London
Adam Sweeting
We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train Robbery itself? Just hours too long for the real Ronnie Biggs, as it happened.Scripted by Chris Chibnall, a man basking in bankability following his bustin' hit series Broadchurch for ITV, this two-part voyage round the GTR is stylish, well cast and easy to watch, but adds nothing much to the existing information-mountain about the crime. You'd get Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Sons of Kemet’s peculiar forces of two drummers, tuba and reeds have been on the road for over two years now, their performances landing on an unsuspecting crowd like a petrol bomb on seasoned timber. With the tuba playing as part of both the rhythm and horn sections, the Sons can deploy both massive rhythmic firepower and potent melodic edge. It’s an intense and compelling sound, exploring the triangular musical dialogue between North and West Africa, the Caribbean, and New Orleans, in a musical language primed with exploding dance hooks and entwined with spiralling North African melody Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.Jewels can be a tricky piece to get right. In less than 90 minutes, it covers 150 years of dance in three plotless acts: mid-19th century French Romanticism, via Fauré, for Emeralds; American Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though greeted ambivalently when it made its debut at the end of 2012, Ripper Street has looked increasingly like TV's undervalued secret weapon as it has surged purposefully through this second series. Maybe the title was misjudged, suggesting it was just another gruesome and mist-shrouded Victorian murder mystery. Turns out it was much more than that.Indeed, echoes of Jack the Ripper have been almost entirely absent as the series has taken the plunge into such factually-based issues as rent-boy networks and the Barings Bank crisis of 1890 (different only in scale from recent financial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The disappearance of Lord “Lucky” Lucan in 1974 remains one of the most teasing enigmas of recent-ish history. Following the collapse of his marriage and a bitter battle with his wife Veronica for custody of their three children, the gambling addict Lucan is presumed to have battered the children’s nanny to death, attacked his wife, then fled the country by boat from Newhaven. Elvis-like sightings of the disgraced peer have poured in from around the world ever since.This TV version of the story (it concludes next week), adapted by Jeff Pope from John Pearson’s book The Gamblers, uses the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to give Simon Russell Beale a brief introduction, so encyclopedic is his list of stage and screen acting credits. He has cruised masterfully through Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, the Restoration playwrights, Shaw and Pinter, and recently camped it up madly in a revival of Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade. He has been such a mainstay of the National Theatre that the building may have subsided into the Thames without him.On screen, he has appeared in such diverse fare as adaptations of Persuasion, An Ideal Husband and Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, and his portrayal of Falstaff Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“Comedy in ballet can be notoriously difficult to get right.” So warns the programme note for The Taming of the Shrew, choreographer John Cranko’s 1969 adaptation of Shakespeare, with which Stuttgart Ballet chose to end their run at Sadler’s Wells this week. The note of caution is well sounded in this context; while it is possible for the ballet to be both funny and affecting, the balance is extremely hard to strike, and yesterday's performance at Sadler's Wells was teetering dangerously on the edge of farce.Part of the problem lies in the source material: the original play is hardly the most Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Distinguished jazz guitarists Philip Catherine and John Etheridge made (a little bit of) history at The Vortex last night, playing together for the first time. In a perfect balance of youth and experience, the evening also saw the launch of a debut album, Road Story, by the Igor Gehenot Trio (like Catherine, recorded by Brussels-based Igloo Records), with original compositions by the precocious 23 year-old pianist Gehenot. The evening was masterminded by Igloo and The Vortex; both deserve credit for an enterprising and worthwhile venture. Etheridge’s musical diversity and grasp of rock Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Stuttgart Ballet, one of Europe's most highly respected companies, is clearly determined to show London its best sides – all of them. Thirteen pieces in one performance is less a mixed bill than a tasting menu, and one that aims to impress: this smorgasbord of pieces were all choreographed for the company, and more than half have not been performed in the UK before.The menu proper is preceded by an amuse-bouche which sets the tone for the evening: John Cranko's short Hommage à Bolshoi (1964) is a velouté of classical loveliness (perfectly rendered by the stunning lines of Maria Eichwald) with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dom Hemingway (Jude Law) is addicted to his own voice, whether he’s soliloquising about his cock, his safe-cracking, his hangover, or telling the psychotic Russian gangster whose houseguest he is how much he wants to fuck his girlfriend. His ornately foul-mouthed verbosity exhausts even himself as he explodes through life, punching, bragging, drinking, drugging and self-destructing, skin puffy, teeth stained, face scarred, gut flabby and eyes staring with fierce confusion, constantly startled by the latest disaster he’s inexplicably ploughed into. “I’m a cunt!” Dom keeps realising.And he is. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.As this entertaining exhibition argues, the Georgian age is also the crucible to which the British owe much of their identity. It was in the pre-Victorian century that the middle classes, which Read more ...