Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can seem like hapless histrionics and just a bit daft. Not so The Other Place. "Inspired" by Sophocles’ Antigone, Alexander Zeldin’s triumphant new play, which he directs, transmutes the seething passions and misdemeanours of myth into a contemporary English family home, with discomforting ease. It is strange, twisted yet terribly Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As hurricanes rip into the American Gulf states with increasing ferocity, Eastern Europe disappears underwater and even the gentle British rain becomes a deluge, the arrival of Daisy Hall’s debut play Bellringers at Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs space couldn’t be more timely,The scene throughout is a belfry, with bell-ringing ropes hanging overhead, where two men in monks’ habits have just arrived. Outside, rain is beating down. The two men, Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) and Clement (Luke Rollason, pictured below), begin to argue about when they should ring the bells, whether they actually need to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Like an angry teenager rejecting everything his parents stand for, American artist Mike Kelley embraced everything most despised by the art world – from popular culture to crafts, and occultism to catholicism – to create what he ironically called “blue collar minimalism”. “An adolescent,” he declared, “is a dysfunctional adult and art is a dysfunctional reality”.Noisy, anarchic, silly and disturbing, Kelley’s unruly output makes for uneasy viewing. Despite Tate Modern’s attempts to civilise and rationalise his work, the galleries are filled with the raucous din of loud music and singing plus Read more ...
French Toast, Riverside Studios review - Racine-inspired satire finds its laughs once up-and-running
Gary Naylor
It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely for Gallic-Gang Productions to resurrect Jean (La Cage aux Folles) Poiret’s farce Fefe de Broadway, adapted as French Toast.It’s 1977 and English theatre director, Simon Monk (Ché Walker wearing Jeremy Clarkson’s hair and bearing the public schoolboy’s sense of entitlement), is down on his luck, needing a hit. He lands on a musical version Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest incarnation of David Mitchell, TV actor, looks at first sight much like the familar one from Peep Show and Back. Not a pufflepant in sight. His only costume change for Ludwig is a pair of wire-frame spectacles. HIs role is pretty familiar too: a buttoned-down individual who culturally favours the classics over the popular, the corduroy sports coat over the tracksuit. Presumably a fan of Beethoven, he has adopted the pen-name Ludwig for his line of work; behind the name he is John Taylor, bachelor. But fate calls him to apply his skills forensically, and he joins the line Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hard to imagine it now, but just a few years ago Ellen DeGeneres was one of America’s biggest daytime TV stars; her chatshow The Ellen DeGeneres Show attracted Hollywood stars and politicians and she was paid millions for it. But then, in 2022, it was cancelled amid accusations there was a toxic atmosphere on set created by senior members of her team. This is the context of For Your Approval, which the comic says is her last stand-up appearance.The Netflix Special starts with a film giving a brief overview of DeGeneres’ career before she comes on stage to a standing ovation, the first of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Set in Yorkshire in the 1890s, and based on the novels by CL Skelton, The Hardacres is the story of the titular family who, it seems, were pioneers of takeaway fish, although not accompanied by chips. It’s their stall selling fried herring fresh from the ocean which makes the Hardacres an unexpected fortune.Hitherto, the family have been working as dockers and fish-gutters and struggling to make ends meet, and events take a turn for the worse when patriarch Sam (Liam McMahon) damages his hand in an accident. When his wife Mary (Claire Cooper) appeals to their employer, the charmless Mr Shaw ( Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Captain" Jack Boyle is a fantasist, a mythmaker, a storyteller. He relishes an audience – usually his sidekick, Joxer. There is a theatricality in his part as written by O'Casey, but in Matthew Warchus's hands this is made an explicit element of the whole production, culminating in the unexpected finale. When the first scene opens, swags of red stage curtains rise and remain looped in place throughout, framing the action.The play, the second in Seán O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, is set in the city in 1922. Citizens ground down by poverty suffer further as society is ripped apart by civil war Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two splendid pieces of orchestral virtuosity began and finished the second Saturday concert by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds at the Bridgewater Hall. It was given the title of “Mischief and Magic”, an apt summary.For mischief we had Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, perhaps the most perfect of his orchestral tone poems in that it not only tells a story but is beautifully shaped and balanced as an extended classical rondo.The episodes were given their folklore-based descriptions by Strauss (“Through the market he rides”, “Dressed as a priest he oozes unction”, “ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why should we not look back in anger? With the Oasis reunion tour in the news recently, the title of John Osborne’s seminal kitchen-sink drama – which kicked off the whole cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Men on its first staging in 1956 – has again become familiar in its reminted version, to a new generation.Now packaged as Young and Angry, Look Back in Anger has been revived along with Arnold Wesker’s equally classic Roots (1958) at the Almeida Theatre in a mini-season with a shared cast led by Morfydd Clark and Billy Howle. But can these 1950s expressions of rage, whose verbal Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert, presented by English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire, at the beginning of its tour (paired with The Snowmaiden, reviewed on theartsdesk last week) has all the biggest virtues of her work in spades: it is narratively lean, razor sharp in its scoring, and alluring in it its dressing up of the strange in the comforting garb of the familiar.This production uses the “pocket version” of the 1994 opera, Weir’s own libretto based on an 1897 German Romantic novella, and kind-of updates it to a mid-20th century aesthetic. But the dark deeds afoot in the woods have a Read more ...
mark.kidel
As the Middle East continues to fragment in hate and horror, a tragic unfolding of events with roots reaching back to the middle of the last century, any sign of love and deeply felt collaboration provides a welcome beacon, and signals the possibility of understanding and reconciliation.Ana Silvera (pictured below), a British Sephardi Jew with family from Izmir and Aleppo, sings songs from the Ladino tradition, the culture that accompanied the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th Century. Saied Silbak (pictured below, right), a Palestinian oud player, draws on Read more ...