England
Medicine Festival review - the new New Age gathers in leafy BerkshireWednesday, 30 August 2023
Fia is a Swedish singer with a crystalline voice and a ear for a great melody - her singalong choruses are not typical for a festival Friday night headliner, like getting the audience to join in with “Sit with your pain/ cradle it close/ and when... Read more... |
Album: Public Image Limited - End of WorldWednesday, 09 August 2023
The world might end with a whimper or an inferno, but it’s hard to imagine a day will dawn that extinguishes John Lydon’s scorn for other people’s fecklessness and idiocy. That hand-made polemic typically drives the cauterising post-punk hosannahs... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Voces8 Summer School - musical oasis offers opportunities for allSaturday, 05 August 2023
It is a complicated business running a summer school for 170 people in the British countryside. Not only laying on a stimulating programme of musical events, providing pastoral care for the under-18s and interval drinks for the over-18s, but more... Read more... |
The Pilgrim's Progress, Three Choirs Festival review - revelatory performance by young musiciansFriday, 28 July 2023
Whatever your opinion of Vaughan Williams, it’s unlikely that you think of him as an essentially theatrical composer. Yet he did write at least three important (as well as several less important) works for the stage: a ballet (not so-called), Job, a... Read more... |
theartsdesk at The Three Choirs Festival - Elgar, Vaughan Williams and HammondTuesday, 25 July 2023
The Three Choirs is (are?) off again, for the 295th time, but with a very different look, even from the festivals of my youth, never mind 1715, or whenever the first one was held (there seems to be some doubt about it). The big oratorio... Read more... |
A Kind of Kidnapping review - claustrophobic class-division satireSaturday, 15 July 2023
A Kind of Kidnapping is a low-budget British comedy with a neat premise and satirical view of class and politics in the midst of a cost of living crisis.A young couple struggling to make ends meet and facing eviction from their squalid flat come up... Read more... |
Jean Cooke: Ungardening, Garden Museum review - a cramped show of airy and spacious paintingsTuesday, 11 July 2023
It’s impossible to think about Jean Cooke’s work without taking into account her relationship with her husband, the painter John Bratby, because his controlling personality profoundly affected every aspect of her life.Had it not been for him, she... Read more... |
Album: PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year DyingFriday, 07 July 2023
As an authentic artist, PJ Harvey manages to remain true to her essence as well as constantly shifting her creative stance. Each of her albums has been a leap forward, and yet anchored in a sound and style that are immediately recognisable as hers.... Read more... |
The Bartered Bride, Garsington Opera review - brilliant revival of a comedy of crueltyMonday, 03 July 2023
Smetana’s enchanting bitter-sweet comedy is probably on the danger-list for cancellation by the modern guardians of our moral sanctity. The plot hinges, like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the cash-sale of the hero’s bride (in Hardy, the wife... Read more... |
The Change, Channel 4 review - beguiling feminist comedy with a stellar castThursday, 22 June 2023
Young women who were riveted by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones columns in the 1990s are now probably of the age where the menopause is, or has recently been, a bigger concern than landing your own Mr Darcy. Which is why Bridget Christie’s The Change... Read more... |
Dear England, National Theatre review - filtering the national narrative through sportWednesday, 21 June 2023
"Is everything loss?" the great Oliver Ford Davies once asked on the National's Olivier stage, in the closing moment of David Hare's masterful Racing Demon. That question informs another masterful play, James Graham's Dear England, newly opened... Read more... |
L'elisir d'amore, Longborough Festival review - agreeable nonsense in a semi-modern English villageWednesday, 21 June 2023
Frederick Delius composed an opera called A Village Romeo and Juliet; Donizetti composed a sort of village Tristan and Isolde, but called it L’elisir d’amore – The Love Potion. The hero, Nemorino, inspired by the Tristan tale, buys an elixir off a... Read more... |
