Reviews
Justine Elias
The setting is the lively 1930s London theatre world, but any sense that The Critic will be a lighthearted thriller should soon be dispelled by a soundtrack featuring “Midnight and the Stars and You,” the song that Stanley Kubrick used to ominous effect in The Shining.Here, the lover on his way to a midnight rendezvous is poison-pen drama critic Jimmy Erskine, who worships the theatre but saves his secret passion for nighttime prowls for rough trade. As played by Ian McKellen, Erskine is a magnificent bastard, gifted, witty, and treading a fine line with his conservative employer. His Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers includes many of his best known pictures and, amazingly, it is the first exhibition the National Gallery has devoted to this much loved artist. Focusing mainly on paintings and drawings made in the two years he lived in Provence (1888-1890), it charts the emotional highs and lows of his stay in the Yellow House in Arles, and the times he spent in hospital after numerous breakdowns.From the incredibly touching and lucid Self-Portrait of 1889 (pictured right), you wouldn’t know he’d just left the psychiatric hospital in St Rémy after recovering from two major Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Platonic love should be simple – basically you’re best mates. And without the complications of sex, what could go wrong? Waleed Akhtar, whose big hit The P Word was also performed here at the Bush, takes this idea and complicates it – by making it about a gay boy and a straight girl.The playwright then adds further complications: family, ethnicity, religion, life chances and career choices. The result, which stars It’s a Sin’s Nathaniel Curtis as well as Mariam Haque, is a fascinating account of mixed emotions and a sad story about the gradual decay of youthful idealism. As such, it Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.Cho followed three pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs with the second book, “Italie”, of Liszt’s rhapsodic musical scrapbook of his travels of the 1840s, Années de Pèlerinage. The first revelation Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hauntings, memories, echoes: Antonio Pappano has started his official tenure as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra by looking back in time. Wednesday’s season opener gave us a MacMillan premiere “haunted by earlier musical spirits and memories”. Last night’s follow-up picked up the thread with the Elgar Violin Concerto – a work alive with stirrings and rustlings just out of sight, recollections that drift in and out of view, a human soul “enshrined” in its strange, otherworldly musings. Before you can launch a new era, after all, you need to put the ghosts of the musical past to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral turpitude. The tale is an Americanised version of the good old country house mystery, and behind the superficial veneer of fabulous homes and expensive boats lurks a hinterland of avarice and cruel intentions.At the core of the action is best-selling novelist and matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury, played by an imperious Nicole Kidman with maximum Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make a great biopic.Unfortunately, it’s precisely because those photographs have become so familiar that Lee was destined to be a frustrating film. We know what Miller looked like from the pictures taken of her by the likes of Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and David Scherman. It’s hard not to have those images in mind when watching the also familiar Kate Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest Greatest Hit to land at the Lyric is Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 award-winning play about a performance of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by British convicts in a New South Wales penal colony. It’s a piece about a true incident in the late 18th century that pulsates with contemporary resonances, a promising choice by the Lyric’s director, Rachel O’Riordan, who has been responsible for so many outstanding productions there. But for once her steady directing hand wobbles. What was impressive about the play originally, its bold mix of satire, social commentary, pathos and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Going to the theatre can be a little like going to church. One communes on the individual level, one’s faith in the stories underpinned by a psychological connection, but also on the collective level, belief rising on a tide of shared emotions. Those complementary sensations, in an ever more individualised, screen-and-earplugs world, are rare – and an example of why people pay big bucks for Glastonbury, Taylor Swift and Oasis.There’s something theatrical, something devotional and even something Swiftie in the air during Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up (that isn’t really) to Six, Toby Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t been seen since.Reawakening, Virgina Gilbert’s terrific second feature, is a gripping exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and self-deception. John, a tense-jawed man who looks bleached of colour, is an electrician whose hobby is toy trains; his wife Mary (Juliet Stevenson) is a schoolteacher, working at the same school that Clare, their only child Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow those of us required to translate the musical experience into words look for the moments which defeat us. One such was the extraordinary sound of muted first violins and cellos at the start of the second movement in Sibelius’s First Symphony last night. Pinpointing its essence feels impossible, but it could only have come from the London Symphony Orchestra’s special relationship with its new Chief Conductor Antonio Pappano.It can’t have been planned at the time of the commission, but an alliance was forged between the Sibelius symphony and the new work on the programme, James Read more ...
David Nice
Some operas shine in the vasts of the Albert Hall, others seem to creep back into their beautiful shells. Glyndebourne’s Carmen blazed, though Bizet never intended his opera for a big theatre, while Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, despite an equally fine cast from what’s now an equally fine company, Garsington Opera, left us with some black holes in the iridescent spider-web.That was no fault of Douglas Boyd’s pacing in a work which can take time to get going, with country miles of exposition, compressing crucial facts from Shakespeare's Acts One and Two, nor of his bewitching Read more ...