Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an attack that has yet to be made, rather than a free dialogue with a set of characters and a story.The joy of Caroline Byrne’s new production for the Globe is precisely its ease. She doesn’t so much wrestle with the text as surrender herself to its flow, whether that carries her to dark places or light. The result is a show that’s half comedy and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel's new show, funny though much of it is, raises some interesting ethical questions. Described by the writer and comic as a “massively disrespectful celebration” of his parents' lives, My Family: Not the Sitcom certainly lives up to that, but, considering his mother is dead and his father is suffering from a form of dementia, neither could give their approval for the material used. Yet because it is done with such obvious affection, that becomes a nagging doubt rather than a burning issue during the engrossing 110 minutes.Baddiel's starting point is that, at his mother's funeral, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Goldberg Variations Bassoon Consort Frankfurt (MDG)The only performances of Bach's Goldbergs which don't hit the spot for me tend to be those played on harpsichord. Piano will always be best, but I've enjoyed versions for harp, guitar, string orchestra and accordion. This improbable new transcription is for nine bassoons: eight regulars plus a contra. It feels reassuringly ‘right’ – presumably because we’re so used to hearing bassoons in baroque music. Henrik Rabien’s arrangement sticks to Bach’s keys, the only significant alteration being the transposition of many lines an octave down Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Like the 1956 Suez Crisis for a previous generation, the 1982 Falklands War (or should that be Islas Malvinas War?) was a turning point for all those who lived through the Thatcher decade. Such was the hysteria at the time that to protest against the conflict was to attract accusations of treason – I remember one anti-war march in central London where the police outnumbered the demonstrators, and filmed us all. Some 900 British and Argentinian soldiers died in the fighting, but what happened to the veterans that survived?In Minefield, which is being staged as part of the London International Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“The most interesting characters are initially difficult to like,” proclaims Jesse Eisenberg’s would-be filmmaker protagonist, in case his cringe comedy’s mission statement was otherwise unclear. Ben is an outlandish collage of unlikeable qualities: abusive, misanthropic, arrogant, vicious, self-loathing, needy, and a poor little rich kid. Eisenberg does everything possible to alienate in an indulgent two and a half hours, short of throttling a puppy, before asking if we can still love him.Perhaps the more intriguing question – and one Eisenberg’s therapist has surely raised – is why the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Warcraft series of "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" (or MMORPG if you must) has apparently amassed over 100 million users since it all began with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. Ergo, turning it into a 3D multiplex-buster is a no-brainer. Surely?I could foresee a couple of potential pitfalls. Firstly, passively watching a movie is quite a different proposition from playing an interactive game. Secondly, it's not as if we've been deprived of this kind of sword-and sorcery, dungeons-and-dragons, mystical kingdom stuff lately, with Game of Thrones, the Hobbit / Lord of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Cornelia Parker invited over 60 fellow artists to join her in exhibiting at the Foundling Museum in London. Titled Found, the show spills out from the basement gallery to infiltrate every room in the building and remind us that, when the Foundling Hospital was set up as a charity for destitute children in 1739, artists made an important contribution. William Hogarth invited friends to exhibit at and donate work to the hospital while Handel ensured the charity's place in the social calendar by giving benefit concerts there every year. The museum contains some moving exhibits; when Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had been looking forward to last night's concert since it was first announced over a year ago. For a Stravinsky nut the chance to hear pieces whose live performances are vanishingly rare was not one to be missed. And it turns out there are enough other fans of austere late Stravinsky to sell out St John’s Smith Square, which proved a very suitable venue for this programme.Although presumably only pressed into service because of the ongoing refurbishment of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a deconsecrated church was the ideal space, both acoustically and atmospherically, for this collection of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Greece has had a bad press in recent years. A place that used to conjure up visions of lazy days on sun-soaked islands, with summer food and warm seas, now just reminds us of the migration crisis, bodies in the water and economic collapse. The country is used as an example of the failure of the Euro, and of the iniquity of the IMF. It is a place of poverty, and riots; a symbol of the age of austerity. A basket case; a warning. Now Elizabeth McGovern, who sheds her Edwardian Downton Abbey garb for groovy 1960s wear, stars in a play about Greece that explores that country’s troubled postwar Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.But it started from a very specific and personal experience. In Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after the Conservatives won the General Election last year. “Bastards,” he calls them, with a schoolboy-ish smile, at the beginning and end of the documentary.Except in the first half of the Thatcher ’80s, Tory policies have specialised in eliciting Loach’s fiercely oppositional cinema – so have anti-socialist Labour policies. For 53 years, he has been Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Our Shakespeare” is the name of the CBSO’s current season. They're making the same point that Ben Elton makes slightly less subtly in Upstart Crow: that Shakespeare was basically a Brummie. And by implication, that four centuries of musical Bardolatory, from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to Verdi’s Falstaff, is all on some level Made in Birmingham. Falstaff, conducted by Edward Gardner, is coming next month; the usual Shakespearean warhorses (Prokofiev, Walton, Tchaikovsky) have already been despatched. That left tonight’s “Seven Ages of Shakespeare”, which, like any concert that puts Purcell Read more ...