Reviews
aleks.sierz
Despite the age of austerity, London theatre is booming. Not just the West End, but Off-West End and the fringe as well. One sign of its health is its openness to Continental imports, especially to plays that have been transposed into English by their own authors. If the market leader of this trend is Croatian-born Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters, then the latest example is Maria Milisavljevic’s often equally compelling Abyss.This play originally opened as Brandung at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 2013, and is still running in that venue’s repertory. It won the prestigious Kleist Award for Read more ...
fisun.guner
This is work that wears its heart on its sleeve. That’s what gets you in the end in this big retrospective of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. The French-American artist, who died aged 71 in 2002, is probably best known for two very different bodies of work: her Shooting paintings, the series of collaborative performances in which she and others blasted paint-filled polythene pouches with a rifle, creating chance-based abstract paintings as the sacs burst over the white-plastered canvases they were attached to; and her exuberant Nanas, a nimble, tippy-toed troupe of gargantuan women, fat- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Russell Crowe, who has played more than his fair share of rugged action heroes, makes his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, a film in which he plays, you’ve guessed it, a rugged action hero. He is Joshua Connor, a farmer living in the Australian Outback in the early 1900s, who has an uncanny knack of finding water sources, enabling him to farm this otherwise arid landscape (beautifully shot by Andrew Lesnie).Actually, this isn’t a film about water-divining or the Outback; rather it’s about one man’s search for his three dead sons, who went off to the Great War together as part of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very often, the greatest impact comes without shouting. Subtlety can have a power lingering longer than the two-minute thrill of a yell. So it is with Bridges, the eighth album by Eivør. In the past, the Faroese singer-songwriter has collaborated with Canada’s Bill Bourne, the Danish Radio Big Band and Ireland’s Donal Lunny, and taken turns into country and jazz. Bridges builds on her last album though, 2012’s Room, as further evidence that she is now more focused than ever.Bridges is an all English-language album. It opens with the elegiac “Remember Me”: the song asks “Will I leave a Read more ...
David Nice
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere of Sondheim's "musical thriller": Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras, two pianos or a handful of instruments wielded by the singers, Sweeneys as musicals and as operas, the dumpy and the tall. Which type was this one? Not a vintage English National Opera production, that much seems clear.A year after this more than semi-staging's Lincoln Centre unveiling with the New York Philharmonic, the ENO Orchestra is very much centre stage, a huge Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” J Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation from Hindu scripture is often used to signify the scientist’s rueful realisation, when it was too late, of what he had created in delivering an atomic bomb to the US military.If his later, anti-nuke position has seemed a bit rich to some – what did he think was going to happen? – Tom Morton-Smith’s exceptional new play gives an inkling of how Oppenheimer could have been so hell-bent on his original course, and of the personal sacrifices, betrayals and moral justifications that got him there. It’s an Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ron Mann’s laid-back documentary about the career vicissitudes and family life of Robert Altman (1925-2006) takes its cue from the tone of the director’s films. It was Altman’s habit to observe his character’s crises, collapses, and deaths with the same evenness and lack of melodrama with which he observed their humdrum moments.Although there’s a powerful current of liberal anger in Altman’s work, at the core of it there’s an acceptance of the reality of Social Darwinism, manifested particularly in the American Way. Optimism goes hand in hand with opportunism, as demonstrated by a scene that Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Your mum told you (or at least, I hope someone did) that it wasn't about being pretty, it was about having personality. True wisdom though this is, you probably also noticed that there are some jobs where it appears to be necessary to conform to a certain model of style or appearance. Playing the princess roles in ballet is one of these, though it's not about prettiness: for practical reasons you have to be shorter and considerably lighter than the men who will partner you. Tall ballerinas do become principals, but, especially in smaller companies, they don't often get to dance the Auroras Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been just over a year since Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring famously gyrated, and chest-thumped his way through the band's latest single on American TV. The show was Letterman and the singer looked like a stevedore undergoing primal scream therapy. Within days the footage had gone viral. People have been talking about it ever since. Not least in the bar before last night’s show – how could he, they asked, possibly keep that up for an hour and a half?Heaven knows where he gets his energy from but Herring never missed a beat. This was his show. Dressed all in black, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All the politicians lined up to chorus "Je suis Charlie" after the nauseating massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January, but three months later, how is that emotional declaration of solidarity against murderous extremism holding up? For this documentary, British Muslim Shaista Aziz went to Paris to find out.Her inquiries suggested that France is split in two over the issue of Western values versus Islamic fundamentalism. So is much of the rest of Europe, but France's rigorous insistence on maintaining the state's secular status, and therefore banning such faith-based Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s no shame in being a jobbing actor, but you can’t help missing the Anthony Hopkins who dissected repression with definitive, painful finesse, back when he was great. The Human Stain (2003) is the last I’ve seen of that, amongst the last decade’s Norse gods, Greek generals and judges. His turn as kidnapped lager tycoon Freddy Heineken resembles one of Larry Olivier’s later, international pay-cheques – as a project if not role, Wild Geese 2 comes unwelcomely to mind.The story of Heineken’s 1983 kidnapping, 21 days of captivity, the paying of a then-record ransom and its strange aftermath Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a distinct lack of giraffe or spiny ant-eater or even ant in The Ark. The animals went in none by none in the BBC’s visit to the Old Testament. When the deluge finally came on, it was only the human race which was saved from the watery wrath of God. Our furry and feathered friends never got the call. They say don’t work with animals, but this was taking liberties with holy writ.Meanwhile theologians will be poring over the text for arcane signs which might reveal why this was on in Easter week, an area of the calendar when they generally tend to favour the last few chapters of the Read more ...