Reviews
aleks.sierz
Don’t you just love celebrity hype? Kim Cattrall’s name alone sold out this show, which runs over the notoriously difficult Christmas period. But sometimes star-casting backfires, and when she had to withdraw from the production for medical reasons, the theatre had to find a replacement. Step forward Noma Dumezweni, an Olivier-award-winning performer who’s due to make her directing debut at this venue next February. But that’s enough, for the moment, about celebrity – what about the writer and the play?The story, written by playwright Penelope Skinner, starts off with Linda Wilde in action. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Young Bulgarian writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov have made a tight, bleak, suspenseful drama in The Lesson (Urok), driven by a commanding, unforgiving performance from actress Margita Gosheva who leads the film. Clearly made on a tight budget (though that doesn’t intrude on production values), their first feature tells an often remorseless story of what happens when the money runs out, which replays themes familiar from the Balkans while also attaining an almost existential dimension.For a story set in the countryside, and in the summer, their cinematographer Krum Read more ...
David Kettle
Christmas has kicked off early in the Scottish capital’s theatreland, with traditional panto Snow White over at the King’s Theatre, and the Lyceum’s high-class offering – as befits the theatre’s 50th anniversary year – in the form of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Don’t count on any "he’s behind you" audience participation here, though – this is a far more traditional theatrical experience, a faithful adaptation of CS Lewis’s beloved children’s fable by Theresa Heskins, lovingly delivered in director Andrew Panton’s enthusiastic, energetic production – and warmly family-friendly, of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We can keep blaming Frank Capra for the lingering notion that Yuletide has magical powers which can turn Scrooges into yo-ho-hoing Santas and convert blood-spattered family feuds into tearful hug-ins by a roaring log fire. To prove it, this would-be seasonal sackful of joy from director Jessie Nelson doesn't shrink from quoting It's a Wonderful Life, both visually and verbally. It's more like an SOS than a homage, though.Prematurely doomed by the concrete overcoat of Steven Rogers's screenplay ("I keep hearing myself trying so hard to be funny," says Olivia Wilde's Eleanor – a struggling Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual and physical energy, and stamina. Stubborn and ambitious, for her class and gender she was unusually interested in business. She sold her work, which indeed she copyrighted, through the printsellers Colnaghi’s, and she was always experimenting and thinking of ways to promote her achievement.One of the seven Pattle sisters – classical Victorians Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Exhibition on Screen" is a logical extension of the recent phenomenon of screenings of live performances of opera and theatre. Initiated with the Leonardo exhibition of 2012 at London’s National Gallery, this is its third season, and the format remains unchanged: a specific show provides the pretext for a bespoke film that goes beyond the gallery walls. Acting as an introductory biography, it interweaves the narration of an artist’s life and work with an illuminating visit to the exhibition; the high-definition, large-screen experience of the cinema more than trumps television, computer or Read more ...
David Nice
Send in the clowns, as they sing in this palace-of-varieties first act, not for Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s sole foothold on today’s operatic repertoire, but for the fool-for-love heroine of a sparkling, swooning rarity. Musically, Zazà is a notch above Mascagni and Giordano for orchestral delights, just below supreme genius Puccini, but its admittedly thinly-spread plot ends by being rather remarkable. Our heroine-artiste may be temporarily broken by her infatuation with a bourgeois theatregoer who turns out to be married, but she’ll return to the stage, and she even manages to expose him for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It might sound hackneyed but Sculpture can only be described as truly psychedelic. They achieve this via a thoroughly original stage set-up. Dan Hayhurst, in a black tee-shirt and military cap, manipulates sounds on a laptop, with a rack of magnetic tape loops to his left which he carefully plucks up and sets on reels, but what makes the London duo a unique proposition is the zoetrope-style visuals of Reuben Sutherland.Moustachioed and clad in an eye-watering multi-coloured poncho, long stripey socks and what appear to be plus-fours, he places cards of images on a vinyl turntable with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1986, the Russian state honoured Mikael Tariverdiev with the People's Artist of Russia award, a mark of respect given to only the most significant figures in the arts. The Tbilisi-born composer was the head of the Composer’s Guild of the Soviet Cinematographer’s Union and had written concertos, operas, ballet music, song cycles (Russian poetry was a favourite), music for television and for 132 films. He was prolific, saw few boundaries and, in 1956, had set Shakespeare sonnets to music. The following year, he did the same for Japanese poetry. But his film music resonates most as it was Read more ...
geoff brown
There are 12 of them, standing in a semi-circle. No conductor in sight. Instead they start singing by striking some invisible match. Immediately the hall is blazing with heat, light, and the ecstatic sounds of Tudor polyphony. Now celebrating its tenth concert season, the British unaccompanied choral group Stile Antico have been singing this repertoire since they first came together; and this Wigmore Hall shindig, exuberantly received by a packed house, marked the anniversary by revisiting the music sung on their very first CD, Music for Compline, in 2007.Have they got bored with this Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The great Caryl Churchill careers down a blind alley in Here We Go, and the results aren't pretty, especially within the cavernous confines of the National Theatre's Lyttelton – this writer's second play this year at that address. A 45-minute triptych about death that gets worse as it goes on, the play put me in mind of the American critic Walter Kerr's famous remark about Neil Simon not having an idea for a play but writing one anyway. On this occasion, it would occur that Churchill had an idea or two and then forgot to write the accompanying play. That, in turn, comes as Read more ...
David Kettle
James MacMillan’s sacred drama Since it was the day of preparation… got its first outing at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 2012. But it was an entirely different experience hearing it in a cavernous Edinburgh cathedral on a chilly November evening – in a welcome re-performance from co-commissioners the Hebrides Ensemble plus Synergy Vocals – to catching it amid the city’s August festival mayhem. And one that suited the piece’s slow-moving, contemplative atmosphere far more strongly, too.In fact, it’s a moot point what the work actually is – sometimes operatic, sometimes Read more ...