Reviews
Clem Hitchcock
Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s multi-screen film installation Vertigo Sea is an epic meditation on mankind’s relationship with the watery world. Exploring themes of migration, environmental destruction and slavery, it was one of the most talked about works at last year’s Venice Biennale. Now at Bristol’s Arnolfini, the location couldn’t be more fitting. Housed in an old warehouse, the gallery is just a stone’s throw from the city’s floating harbour, near where, three centuries ago, ships arrived laden with human cargo.Akomfrah took his cue from a radio interview with young Nigerian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky are making a big deal about the fact that this new fantasy-drama is based on an idea by Marvel Comics superhero Stan Lee, but the "lucky man" is surely the 93-year-old Lee himself. "They [Sky's production team] went back to England to do the work," said the LA-based Stan. "I stayed here to take the credit."Stan's concept was to base a show around a character blessed with phenomenal, outrageous luck. It turns out this chosen one is London detective Harry Clayton (James Nesbitt), though for the opening minutes of this debut episode his luck was very much out. We homed in on Harry as he Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eddie Izzard tells us at the top of a show lasting two-and-a-half hours that he's on the home straight in a mammoth tour taking in 28 countries. He first performed Force Majeure in 2013 and now, in a slightly rebooted form, he parks it in the West End for an extended run as Force Majeure Reloaded.Izzard has ditched some of the weaker elements but the core - his deconstruction of the history of civilisation - remains the heart of the show. He nails his colours to the mast quickly – he puts his trust in people, not in authority figures or religion – and God himself is presented as an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Be careful what you wish for. I’ve often moaned about the fact that British theatre is too naturalistic, and that its stagings are too banal, full of quotidian detail and a specific sense of place, but strangers to the wildness of the imagination. So I have found myself wishing for more exciting settings, and bolder directing. And here at last comes one solution to the miseries of naturalism – a boldly staged revival of master penman Simon Stephens’s 2001 play, Herons, directed by this venue’s artistic director Sean Holmes.When I saw the first production at the Royal Court’s studio space, I Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven: it’s a while since I have heard the Scottish Chamber Orchestra play such an essentially classical programme on its home turf, the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. Recent reviews have focused on concerts in the much more capacious Usher Hall, where this intrepid orchestra has pushed at the boundaries of its natural repertoire with an ongoing Brahms cycle and even a Mahler symphony.The difference is striking. It’s not just the numbers - in the Usher Hall a chamber orchestra of about 40 can effortlessly swell to more than 60 - but it is more the contrast of texture and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Many jazz singers are known for an instantly recognisable tone. Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong are known the moment they open their mouth, for a particular quality of delivery. Jazz singer and comedian Ian Shaw, who launched his 14th album at Pizza Express Jazz Club last night, works differently. His best performances are about the blend of comedian’s timing and musician’s tone, and once he’d warmed up last night, there were tears and giggles aplenty.His new album combines originals and an eclectic collection of covers, and they give the incredible versatility of his vocal range full rein Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology. At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.And here comes a six-part television history, sprawling and ambitious, of the past 4,000 years masterminded and narrated by Michael Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, a film of surpassingly exquisite visual beauty, centres on a deadly hit-woman in ninth-century China who for humanistic or sentimental reasons can't bring herself to kill all her designated victims. That the Taiwanese master Hou dispatches the movie’s stylized skirmishes and ambushes bloodlessly, and with uncommon brevity, emphasizes that it wasn’t the chance to depict violence that drew him for the first time to the wuxia martial arts genre. Quentin Tarantino won’t be remaking The Assassin any time soon.Lithe, black-clad, and unsmiling, Nie Yinniang (Shu Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.That precipitated a witch-hunt, forcing those accused to flee their families and homes. They suffered violence: so great was the sense of public anger inspired by made-up equations of homosexuality with paedophilia that a number of people Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Some chamber ensembles flourish through creative conflict, contrast and tension. Others streamline their approach, not so much relinquishing individuality as allowing the best of each to blend into more than the sum of their parts. The Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch has grown, in its five-year existence, to be one of the latter.Partly the secret of its success could be that the three musicians – British cellist Raphael Wallfisch with two Israeli colleagues, pianist Arnon Erez and violinist Hagai Shaham – are not only old friends, but long-experienced chamber music players, each with a wealth of Read more ...
David Kettle
Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Court in 1997, Conor McPherson’s The Weir has become something of a modern classic, notching up dozens of productions worldwide and even winning inclusion in the National Theatre’s list of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century. It’s also a deceptively simple, unassuming offering – on the face of it, not much even seems to happen. There are no theatrical pyrotechnics, just a few spooky stories told by locals to an intriguing newcomer in a rural Irish pub. So there’s a weight of expectation on any new staging, and also a curiosity as to what Read more ...