Reviews
Nick Hasted
Brighton Festival’s guest director speaks in a sort of rapid-fire drawl, ideal for her debut as a stand-up comic, which she claims was tonight’s Plan A. This half-century veteran of performance art is more slippery than that, proffering a discursive, unreliable, funny and profound master-class in shaggy-dog philosophy, with the festival’s theme of home at its arguable core.The hit single “O Superman” was Laurie Anderson’s vital calling-card to pop culture, her marriage to Lou Reed a brief downtown New York art nirvana, addressed elsewhere in the festival. But the life she zigzags through Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
The foyer of Brighton Dome for Brighton Festival director Laurie Anderson’s Song Conversation would have had a PR executive flummoxed; from punks in their 20s licking the rim of a plastic pint to a hobbling couple clutching programmes. The breadth of audience is surely a testament to Anderson’s unique career of performances combining pop melodies with countercultural performance art. As the seemingly ceaseless passings of pop eccentrics litter our newsfeeds, it’s a relief to see the former NASA artist-in-residence and “O! Superman” composer alive and electronic.The performance is a Read more ...
Bill Knight
Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field.And big picture it certainly is. Now in its second year at Somerset House, Photo London aims to be the best photographic fair in the world – "the first photographic fair of the smartphone generation" – with over 80 galleries and 480 artists exhibiting. The exhibitors are a selection of London galleries alongside a range of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.The source material is the much praised 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. Eggers, author of the super-ludic memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the end, the swirling fragments of Marcella all fell together quite nicely, though Anna Friel's portrayal of Marcella Backland never made you think you were watching a real detective in action. Afflicted with memory loss, blackouts and intermittent "fugue states", she was more like a series of devices and obfuscations to make sure you never had a fighting chance of being certain about what was going on. It was like guessing at a crossword from which somebody had Tippexed out a few clues, though I do have an intuitive friend who guessed the killer's identity several episodes back – pure Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The sense of humour is a funny thing. It raises questions about whether what we find funny can tells us anything about who we are, or what we might become. The case of Screaming Lord Sutch, the semi-legendary rock singer and founder of the satirical Official Monster Raving Loony Party, begs the question: is his wild eccentricity an example of our national pride in tolerating bonkers people, or just an individual act of wonderful silliness? And what does it say about our political system that although he lost every one of the 41 parliamentary elections that he stood in as a candidate, he still Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to shoot in colour to produce a sharper image in black and white. Discovered in the archives a few months ago were perfectly preserved canisters of colour film, six hours' worth in all. This was all a decade before colour came regularly to television.So, perfectly timed for Attenbourgh's 90th birthday, the story of Zoo Quest was retold in this Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Gender deconstruction, fraught feminism and the perils of hook-up culture: George Bernard Shaw’s comedy of manners, penned in 1893, shows we haven’t come as far as we might think. It’s a point rammed home by Paul Miller’s choice of modern dress, but this otherwise pleasantly conventional production cushions its provocations, with the real challenge coming from a near-three-hour running time.Leonard Charteris (Rupert Young), the eponymous philanderer and a loose Shavian self-portrait, is caught between the woman he loves, sophisticated widow Grace (Helen Bradbury), and the woman who loves him Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.The extended opening sequence is a mesmerising standalone episode. It sets up the action by whisking us back to ancient Egypt and introducing the infinitely ancient Apocalypse, a self-styled god who has spent aeons gathering ever-increasing powers by transplanting the gifts of assorted mutants into himself. As pyramids tumble, Singer zooms us back Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a beautiful moment at the start of Act II of Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly. Butterfly kneels, leaning forward to kiss Pinkerton, seated in his defiantly Western armchair. A paper screen moves swiftly across our view, and almost before it has passed he is gone, just another evanescent vision in this gorgeous, ephemeral world where cherry blossom no sooner flowers than it fades and falls.Now on its sixth revival, Minghella’s production has lost none of its visual appeal. Quick on its feet, thanks to sets that suggest rather than assert, swiftly reconfigured from moonlit grove to Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
If a good game is measured by the sum of its parts, then Battleborn is a cacophonous cocktail overflowing with noisy, distracting ingredients, fighting for your attention and clouding the overall flavour. Like a big night out, this fast-paced blaster has a tendency to be a bit messy, but good fun at the same time.We’re in the cartoon-like, frenetic first-person shooter world where you get to unlock a 25-character roster, running and gunning your way through colourful sci-fi fantasy levels on a quest to save the last star in the universe. Every character has their own personality and comes Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Behemoth Dances. Who dances? You know, Behemoth, the huge demonic black cat who cakewalks through Stalin’s Moscow in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita spreading mayhem and magic; the spirit – as quoted by Bulgakov, and taken by Stephen Johnson as a sort of motto for his new orchestral work – “that always wills evil, but always does good”. A sardonic fanfare announces his appearance, before the orchestra whizzes away on a bustling, bristling spree. Woodwinds squeal and skirl, the surface glitters, and a piano throws in a few deadpan comments.But this isn’t just a deliciously orchestrated Read more ...