first part of Hollinghurst’s third novel, his masterpiece, The Line of Beauty (2004), in which the young gay hero, Nick Guest, becomes a lodger – a guest – in the house of a recently elected Tory MP, Gerald Fedden, whose son Toby he’d fancied at Oxford.Nick loses his virginity with a young black man called Leo in the bushes of a communal garden behind the Feddens’ house, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Springs begins cooking with “Spaced Out Invaders - Part I Quirks,” its fourth track. A spindly, rotating guitar figure interweaves with clattering percussion and pulsating electric bass. Around three minutes in, a sax – which, until this point, has kept in the background – begins whipping up a maelstrom. Overall, the effect conjured is that of a space rock-inclined exotica, Martin Denny had he been an early Seventies freak.Elsewhere, Springs turns corners into pure kosmiche-adjacent spaciness (“Spaced Out Invaders - Part II Vessels”), Canterbury scene jazz rock were it informed by a Gang Of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the chart success of his second album, June 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul, it was inevitable that any single had to represent Isaac Hayes in a different way to the LP. The album’s 12-minute version of “Walk on by” would not work as a seven-incher. There was also “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which clocked in at over 18 minutes. They did, though, become the A- and B-sides of a tie-in single. But only after significant editing.The decision to truncate album tracks for the singles market set a pattern. Follow-up album The Isaac Hayes Movement opened with a just-short of 12-minute cover of “I Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As he might slide off it in transit, for good measure he gives it a belt to tie him down. It would be a “seat belt”, he suggests triumphantly.This detail tells you a lot about the world the American playwright Rajiv Joseph has created in Guards at the Taj (2015). It’s a fantasy, semi-surreal, with one foot planted in the quotidian. The terrain is from a distant era that verges on mythology, a time of autocratic emperors with grand projects, though its two Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the foyer of the Linbury Theatre is an exhibition which gives a very upbeat account of the presence of black dancers in British ballet. Photographs dating back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s show practitioners of extraordinary physicality and verve, with wide, confident smiles.So what happened? On the whole, not much. Yes, Jerry Douglas, aged 19 in 1997, became the first African American officially to join the Royal Ballet. But was he given roles to match his talent? On this point the exhibition text is mute, but my last remembered sighting of Douglas on the Covent Garden stage was as a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean Baker has crafted a high-velocity drama in three acts with a star-making turn by its lead Mikey Madison in the title role. She prefers to be called Ani and makes her living in a lap-dancing club in Manhattan by night before sleeping away her days in a run-down house in Brooklyn, right next to the rattle of the elevated train. Self-possessed and skilled at getting cash out of clients with some well-rehearsed gyrations, Ani is the latest in Sean Baker’ Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf earlier this year, posturing moodily as an Italian film director. The London Handel Festival’s specially commissioned Aci by the River seemed to have found the ideal form in which to explore this tale of thwarted desire for modern audiences; a dark tale of #MeToo woe in an alienated urban setting.Yet the ebullient, passionate performance delivered by La Nuova Musica at the Wigmore Hall last night proved that when it comes down to it, there’s simply Read more ...
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Disney+ review - the Boss grows older defiantly
Adam Sweeting
Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made documentaries about the making of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen On Broadway and several more. Road Diary takes as its theme Springsteen’s 2023-4 tour, and uses that as a platform for an often emotional survey of his 50 year history with the E Street Band.This was the first time the E Street Band had been back on the road since 2017 (the Covid interregnum didn’t help), and there are some wry observations about scraping off the accumulated rust. Drummer Max Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war.It's a timely film given the race riots and hate crimes stoked by far-right agitators this summer – when would it not be timely? It gets its vital message across, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. Almost. Yes, that's good. We are in 1970s south-east London, and this immediately introduces, despite its tentative tone, the protagonist as a young man trying to define his identity.Like the original book, this stage adaptation — by director Emma Rice with help from Kureishi — explores the tensions between East and West, Buddhism and Islam, suburb and city, glam rock and punk, gay and straight, with some of the characters adopting fake identities as well Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novel, about one man’s stand against the evils of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. But, for me, what is most striking about the film is the reminder it offers of the mystery of acting, and in particular its malleability; call it a gift, or a craft, but we too often underestimate the best of it, how extraordinary it can be for an actor to completely embody a character, real or fictional, so convincingly that an audience believes, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on stage in 1982, after The Godfather (Parts I and II) but well before The Sopranos. For ENO at the Coliseum, Elaine Tyler-Hall has now directed its 14th revival. ENO has lately borne the brunt of drive-by funding massacres by the ruthless (and opera-loathing) capi who control the UK arts-subsidy game. We get the appeal of guaranteed crowd-pleasers and Read more ...