Reviews
Veronica Lee
Well, here’s an interesting endeavour. The 2,000 Year Old Man was a series of improvised sketches performed in the 1960s by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. Brooks played the old guy, talking about all the great names in history – Jesus, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and many more – he has known in his long and eventful life. Reiner was the straight man, lobbing the questions that Brooks would then riff on. What started as two comedy mates having a laugh become television sketches and five albums-worth of recorded material.The humour, which is Yiddish, world-weary and overly dramatic – I am a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The story of the 1964 Smethwick election, with its unofficial Tory slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour,” is well known. The successful Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, subsequently became MP for Portsmouth North, 1979-97, where he advocated the similarly opportunistic but less controversial cause of the naval dockyards, and died in 2013. What really shocked about this often eye-wateringly revealing documentary was the extensive footage of the caustic casual racism prevalent at the time.The worst of this, perhaps, was the excerpt of one George Newey announcing Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Susanne Bier follows the disappointing Serena with a well-acted and worthy drama that confronts societal prejudice, the sticky issues around child protection, and our inability to see what's right under our noses. Despite the plot's predictable and manipulative machinations, A Second Chance is rendered compelling every step of the way by Bier's searching direction and a mesmerising lead performance from Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.Coster-Waldau plays Andreas, a police officer working in rural Denmark who seems like the epitome of a good man. He's a new father and the devoted Read more ...
geoff brown
Through symphony, opera and orchestral fireworks, Julian Anderson’s music can usually be guaranteed to bring his audiences plenty of meaty listening. But the British composer’s golden aura faded somewhat during the London Philharmonic’s world premiere last night of In lieblicher Bläue, a quasi-concerto (“poem” is Anderson’s preferred term) for violin and orchestra. Some of its troubles might lie in the composer's source of inspiration, a crazy-quilt German Romantic text, hovering between poetry and prose, written in the early part of Friedrich Hölderlin’s long mental decline.The text has Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Perhaps it’s because today’s economy often seems to reflect the nightmare of the late Seventies, but recent years have seen plenty of the original punks return to public attention with a renewed vigour. Whereas some, like support band The Rezillos, have reformed after a break of several decades, the Stranglers, despite a few line-up and stylistic changes, have never gone away and aren’t shy about playing a set of tunes drawn from their 40-year career.The Rezillos in fact, were a fine warm-up for the evening with their Banana Splits-like take on punk. Classics like “Somebody’s gonna get their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Simple Minds: Sparkle in the RainPlaying increasingly larger venues throughout 1983 had changed Simple Minds. “In places like that, 50,000 people, there’s just no room for subtlety, and there’s no need for it and there’s no want for it.” The quote from frontman Jim Kerr is telling.When Sparkle in the Rain was released in 1984, it made good on the promise of “Waterfront”, the single which trailed it. This was a new, heftier Simple Minds: a band retooled for stadia. “Someone recently described the record as 'art school rock with fantastic bombast',” says Kerr elsewhere in the book Read more ...
Heather Neill
Mustapha Matura's 1974 play is a celebration of liberation, both social and political, and a sly warning about the possible pitfalls of sudden freedom. Mas (or Masquerade) is the Trinidadian version of Carnival, an exotic mixture of Christian and African tradition played out just before Lent. It provides an opportunity to adopt a different persona, to drink to excess and to behave in ways unacceptable at any other time. But Matura's play is set on either side of colonial Trinidad's liberation from Britain in 1962; the acting out of roles and dressing up as policemen and generals takes on a Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When the curtain came down on Liverpool’s year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, back in 2008, there may have been some who thought that the party was over. Things in the city’s arts world were never going to the same, however, and much has changed since 2008, mostly for the better. But there is one institution which, though it’s been through some major changes in its lifetime, is a constant on the Liverpool scene.The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is celebrating its 175th birthday. Philharmonic Hall has been refurbished and building work continues to provide a new performance Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When a documentary about Irish rock music starts with footage of late-period Bono shuffling about awkwardly dressed in black, my first impulse is to check my iTunes in case he’s surreptitiously shat another album into my computer. The second is to reach for the remote. Thankfully though, this was just a glimpse of what was to come down Ireland's rocky road. I had more than enough time to steel myself as we sped back in time to a point when the fledgling blues scene was first making an impact in the country.In the South during the 1960s, the Church held sway and, with it, a tight grip on the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saul Dibb dispenses with the first half of Irene Nemirovsky’s great novel Suite Française in about a minute. Grainy newsreel footage disposes of the Fall of France in 1940, then it’s on to the occupation of Bussy, the country town where Lucille (Michelle Williams) falls for gentlemanly German officer Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts, pictured below with Williams). Their unconsummated, forbidden affair under the gimlet gaze of mother-in-law Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas) is the focus of this plainly filmed period romance, as the posters suggest it will be. Lovers of the novel will be Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Morton Feldman and Robert Schumann don’t often appear in the same sentence, but in his brief platform introduction Alexander Melnikov perceptively located common ground: they are two of the greatest writers on music, both for their polemical intent and their vivid imagery. It can be hard to avoid analogy and metaphor when discussing Feldman’s music, but why bother trying? The composer himself wrote of Triadic Memories (1981) that “Chords are heard without any discernible pattern. In this regularity there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Paloma Faith has been on the front pages lately. Winning the Brit Award for Best Female Solo Artist 2015, following two previous unsuccessful nominations, has done her profile no harm. A few songs in tonight she squats down behind the grand piano and announces, “There’s a little thing round here,” then triumphantly produces her Brit, dedicating it to her audience. Aside from the Brit, much media interest was roused by her bold move asking Owen Jones, political journalist and author of the books Chavs and The Establishment, to be her touring support act.Prior to her performance she brings the Read more ...