Reviews
Sarah Kent
Celebrating the four ages of man, eight huge, semi-abstract paintings create a carnival atmosphere in the Serpentine’s central gallery. The freshness of Childhood is characterised by flowers, petals and stamens floating on a blue ground. The passions of Youth warrant a ground of hot orange crammed with circles and spirals jostling for space like amoeba in a petrie dish. Adulthood is dominated by a large, yellow gourd-like shape on a lavender ground; dancing in attendance are looping letters and clover-leaf swirls. Old Age is no less euphoric, but the colours are subtler and the loops and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The weekly magazine Country Life was founded in 1897, and is now perhaps improbably owned by Time Inc UK. Its popular image among people who do not necessarily ever look at it is defined by the famous (or infamous) girls in pearls: those portraits of well-groomed fiancées, a kind of weekly visual equivalent of – say – Desert Island Discs for prosperous young aristos, which introduce the articles of each issue. There have been 6,000 such young belles since 1897, interspersed with an occasional Prince Harry or William – not wearing pearls.This time round it was a Yorkshire lass, Ella Charlotte Read more ...
graham.rickson
Francis Chagrin: Symphonies 1 and 2 BBC Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins (Naxos)Born Alexander Pauker in Bucharest in 1906, Francis Chagrin's name change occurred after pitching up in Paris in the early 1930s to pursue a musical career, his personal chagrin a result of disinheritance and an unhappy divorce. His teachers included Dukas (see below) and Nadia Boulanger, Chagrin supporting his studies by playing the piano in nightclubs. He moved to London in 1936, later describing himself as “Romanian by birth, British by nationality and cosmopolitan by inclination.” A busy career took in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It has been said of Shetland, the BBC crime drama based on the novels of Ann Cleeves, that it displays the somnambulant spirit of many of its Nordic contemporaries, while being caught in the traditional traps of homegrown detective dramas. The simple, cut-out characters, it is argued, stick out against a far more delicate backdrop – like the Hay Wain populated by fuzzy felt figures – something that could pass for art, but only if done by Bansky, ironically and for idiots.Before I digress too much, I should say that I hold no truck with this view, and am of the opinion that series three Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As a title, Hail, Caesar! is as delightfully self-conscious and “inside Hollywood” as The Hudsucker Proxy and O, Brother Where Are Thou? An alternative might have been It’s a Wonderful Lie.Set in 1951, Joel and Ethan Coen’s satirical fantasy, a companion piece to Barton Fink, stars Josh Brolin as a fictional studio boss who doubles as a gumshoe to protect his company’s image from scandals. Among the stars who test his resolve are a dim matinee idol (George Clooney) kidnapped by a Communist cell modelled on the Hollywood Ten while playing a Roman officer in the eponymous biblical epic, a Read more ...
David Kettle
Just a few days earlier, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra had been doing a pretty convincing impression of a symphony orchestra in a powerful Vaughan Williams Fifth Symphony under John Storgårds. And here they were, in crisp, nimble Mozart and Beethoven, being a thoroughly convincing period band – well, with valveless horns, at least. They’re nothing if not versatile.But the real joy of their conductorless concert – and joyful it truly was – was its laying bare of the mechanics of music making itself, and in just about every combination made possible by the absence of a conductor. For that, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Richard Gere is a quiet knockout in Time Out of Mind, the Oren Moverman film that has for some reason remained as below the radar as its invisible (to the rest of society anyway) central character. Why wasn't this performance in the Oscar mix for the seasonal gongs just gone? He'd have had my vote, that's for sure, though it's doubtless part of its Israeli-American writer-director's game plan that this star turn remain unshowy and self-effacing in keeping with the sorrowful terrain that it traverses with unforced ease.Not that there's anything easy about the life Gere's George Hammond is Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This new run of Kaash is an interesting test case for Akram Khan Company as its eponymous founder approaches his retirement from stage performance (forecast for next year). Kaash was Khan's first full-length work, created in 2002 and widely acclaimed at the time. But can Khan's older work stand up after 14 years in which Khan has consistently supplied the British dance scene with some of its most riveting shows (DESH, Gnosis, Sacred Monsters)? And will audiences respond as enthusiastically to Akram Khan pieces without Akram Khan himself on stage?I think yes, to both questions, though Kaash is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Three and a half years ago the writer Robert Jones and producer Kath Mattock came at the crime genre from an unusual angle. Instead of having characters in a murder case talk to one another, they all addressed the camera directly, each offering their own apparently unmediated viewpoint. The title took its cue from the direct style: Murder. Murder: Joint Enterprise won a Bafta. It has taken a while, but the single experimental film has given birth to a short series of three new cases.The first, The Third Voice, is set in small-town Scotland. Two brothers-in-law go fishing, but only one of them Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Barry Adamson has recently moved to Brighton and is clearly delighted with his new home town, which he refers to, shortly after starting his set, as a “dressing-up box by the sea”. Later in the evening he introduces the Hammond organ-laden “The Sun and the Sea” by telling his audience it was written about Brighton a few years ago, before he moved there, dryly informing us that he couldn’t fail to be drawn to somewhere that has “hail in the springtime and pebbles on its nudist beach”. He appears to have already gathered a coterie of local fans who crowd to the front of the low ceilinged-venue Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young man who turned up on a railway platform with no knowledge of who he was or how he came to be there. In the wake of the story’s publication, hundreds of bereaved families came forward to claim the unknown soldier as their own.Now Anthony Weigh – an associate writer at the Donmar – offers his “new version” of Anouilh’s Le Voyageur sans bagage. It turns out to be a thorough rewrite, with added Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Author James Runcie (son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury) hit on a cunning formula with his Grantchester Mysteries. Since the British are incurably addicted to maverick detectives, country house mysteries, clergymen who are part-time sleuths and foul deeds in the heart of the English countryside, why not just repackage the lot like a larcenous Greatest Hits? Take one cleric, add one copper, plant 'em in the Grantchester meadows... Now That's What I Call Crime! Vol 1.Cometh the book, and in 2014 followeth the first TV series. Ratings were pretty good, so here's the follow-up. The timing Read more ...