Reviews
Veronica Lee
Time was when the words “a new sitcom from Ben Elton” wouldn't make anyone's heart quicken with anticipation. I think it's fair to say that after the glorious Blackadder (1983-89), he struggled to write anything so brilliantly, giddily funny, but with Upstart Crow he has made a storming return to form.David Mitchell is William Shakespeare, here played as a man for whom one word will never do when he can say ten, and always on the verge of a moan – whether it's about the poor 16th-century transport system between London and Stratford-upon-Avon, or the fact that, as a Midlander, he's seen as an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Smoke and Mirrors is a show based around circus skills. It’s by the Ricochet Project, a performing unit consisting of Berlin-based US performers Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes. However, those expecting a spectacle offering visual pizzazz and the occasional laugh will be disappointed. These two are not clowning. Smoke and Mirrors is full of physical skill, precise choreography and attitude, but the 55-minute piece, which won an award for Best Circus at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is overwhelmingly stone-faced serious. It's not so much circus as an amalgamation of contemporary dance Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Pathfinder started life as a tabletop role-playing game. A spin-off from the classic Dungeons & Dragons, it was created during a schism over the direction the main game was taking and quickly established itself as a rival with a fanatical following.The game’s publishers, Pazio, then created a further spin-off in the form of a collectable card game, Pathfinder Adventures, which captured the essence of the full game in quick-to-play adventures using cards and dice rolls to simulate both combat and exploration. The card game is well liked but perhaps a bit complicated, with lots of dice- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.The latest Le Carré adaptation features an innocent bystander sucked into a plot to bring down a shady business organisation which has links to self- Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Laid low by a bug, Daniel Harding had to withdraw at the last minute from conducting the LSO last night. Booked as the soloist, Leif Ove Andsnes stepped into the breach to lead Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 from the piano, as the composer would have done. His unruffled keyboard technique and unimpeachably neat phrasing betrayed no sign of hasty preparation. Unfortunately they also barely scratched beneath the surface of a dark and troubled work that grabbed Romantic imaginations at a time when so much other Mozart was brushed off as Rococo plasterwork.No 20 shares its key of D minor with Don Read more ...
bella.todd
Of all the 400th anniversary tributes to Shakespeare, this ramble through an allotment just outside Brighton has to be one of the oddest, and most unexpectedly moving. Brighton Festival has a reputation for site-specific work, rediscovering secret pockets of the city and surroundings. This year it’s the turn of Roedale Allotments, a sprawling site of 200-plus plots hidden within a tree-lined valley. It’s a ramshackle rural idyll with a distant twinkle of the sea.Artist Marc Rees stumbled upon this “horticultural, higgledy-piggledy metropolis” a couple of years ago. He had been looking for Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's peculiar seeing any band come back together after a serious length of time, but when that band were part of your adolescence the cognitive dissonance is exponentially increased. Along with the likes of Ride and Slowdive, Lush were a band linked to the “shoegaze” indie sound born in the Thames Valley at the very end of the Eighties, and my main experience of them was at ear-bleed volume in dangerously packed-out, toilet-stall-sized venues around the area, my fringe covering my face and all the hormonal intensity of youth amplifying the effect of the sound. So to see them after a gap of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allegedly one of the worst plays Shakespeare wrote (which he may have done in cahoots with Thomas Nashe), the first part of Henry VI emerged victorious from this TV adaptation. Whereas one might think twice about chopping and rejigging Hamlet or King Lear, director and co-adapter Dominic Cooke had applied some muscular compressing and reshaping which meant that the piece gathered pace steadily, and was thundering ahead at full steam by the time it hit the final credits.Mind you, it wasn't strictly Henry VI Part 1, since some of the later scenes (most notably the harrowing denunciation and Read more ...
bella.todd
Tindersticks certainly know how to instill a mood. Outside the Dome Concert Hall the start of the Brighton Festival is in full swing, with a proliferation of tents, parades and shiny happy tourists drinking in the sun. Inside, Stuart Staples is singing “don’t let me suffer” in a wracked warble to a video of a lone woman floating naked in a distorted swimming pool.Masters of all kinds of musical melancholy – creeping kinds, seething kinds, billowing kinds and above all achingly beautiful kinds – Tindersticks are currently touring their tenth studio album. Each song on The Waiting Room Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any appreciation of Scotland’s The Associates is coloured by the knowledge that Billy MacKenzie took his own life at age 39 in January 1997. More than his band’s voice, he personified their unique approach to music. Between 1979 and 1982, with collaborator Alan Rankine, he created a string of vital records which defy genre pigeonholing and define their vehicle The Associates as one of Britain’s most wilful pop acts. Rankine split from MacKenzie in 1982 at the point when they had broken into the charts. MacKenzie, despite continuing to record as The Associates, solo and in collaboration, never Read more ...
bella.todd
You’ve arrived at a party in a pub, tagging along with a guy you just met. You’re attempting to catch the barman’s eye, while scouting for a friendly face. The band declares that everyone must dance to the next one, and you wish you’d ordered a double. A man you’d like to speak with keeps walking past, but you can’t think of a single opening line. This situation is seriously awkward. And that’s before you factor in the real reason you’re here.A collaboration between immersive theatre company Hydrocracker and interactive media artists Blast Theory, Operation Black Antler is a piece of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Sunshine came softly through my window today..." How fortuitous that veteran Scottish tunestrel Donovan should have picked London's glorious first day of summer to stage his "Beat Cafe" event at the Palladium. The plan was to rove across his back catalogue to celebrate his 70th birthday (which actually falls on Tuesday) as well as his half-century in the music business.The cavernous Palladium space wasn't packed out, but the loquacious and ever-exuberant troubadour didn't seem to have noticed as he bustled about the stage like a small pixie with an outsized guitar. He clearly has a healthy Read more ...