Reviews
Simon Munk
You crouch atop a gothic skyscraper, barely distinguishable from the gargoyles you're surrounded by. A rainy sheen dimly reflects off your armour. Your cape flaps and cracks in the wind. You dive into the city… The Arkham game series has at least delivered a real chance to "be" Batman. But as each has gone on, and your moves list, your gadget bag, the city you roam and the things you can do has got larger and longer, the series has increasingly lost its way. Arkham Knight is simultaneously the worst and best of the series – perhaps a fitting finale, then.Starting with the good, swooping down Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people in the UK will know US comic Rob Delaney from his wonderfully sardonic Twitter feed (1.17 million followers) or his autobiography Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage - a painfully honest (and often snortingly funny) account of his alcoholism as a younger man. More recently they may know him as the co-star (with Sharon Horgan) of Channel 4's Catastrophe, the hilarious and sexually honest sitcom they created about a couple of strangers whose casual affair leads to them becoming parents together.Any of those should have prepared the QEH audience Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hamlet instructs his players to "hold...the mirror up to nature”, advice taken literally in this arresting 120-year anniversary staging of Chekhov’s homage to the Bard. Jon Bausor’s set is dominated by a vast angled mirror, offering an appropriately bird’s-eye view and lending cinematic scope to this familial tale. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of a group who need their image reflected back at them through the admiration of others in order to satisfy their egos. The lakeside country house might be teeming with passions, but this love, notes Torben Betts’s pithy free adaptation, “is all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was a huge hit, a small-budget British film that in 2002 unexpectedly found an international audience way beyond its setting in suburban west London, and made stars of its two young leads, Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra. Now the director (with her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges) has written a stage musical version, with music by Howard Goodall and lyrics by Charles Hart.The story has undergone some tweaks to bring it to the stage, but the setting – Southall in 2001 – remains the same. Jess Bhamra (Natalie Dew), an 18-year-old girl of Punjabi Sikh Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The play I have just seen is not the play you will see. Of course, one of the draws of live performance is that no two nights are the same, but that idea is taken to a mesmerising extreme in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Every night, a new guest actor – who has never seen the show nor read the script – joins Crouch in this two-hander; past playmates include Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Eccleston, Frances McDormand and Roger Lloyd Pack. There’s no wacky improv, with Crouch instructing and marshalling his scene partner, but each distinctive interpretation provides Read more ...
Florence Hallett
One of the earliest surviving sculptures by Barbara Hepworth is a toad made from a khaki-coloured, translucent stone; you can imagine it cool and heavy in your hand, not so very different from the animal itself, in fact. Made nearly 30 years later, the monumental sculptures carved from African guarea wood are almost unbearably touchable, each one with its dark, glossy exterior cracked open to reveal an inside as creamy as a conker. But while we are denied the pleasure of touching these objects, looking at Hepworth’s work is in itself a gloriously tactile experience.This almost synesthetic Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
No, don't check your calendar – it's definitely not March. I associate flamenco at Sadler's Wells so strongly with their annual two-week festival in early spring that watching Paco Peña Company at the Wells last night felt a bit like a cheeky out-of-season treat, akin to buying foreign strawberries before the native ones have come in. Fortunately, this was no watery, bland, forced berry, though: Peña and friends are some of the best in the business, purveying reliably high-quality goods in smart, well-produced packaging.The new show, Flamencura, does not follow Peña's last, Garcia Lorca- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The hook for Alan Yentob's portrait of the 86-year-old architect Frank Gehry was the initiation and progress of an enormous new building in a rough portside area of Sydney, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building for the business school of the University of Technology. It opened after nearly two years of construction, on time and on budget, last autumn. To commission it, the dean of the school, Ron Green, simply rang Gehry up, and Gehry replied with just four words: "I’m up for it." As he said, the dean took a conscious risk in all sort of ways. We heard from a range of Australian workmen, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Fair exchange? German humour, perhaps? We send Her Maj off to the Fatherland for a State Visit, and the Embassy of the Federal Republic in London reciprocates by bringing us the popular singing phenomenon – “national institution”, as he was described in last night's introductory speech – Max Raabe, for an early celebration of 25 years of German reunification. The 52-year-old Raabe, with his boyish looks, slicked-back hair, impeccably suited in white tie and tails, is Germany's leading custodian of the songs of the Weimar era. He is quite some phenomenon in his home country, where he performs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year's debut series of True Detective starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in a fascinating slice of metaphysical Southern Gothic. That's all gone now though, because this time, writer Nic Pizzolatto has shunted the action out to the West Coast, to a small fictional city in the shadow of Los Angeles called Vinci. Apparently Pizzolatto based it on real-life Vernon, California, a city infamous for its history of endemic corruption.The show's new protagonists are Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), a Vinci cop with a long list of personal issues, and casino owner Frank Semyon Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Can we really distinguish between experience-based judgement and personal bias? Caroline, the social worker at the centre of American writer Rebecca Gilman’s latest "issue" play, trusts a gut instinct informed by her 25-year career, but those decisions – which shape the lives of her young charges and their families – are gradually revealed to be subjective in the extreme. The passion that fuels her commitment to an arduous, under-appreciated job is also the reason she might not be suitable to perform it.It’s a refreshing subversion of the traditional "caring people versus intractable system" Read more ...
David Nice
Lagoon, miasma and scirocco may seem as far away as you can get from the rolling hills and pleasant airs of the Wormsley Estate in deepest home counties territory. Nor are the bleached bones of Britten’s bleak if ultimately transformative operatic swansong the usual culinary fare many punters might have expected to go with their fine wines and gourmet picnics. Against the odds director Paul Curran makes it all work, going about as deep, disturbing and ambiguous as the work allows while still serving a star performance in Paul Nilon’s Aschenbach and adding to the opera-ballet dimension that Read more ...