Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
There's a whole fairytale backstory to be told here. The residents of Saffron Walden and the surrounding area still can't quite believe their good fortune. The North Essex town and its state secondary school have been gifted a new 730-seat concert hall with a fine acoustic by a philanthropist with twin passions for state education and classical music.The hall's run of good fortune has continued, right up to this concert, arguably its biggest coup to date. The hall's manager Angela Dixon had managed to book Nicola Benedetti for just one performance, and when all the tickets for the violinist's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The oldies are back at Jaipur's Marigold Hotel and they're looking like goodies, too, thanks to a British dame or two and an Ol Parker script that knows when to leave off the breeziness and let the occasional intimation of mortality hold sway. And in a celluloid landscape plagued by sequelitis, the fact that a collective of British pensioners and their newfound Indian chums have been brought back for more is itself rather bracing compared to the usual spate of avengers, transformers or what not that keep most film franchises going.The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel's 2012 predecessor Read more ...
stephen.walsh
You might imagine that composers in general would write songs. On my way to the BCMG’s programme of pieces from the songbook assembled by John Woolrich and Mary Wiegold for the Composers’ Ensemble 30-odd years ago, I tried and failed to think of a significant 19-century composer who didn’t write songs. But in the 20th century song seems to have become a dirty word, associated with mere popularist geniuses like Gershwin, Irving Berlin and John Lennon, then grafted back on to “classical” (as opposed to “music”) as a CD track label. “Serious” modern composers, it turns out, have to be more Read more ...
Marianka Swain
How do we respond to a tragedy of infinite mystery? We investigate, we speculate, and we seek to impose meaning, to produce a story that safely contains unfathomable horror. However, those hoping for such reassurance via a traditional theatrical narrative in Bush Moukarzel and Dead Centre’s Lippy will come away disappointed. This darkly absurdist piece floats searching, fundamental questions, but answers came there none.Fifteen years ago, in the small Irish town of Leixlip, police discovered the bodies of 83-three-old Frances Mulrooney (Joanna Banks) and her three nieces, Catherine (Eileen Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recent attitudes to Victorian Britain have changed radically. The popular view used to be of a period filled with a kind of smug imperial confidence, underwritten by the increasing wealth of the industrial age. This ingrained assumption was perhaps epitomised by Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians, which saw the eminences as bungling hypocrites. And although secret lives might have been as wild as may be, one characteristic myth was that even piano legs had to be obscured with frilly covers for decency. This simplistic summary was leavened by acknowledging geniuses from Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
When Purcell died at just 36, he left The Indian Queen unfinished, which only adds to the usual problems of staging his "semi-operas" – plays with musical interludes which don’t really accord with modern operatic tastes, despite the ravishing beauty of the music itself.Rather than tinkering around the edges, Peter Sellars – the director best known for his long-standing partnership with John Adams – has created a new piece entirely. Its narrated plot, borrowed from Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar's The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma, is set around a particularly savage episode in the Read more ...
Simon Munk
A shambling corpse, desperately gouging anything that comes near it for sustenance, a shadow of its former self. I'm not talking of the zombies that infest this game, but the Resident Evil series itself and its iconic Japanese publisher Capcom.For those not familiar with the Resident Evil series, this wildly successful set of games jump-started the "survival horror" genre in 1996, and has since spawned an army of spin-off game titles and films, while the main series has mutated – from slow-paced adventure to high-speed action.The original Revelations saw the game broken into TV-style " Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With a similar title to Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, White God, too, is an allegory on racism with a canine slant. Where the 1982 film centred on a dog trained to attack black people, Kornél Mundruczó’s film is set in a Hungary where mixed-breed dogs are rounded up and sent to pounds. An edict from a government which is neither mentioned specifically nor seen, permits only pure “Hungarian” breeds. Mutts have to be reported.In the main, society appears to accept this. Dog catchers in white vans roam Budapest’s streets to round up the forbidden mongrels. Neighbours report on each other if they Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you take your rom-coms? Full-fat Hollywood schmaltz, Shakespearean, or lean and elegant – a Stoppard perhaps, or Coward? If your answer did not include “With lashings of social philosophy, ethics and a lengthy dream sequence, preferably running north of three hours”, then Man and Superman might not be the play for you. For those who prefer things quick and contemporary there’s Closer up the road at the Donmar, but for anyone prepared to take a risk with an Edwardian oddity – a baggy, generous, thinks-faster-than-it-can-talk comedy – Shaw still has plenty to say.At full length, George Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses. And to cap it all director Peter Kosminsky, fetishising Mark Rylance’s inscrutable face, seemed to want every take to carry on into next week.In the end, the rewards for loyalty were rich, and never more than in the adaptation's final Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the beginning was the Word and, not long after, came a need for ritual purification. “When Adam was banished from Eden, he sat in the river that flowed from the garden. Adam immersed in the water, in the very first Mikvah …”.Goyim audience members will be grateful, as I was, for the gloss on this traditional Jewish practice given by one of the characters in the opening minutes of The Mikvah Project, the first full-length play by Josh Azouz, who is currently on the Royal Court’s writers programme. We were more grateful still for his bringing the ballast of comedy to such topics as faith, Read more ...
fisun.guner
So, Picasso’s last words turned out not to be, “Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink anymore” – yes, those famous last words that inspired a Paul McCartney dirge – but were, according to this TV biography looking at Picasso’s women and how each significant relationship informed the direction of his work, “Get me some pencils”. A more prosaic request, certainly, but he died in bed, aged 93, his pencils delivered and drawing to the last. It was a good and fitting end.It was, however, an unpromising beginning, for when Picasso entered this world it was feared he was still born Read more ...