Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
If Matthew Bourne never made another story ballet, his company New Adventures could probably carry on touring his back catalogue till the end of time. The Sleeping Beauty is only on its second London outing, and although it lacks the emotional clout of his Swan Lake, it’s clearly set for a similarly long life as a Great British Export. I can only think that’s why Bourne opted, dismayingly in my view, to use recorded music. It’s not that he’s cheapskate: he commissioned a new version of Tchaikovsky’s score, strongly conducted by the company’s own Brett Morris. But a recording is portable. Plus Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s more than ten years since Marcella Puppini invited current “sister” Kate Mullins and a third singer, who has since been replaced twice with unsisterly ruthlessness, to form her eponymous close-harmony sorority. The trio’s slick, switchback harmonies, generally retro repertoire, and glossy vocal finish, have carved them a distinctive niche in the scene, even as that era has been dragged back into the mainstream by a glut of burlesque tribute acts. The show was billed as a Ronnie Scott’s Christmas Special, an area in which the Sisters have previous: their collaboration with Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Strap yourself into the wingsuit of freedom fighter Rico Rodriguez and launch into an explosive open world game boasting four hundred square miles of beautiful Mediterranean islands to explore. Your mission is to liberate your homeland, the fictional island republic of Medici that’s crumbling under the brutal rule of General Di Ravello. To aid your quest you have access to a massive arsenal of weapons, gadgets and vehicles, combined with the freedom to explore your environment from seabed to sky.Just Cause 3 (★★★★) is a sandbox game where you choose the best course of action. Follow the story Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emotionally to a degree it didn't begin to achieve at a West End premiere that I recall almost three decades on.As if taking a leaf from the same play's subsequent (and much-improved) 1994 New York Lincoln Center premiere, a once-abstruse work finds the necessary pulse to keep audiences engaged in a text that comes positioned both chronologically and temperamentally between The Real Thing and Arcadia (Hapgood Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“Every time I go on stage it could be the last,” Carlos Acosta warned a few years back. And now that moment has come – or very nearly. There are a scant six performances of this farewell gala at the Coliseum (largely a reprise of an Olivier-winning programme he presented in 2006). Then he picks it up again next May, with different supporting dancers, for a fleeting regional tour. Those quick enough to have bagged a ticket are in for a treat.Acosta has always given good gala. Aware of the potential choppiness of the traditional format – a meat-counter display of bleeding chunks, hacked from Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surely given him a very special quality in the nation's consciousness, a combination of general benignity with more than a hint of absent-mindedness, an almost madcap bafflement at the world.So I can’t have been the only one to wonder what he was going to make of Ebenezer Scrooge, and the top-hatted image of him that grins at us from the poster has the kind smile that we certainly associate with the character post- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
With its hybrid Romantic-kitschy plot, chocolate-advert Tchaikovksy tunes, and baggage of obligatory Christmas cheer, the Nutcracker is harder to get right than you might think if you've only ever seen Sir Peter Wright's Royal Ballet version, now over 30 years old and still practically perfect in every way.The production is the result of research into the St Petersburg original, as well as revisions added 15 years ago to incorporate ideas from the Nutcracker Wright did for Birmingham Royal Ballet, but it feels as effortless, inevitable and magical as a fairytale's "once upon a time". Part of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It would take a brave soul to mention Peter Mullan and “national treasure” in the same breath. To start with, he’d be more than clear which nation has his allegiance, and then suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that maybe he was, well, a wee bit young for any such honorifics...So we’ll leave that for another couple of decades, and just salute an actor whose presence on screen is so distinctive, compelling and most of all real. (And hope that we’ll see him back soon in the other capacity in which he has distinguished himself, as a director, with three films, Orphans, The Magdelene Sisters Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of breathless frontloading in television documentaries. The headlines promising shock and awe coming up are posted in the opening edit as a way of hooking in the remote-wielding viewer. Very often as presenters stump around history’s muddy digs or leaf through dusty old tomes, the revelations vouchsafed turn out to be a bit iffy, a bit yeah but no but so what? The hyperventilation is often a precursory guarantee of bathos. You’d be better off reading the book. So Andrew Graham-Dixon had to draw on an extra reserve of superlatives to sell Secrets of the Mona Lisa.“These Read more ...
aleks.sierz
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West – and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a landscape of food shortages and human-rights abuses. Yet its regime calls this dismal place the "Best Nation in the World". To us, it’s a secret world, a strange culture difficult to comprehend, easy to fear. Small wonder that, in American playwright Mia Chung’s 2012 play, two hungry sisters fantasise about leaving it for good.In the first scene the older sister, Minhee, and her sibling Junhee are Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse, Cymbeline was quite literally made for this space. How disappointing, then, that director Sam Yates proves so wilfully blind to the theatre’s unique spatial and dramatic possibilities, delivering a production that might charitably be called faithful, but which more often feels simply blank.Lighting is a crucial part of the dramatic rhetoric of the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Guy Maddin diehards will find the Winnipeg auteur’s delirious latest homage to antique cinema so mesmerizing they’ll be sorry when it ends. There are times during the 119-minute The Forbidden Room when it seems it’ll run forever, like M.C. Escher ants on a Moebius strip. But shortly after the rapid-fire montage of multiple climaxes, even the most dedicated fan must accept that it’s time to go home and bathe.Ageing roué Marv, played in a gaping dressing gown by Maddin regular Louis Negin (pictured below right), gives precise instructions on “how to take a bath” in the opening sequence ( Read more ...