Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
Entertaining our troops overseas has already proved a fruitful subject for drama, and not only for its show-within-a-show potential. Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade – revived in the West End three years ago – combined latrine-level banter and tawdry cabaret to create pathos and comedy. Now, updating the military status quo, comes The Sweethearts, a new play by Sarah Page marking the first anniversary of the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.Coco, Mari and Helena are a manufactured girl-band – "The Sweethearts" of the title – inured to their every move being Read more ...
David Nice
“The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”: whichever of his Pravda scribes Stalin commandeered to demolish Shostakovich’s “tragedy-satire” in January 1936, two years into its wildly successful stage history, didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it defines one extreme of the ENO Orchestra’s stupendous playing under its new Music Director Mark Wigglesworth. On the other hand there are also heartbreaking tenderness, terrifying whispers and aching sensuousness. A fuller picture of Shostakovich’s murdering heroine as 20th - or even 21st - century Russian woman couldn’t be imagined; soprano Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: It Don't Bother Me, Jack Orion / Bert Jansch & John Renbourn: Bert and JohnWhen theartsdesk last caught up with Bert Jansch, it was April 1965 and he had just issued his eponymous debut album – a set which now, as it was then, is a benchmark take on what acoustic folk and blues would be if a singular, all-embracing vision was applied. As much singer-songwriter album as template for the future of boundary-breaking British folk, Bert Jansch was as influential as it was remarkable.Jansch did not stand still after April 1965. His follow-up album It Don't Bother Me was released in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The British, it is said, are victims of reserve – eschewing anger, open affection and hurt for crossface winkyface sadface. While an over-simplified (not to mention shockingly solipsistic) take on a far from unique tendency, there is a kernel of truth here. A difficulty, perhaps, in conveying emotions accurately. A mistrust of heightened states – a tendency to misconstrue and get caught up in guilt, blame and shame.This could go some way to explaining why, when John Lydon, the russet-topped frontman of the Sex Pistols accosted the nation with his thousand-yard stare and combination of Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Iliad is the third collaboration between National Theatre Wales and “the two Mikes”, directorial duo Pearson and Brookes. The pair have been responsible for two previous highlights of the still young company’s back catalogue, The Persians (2010) and Coriolan/us (2012). Aeschylus was re-imagined on a Brecon Beacons military range and Shakespeare recast in an RAF aircraft hangar, so it is perhaps surprising that the ultimate epic drama of war is staged in an actual theatre, the compact and modern Ffwrnes in Llanelli.“War Music” is the generic title of Christopher Logue’s Homer, five full-length Read more ...
David Kettle
Craig Roberts first made his mark in Richard Ayoade’s 2010 debut feature Submarine, playing a socially inept Welsh teenager. For his own debut feature, as writer, director and lead, Roberts plays – well, a socially inept Welsh teenager. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable – and possibly even intentional, too. But they’re also a bit unfair, partly because Ayoade’s film is by far the more assured of the two, but also because in Just Jim, Roberts seems to be attempting something a bit darker, and far more dream-like. He might not always succeed, but he certainly has a lot a fun Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Loose Tubes go hand in hand with Ronnie Scott’s. This was the setting for their fabled residencies back in the Eighties, the scene of their farewell gig in 1990 and of their comeback last year (both of which feature on new live album Arriving). The venue’s location gets a name check on 2010 release Dancing on Frith Street (featuring more live material from that 1990 gig) and it got another mention on Thursday night, with Tubes trombonist and irreverent MC Ashley Slater declaring it the band’s "spiritual home".I saw them play the 1600-seat Hall One at Gateshead International Jazz Festival back Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Was it when we all obediently received, then held, contemplated, then savoured, then (and only then) swallowed a single grape? Or was it as we paced solemnly round the room for the sixth time, whirling brightly coloured plastic tubing above our heads to make a whirring sound, that the penny dropped? Actually I’m fairly certain it was being exhorted, for the nth time, to “embody alertness”, to feel my “super-alert hands” that did it for me. Don’t be fooled by the marketing: Rolf Hind’s Lost in Thought is no more an opera than I am a yogi.You can talk about meaningful silences or the Japanese Read more ...
David Nice
In 2007, Jiří Bělohlávek set the distinctive seal on his leadership of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their ongoing Mahler cycle with a riveting performance of the Third Symphony. The legacy he established of a deep, well-moulded string sound which the orchestra didn’t really have before has left its mark on his successor Sakari Oramo’s even more impassioned attempt at the most epic of all Mahler’s symphonies. We even had the same peerless trombonist, Helen Vollam, awesome in the primeval funeral marches of the first movement, amid a mix of distinguished orchestral soloists old and new. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In an age when film stars take selfies at the Oscars and photobomb other celebrities, and when the bashful have little control of their image saturating the internet, it may be hard to imagine a time when an actor could be on the verge of stardom without anyone having any idea who he was – or a moment when a photographer could have the inclination or intimate access that could actually touch on something truthful.But by all accounts this was the case in 1955, for the actor James Dean and for Dennis Stock, the Magnum photographer who took the pictures that have become most associated with the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Cards on the table: the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is looking for a new music director. Having filled its new season with emerging talents – Andrew Gourlay, Daniele Rustioni, Ryan Wigglesworth and Ben Gernon, to name just four – it’s an open secret that any concert directed by a youngish, more-or-less unattached conductor in Birmingham for the foreseeable future is effectively an audition for the job. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.All of which created a certain buzz around this Birmingham debut by the Romanian-born, Philadelphia-based Cristian Măcelaru. As winner of the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Comedy, love and a bit with a dog,” counselled Henslowe in Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, and his populist advice is taken to heart in this broad, bawdy, big-hearted farce untroubled by nuanced characterisation or context. Jessica Swale’s modern-language Restoration romp ensures a lively end to the Globe’s season, but playing to the galleries does a disservice to her trailblazing heroine.Cinderella-like Nell Gwynn (a luminous Gugu Mbatha-Raw) made the astonishing journey from illiterate Cheapside commoner to Charles II’s bedchamber, via a celebrated stint as one of England's first Read more ...