London
Gary Naylor
The kitchen sink drama has been a standby of English theatre for 70 years or more, but not always with an actual sink on stage. But there it is, in an everyday home that harbours a secret or two in Clive Judd’s debut play, the winner of the 2022 Papatango New Writing Prize. Matt, distracted and not wholly at ease, pitches up unannounced at the house in which he grew up, just outside Kidderminister, one of the more faceless towns in one of the more faceless regions of England. His cousin, Jess, seems listless, neither pleased nor displeased to see him some two years after last he was in Read more ...
Leo Hussain
I still remember vividly my first encounter with ENO. I was taken, as a nine-year-old boy, on a school trip to see a performance of Peter Grimes. And I was hooked. I pestered my parents to take me back several times to that same production. I can still hear the ringing of the "Storm" Interlude, and see the waves projected outside the door as the characters entered the pub (and I still remember sniggering with my classmates at the line "that’s a bitch of a gale out there").Over the following few years, many more school trips to ENO followed. Xerxes, Love for Three Oranges with its scratch Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Every day there is bad news about the NHS — junior doctors are exhausted, nurses need foodbanks and the stats are hitting all-time lows. So a new play about a junior doctor facing the stresses of the job is certainly timely.In fact, Nathan Ellis was inspired to write Super High Resolution, now given a powerful and moving production at the Soho Theatre, because his sister, Dr Tamsin Ellis, almost quit her job. Yes, she was that desperate. And you can tell: the writing is personal and committed — this is a play that feels like it has been wrenched from the heart.In this story, which is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Cecil Sharp House, citadel of folk music, finally resounded last night to the mellifluous tones of Barbara Dickson whose distinguished career began at the Howff Folk Club, Dunfermline, in the heady days of the 1960s folk revival. The choice of venue perhaps suggested an all-folk programme but while Dickson dug deep into her song bag the performance drew on numbers from across her remarkably varied career. While anyone hoping to hear her number one hit – “I Know Him So Well” – would have left disappointed, Ewan MacColl, whose favourite haunt it was, would have thought it all most inauthentic. Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s retro and there’s retro. Some music – what you might call the Oasis tendency – simply reproduces the obvious signifiers of the past as signposts of cool. But there’s other stuff that shows deep understanding of both the technique and the spirit of what came before, that really taps into the same wellsprings that created the sound it’s replicating in the first place.Exec producer Gilles Peterson and bandleader Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick’s STR4TA project is well and truly in the second camp, and its beauty is in its absolute adherence to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Hermes Experiment are the cool kids of the contemporary music school, who have brought a "build-your-own-repertoire" approach to generating music for their unique combination of soprano, clarinet, harp and double bass. As their name would suggest, they are firmly in the experimental tradition, using improvisation, extended techniques and graphic scores.They attracted the appropriate level of beards and cardigans to their Purcell Room recital, starting at the undeniably hip time of 10pm. The concert was called "Familiar Objects" – and there were domestic items, from clothes airer, to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London’s Morton Valence are one of those bands music journos love, not that it’s done their career much good. I’ve bigged them up a few times, myself, starting at least a decade ago, but widespread critical acclaim has not added up to countrywide recognition. They are now up to album eight, still based around core duo Anne Gilpin and ex-Alabama 3 dude Robert “Hacker” Jessett, and their latest album is as consistently pin-sharp as everything else they’ve done. If only more would hear it!As ever, their default setting is doomed Leonard Cohen-meets-Raymond Carver narratives, deliberately English Read more ...
David Nice
Sullivan’s Overture to The Yeomen of the Guard isn’t quite the equal of Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger – what is? – but its brass-rich brilliance and wholesome ceremonials wouldn’t have been possible without that great example. Cue the first of director Jo Davies’s missteps as a 1950s newsreel gives us the “backstory” of alleged spy Colonel Fairfax’s imprisonment: loud broadcast voice over Chris Hopkins’ already speedy account is a big mistake.Sometimes the fidgety routines for the chorus and three busbied tapdancers look like a halfhearted attempt to rival the more Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’ve not heard a didgeridoo in concert before so was grateful to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for giving me the opportunity, as part of a busy programme at Milton Court last night. Didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton was put alongside Beethoven, Janáček and others as the touring string orchestra, led by Richard Tognetti, settled into a three-day Barbican residency.The ACO has a reputation for innovative programming and last night’s was a good example. The eclectic range of music on offer had several strands – perhaps too many for complete coherence? – but the playing was excellent and the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the gullible out of their savings and shoe-horning right-wing ideologues into political and judicial office. Thank God (ironically) that we’re too smart for that kind of nonsense in Europe. How’s that turning out then? Perhaps it was the lockdown; perhaps it was the recent excellent film, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; or perhaps it was just getting Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title suggests, Peter Gill’s Something in the Air is an elusive piece – it’s about catching at instinct, responding to intuition, bringing together overlapping hints of present and past lives. From these different stories, spun out of lived experience and imagination equally, the octogenarian playwright leaves the audience to craft a whole.We first encounter the play’s two main characters in a straightforward setting: the institutional straight-backed chairs suggest that Colin (Christopher Godwin) and Alex (Ian Gelder) are in a care home, but the closeness between them – the intimacy Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the third time I’ve heard Path of Miracles live this year and I’d happily hear it another three times before Christmas. I reviewed the amateur Elysian Singers sing it in February, and the BBC Singers took it on for the first time in May – but last night’s triumphant version by Tenebrae was surely the best of the lot. This is a profound and moving piece, symphonic in its scope, surely one of the masterpieces of the recent choral repertoire, back where it started, with Tenebrae.Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles, which describes the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, was Read more ...