Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
The delicacy of its supernatural elements make Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, as adapted by Tchaikovsky, a tricky proposition for any director. Do you go with the ghost story and risk losing your audience emotionally, or do you play it straight, trying to rationalise the plot’s moments of macabre? The hands of the clock stand perpetually arrested just moments before midnight in David Alden’s new production for ENO, putting his audience out of any doubt as to which he has chosen.Setting the opera in hospital or mental institution is not a new idea, but one that serves Alden well in a large- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Mothmen: Pay Attention!On their 20-minute “Mothman”, Manchester’s The Mothmen took a trip fusing bendy Captain Beefheart-style guitar, dub, insistent percussion and a Krautrock sensibility. The side-long track closed their album Pay Attention!, originally issued in March 1981 by the On-U Sound label. As a sign-off, “Mothman” was undoubtedly arresting but however absorbing it was, this was the sound of history. The workout was recorded by a line-up of The Mothmen which split shortly after it was recorded in May 1980.The band carried on with a reconfigured membership, but Pay Attention! is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The fifth Songlines Encounters Festival at Kings Place brought together artists from around the world, offerering a powerful cultural kick-back against all manner of extremist positions. The opening Thursday featured young Portuguese Fado singer Gisela João, with Cypriot trio Monsieur Doumani, and the closing Saturday paired the Shikor Bangladesh All Stars with the Anglo-Bangladeshi Afrobeat Latin grooves of Lokkhi Terra.But it was Friday night’s coupling of Iranian singers Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat with Highlands fiddler Duncan Chisholm that showed how striking and creative these Encounters Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein’s new play, Now This Is Not the End, the city is remembered with a touch of nostalgia by Eva, an old German lady living in London. But these memories are under threat: she is beginning to suffer from dementia so her vivid recollections are becoming cloudy – can anyone help her preserve her past?Living with her second husband Arnold, Eva has sold Read more ...
David Nice
There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a poet of comparable word-magic and a composer to reflect the crucial role of music at the Athenian festivals, serving the drama with masks and compelling strangeness, as Peter Hall did in his seminal 1980s Oresteia at the National Theatre (poet: Tony Harrison, composer: Harrison Birtwistle, peerless both). The other is to cram it into modern dress and language, hoping that the eternal verities stick, which Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Winston Churchill’s famous words on Russia serve as a very apt verdict on Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo), the third film from Chinese director Diao Yinan. Its noir detective style pays homage to classic Hollywood tropes, but this is an unapologetically arthouse piece that impresses most for its gloriously dark visuals: it certainly captivated last year’s Berlinale jury, winning the Golden Bear there over Richard Linklater's Boyhood and other more approachable fare.Viewers may well need more than one watch to even attempt to explicate Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Many matches are made in Fiddler on the Roof but the matchmaking prize goes to Grange Park Opera for getting Bryn Terfel to take on the role of Tevye. Having only recently played Sweeney Todd, and indeed throughout a varied career, Terfel has proved that he can treat lighter music with respect and sincerity, not to mention plenty of good humour. He is superb as the beleaguered paterfamilias, intoning aphorisms at his family, god and anyone who’ll listen with more than a nod towards the cinematic Tevye which made a household name of Chaim Topol – who was actually in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's impossible to overstate the reverence accorded the painter Agnes Martin by her fellow artists; in the panoply of American cultural goddesses, she is right up there with Emily Dickinson. Yet she is scarcely known in the wider world, partly because her work is relentlessly abstract, but also because she was deliberately evasive.She left New York in 1967 just as her reputation was gaining momentum and moved to New Mexico, where she lived as a recluse until her death in 2004. She rarely agreed to interviews and when she did speak would give conflicting accounts of her past, so there was no Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“The only way is up” might have been the motto for the Orange Tree over the past year. Last spring, the future couldn’t have looked bleaker for the Richmond producing house when it lost its entire Arts Council grant overnight. Yet here we are, seven productions later, looking back at a season that has included an almost bullish proportion of new and rarely performed writing.Buckets, by director-turned-playwright Adam Barnard, is a collection of 27 scenes, mostly monologues and duologues, some of them just a couple of lines, like theatrical haikus, others quite extensive, though the entire Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Welcome to Newton, 2087. In this dystopic cityscape of neon lights, seedy underbellies and scientific industry, the overwhelming influences of genetic engineering, CCTV, AI and techno-terrorists are running rampant over the lives of its troubled inhabitants. The only means of escape is in the Trance, a digital world of obsolete physics, where any computer programme can be made manifest and interacted with on a human level. It’s now the norm to have wetware implanted in your brain so that you can phase in and out of Trance whenever you like.And it’s within this matrix that the first of our Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Hope and Glory, John Boorman revisited the Blitz-battered London of his childhood, and managed to find infectious humour and optimism among the wreckage. Now, 28 years later, he travels back to the early Fifties for this belated sequel, depicting a Britain still exhausted from the European war while the conflict in Korea hinted at a different and scary new world.Not that Boorman brings us to any gore-sodden battlefields or strategic command bunkers. His focus is strictly personal and intimate, as he takes his protagonist Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) – nine years old in the first film, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know all about it when the dentist is fiddling about inside your mouth, attempting with a variety of utensils to pluck out the culprit.I now see I had it easy. Meet Angela, a dog-walker from Cheshire. Her teeth were in a state of rococo disrepair. The camera went in for a snoop and it was like a cross between a motorway pile-up and a binful of rotting Read more ...