Reviews
mark.kidel
Teen spirit explodes time and time again in the intimate space of Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, with piercing electronic sounds, fierce lighting and a torrent of high-energy movement. The frenetic pace of Baz Luhrman’s film has left its mark on intepretations of Shakespeare's classic love story, and this isn't necessarily a good thing. There is more than enough youthful energy in Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory's production of Romeo and Juliet, and the decision to place the action in the rebellion-torn 1960s feels misguided and undermines a show that nevertheless features some very good Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stars continue to be born from Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Following on from the ongoing Broadway run of the show, which catapulted to name status its Tony-winning leading lady Jessie Mueller, along comes the immensely likeable West End version and – oh, Carole! – much the same looks likely to happen again here.Until this point, English actress-singer Katie Brayben was best-known for playing Princess Diana in last year's hit play King Charles III. But from this point on, and for as long as she chooses to stick with it, Brayben (pictured below) and the West End incarnation of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Captured in monochromes ranging from the most delicate honeyed golds to robust gradations of aubergine and deep brown, the earliest photographs still provoke a shiver of surprise and excitement. Even now, their very existence seems miraculous, and the blur of a face, or the lost swish of a horse’s tail signifies the photographer’s pitched battle with time, never quite managing to make it stop altogether. And with their chemical concoctions, their images emerging gradually, apparently from within the paper itself, it is no wonder that from the outset the photographer’s art was cloaked in the Read more ...
Heather Neill
The big news was that dashing Greg Wise was returning to the London stage after an absence of 17 years. Still best remembered as the handsome cad Willoughby in the film of Sense and Sensibility – now 20 years old – he appears in the intimate Park 200 auditorium as a middle-aged, care-worn father, oblivious to wrinkles and grizzled locks. He gives a performance so physically and emotionally charged, however, that his looks are irrelevant.Kill Me Now is advertised as a dark comedy; it would be closer to the truth to describe it as a tragedy enlivened with glints of wit and humorously Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It would probably be best to start this review with a mention of the band, The War on Drugs, whose 2014 LP, Lost in the Dream, saw them realise their potential in a flurry of "Best Of" lists and almost unbelievable hyperbole. However, before we get fully into that, I should state, for the record, that I’ve always hated Brixton Academy. The rake plays havoc with my calves and the beer tastes homeopathically weak, while sound spirals and muddies as it travels into the gods before falling back to earth like a plague of shit brown noise. This is why the support band suffered dreadfully last night Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Going into this programme, it dawned on me that I knew next to nothing about Mark Rylance's background – where he came from, who his parents were, what he does in his personal life. Having reached the end credits I was little the wiser, other than having learned that he has a wife called Claire, since none of it fell within the purview of Melvyn Bragg's interviewing.But I suppose there's always Wikipedia for the other stuff, and Bragg's close focus on Rylance the actor and his main spheres of thespian activity paid its own dividends. It prised out revelations about his approach to his craft, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror tropes. Alongside the titular teen tradition it featured an abandoned warehouse, a Ouija board, a trip down to the basement and a midnight swim. With his chilling follow-up Mitchell goes full horror, presenting us with a STH: a sexually transmitted haunting.It Follows updates Halloween's suburban horror story – where the adults disappear, leaving Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Plays about Muslims in British theatre tend to open a door on a segregated community, a place cut off from the mainstream. But stories that show cultural conflict – between whites, Asians, Muslims, Hindus, Poles and Sikhs – are much rarer. So it’s good that actor-turned-playwright John Hollingworth’s debut play, with a title which alludes to Walt Whitman’s “I am large. I contain multitudes” from Song of Myself, dares to explore conflict between social groups.Dateline: Bradford. Some time in the nearish future. As Conservatives gather for their annual conference in this Read more ...
Gary Raymond
For many the story of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas will be familiar. It has been told in many forms, and powerful and inspirational as it is, many times too. Thomas (known to all bar his mam as “Alfie”) is now not just a totemic figure in the sport he graced for 16 years, but a symbol of courage and hope for the LGBT community and indeed anyone who has at some point in their lives felt the walls closing in.The story of the first man in world sport to come out as gay is one that does not lose its power in the retelling, and National Theatre Wales’s much anticipated staging of it – in Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival is cunningly scheduled for that particularly dreary fortnight in late February when winter has been going on forever, spring is still just out of reach, and half term brings the dismal realisation that we're only just halfway through the school year and summer holidays are still at least five months away. When you're longing to be somewhere else, there's nothing like flamenco, a raw, gritty music-and-dance form born among the dispossessed of southern Spain.It's come a long way since then, of course, and the flamenco stars imported by Sadler's Wells are no Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Political sleaze, arguments over Europe and fears for the NHS – sometimes it feels as if it’s the 1990s all over again. And, right on cue, theatre has been staging a whole shelfload of revivals of work from that decade: Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, Conor McPherson’s The Weir and Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing. The Donmar Warehouse, under the spirited leadership of Josie Rourke, has led this trend, and its latest offering is Closer, Patrick Marber’s brilliant 1997 play, revived now with Rufus Sewell in the cast.Set in London, and partly a Valentine to the hidden nooks and crannies Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“The Sun comes up, another day begins/And I don’t even worry ‘bout the state I’m in.” One of the great opening lines in rock and a motto to live by. The Jesus & Mary Chain lay into their second single, "Never Understand", with deadpan gusto, their soundman pushing the decibels up. Murky silhouettes amid dry ice under an array of strobing lights, they hammer it home. Jim Reid is at the microphone, clad in a box jacket and jeans, looking much as he ever did but with cropped monkish hair. His brother William, belly pushing at his “1972” tee-shirt, his trademark flourish of once-black hair Read more ...