Reviews
David Nice
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project. Mariinsky star of long standing Yulia Makhalina sprinkled gala stardust, the corps of the revelatory Natalia Sats Children’s Theatre re-enacted Fokine’s routines with theatrical flair and that energy levels were so high throughout had everything to do with the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Buxton has gone Bohemian, digging into Dvořák’s treasure trove and celebrating Gluck’s tercentenary. The choice of Dvořák’s The Jacobin fits the Buxton Festival tradition of rooting out neglected works, since this has been unjustly overlooked since the first performance in 1889. It’s an irony that this makes Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice an unexpected choice, being ever-popular since 1762. However, artistic director Stephen Barlow has linked them for the festival’s two new home-grown productions for this, the 36th festival.Director Stephen Unwin gives us a moderately updated version of The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chelsea Handler may be an unknown name for many in Britain - although some will know her from her spat with Piers Morgan on his now-cancelled US chat show - but there were plenty of fans at the London Palladium to watch the actress, comic and chat show host making her UK stand-up debut, with a one-off show based on her travelogue of a trip to Africa with some friends, Uganda Be Kidding Me.In typical American stand-up style, the show was only an hour long, and she didn't deviate from the script to riff on local subjects or engage with the audience. When a fan called out for “the kayak Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate the merely good from the truly great – and who would have expected that there are truly great photographers yet undiscovered, or even some that didn’t want to be discovered? This is the backstory of Finding Vivian Maier, an exceptional and exceptionally compelling documentary co-directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.It was Maloof’s own Read more ...
Naima Khan
As far as essential female experiences go, Esther Mills hasn't had many. A 35-year-old virgin living in New York City in 1905, she is destined to go down in history as an "unidentified negro seamstress", to cite the caption on the projected image of her that opens Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel in a very fine Off West End staging from the director Laurence Boswell that was first seen in Bath. Now at north London's Park Theatre, this 2003 play from the multi award-winning American dramatist who went on to pen Fabulation (2004) and the Pulitzer prize-winning Ruined (2008) hones this author's Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s 70 years since Mondrian died in New York, leaving unfinished his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, an ebullient title quite at odds with the buttoned-up asceticism we normally associate with this artist. The Courtauld Gallery showed a small survey two years ago, which paired his flat grid compositions with the paintings and white reliefs of Ben Nicholson, focusing only on his two years in London (1938 to 1940). Though it proved surprisingly illuminating, in its precise, compare-and-contrast way, any exhibition promising a little more depth must be welcome. Now we have two, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It's a woman’s world at Park Theatre, where an all-female company tackles three American shorts that place the private feminine experience under a microscope. Jack Thorpe Baker’s casting yields mixed results, emphasising the shrewd analysis of gendered thought in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Philip Dawkins’s Cast of Characters (both half an hour), though Brooke Allen’s 50-minute study of grief, The Deer, already suffers from character opacity. The Deer is markedly less incisive, providing the evening with a somewhat muted conclusion.Cast of Characters offers dizzying formal experimentation, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lewis: L'AmourImagine a very subdued Antony Hegarty whispering over the spookiest moments of Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. Or conjure up a marriage of Arthur Russell’s shimmering World of Echo and John Martyn at his most intimate, but shorn of all but the most necessary instrumentation. To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio. Yet until a few years ago it was unknown and, even then, only available as a dodgy download with added colour from the scratches Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
When the lights go up on Jack Shepherd’s In Lambeth, you could be forgiven for assuming you were looking at a biblical scene. A man and a woman sit naked in the branches of a tree, a tableau straight out of Eden, not south London. She has a book in her lap; he’s picking out a tune on a tin whistle. All is serene.Except this isn’t Eden, and they are not Adam and Eve. This is London in the late eighteenth century, and William and Catherine Blake are reading Milton’s Paradise Lost while sitting in a tree in their Lambeth garden. William is talking to the angel who taught him the tune he is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most notorious case of the BBC banning a pop record was the episode of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" in 1977, which was of course the year of Her Maj's Silver Jubilee. "That was genuinely dangerous," Paul Morley intoned gravely (the record that is, rather than its banning), though as with several of the cases examined here, this one wasn't quite as open and shut as it seemed.The Beeb had been cheerfully - or at least unprotestingly - airing the disc on radio until the moment when the band swore at Bill Grundy on TV. It was Malcolm McLaren's bizarrely-dressed band of urchins Read more ...
graham.rickson
Per Nørgård: Symphonies 1 and 8 Vienna Philharmonic/Sakari Oramo (Dacapo)Per Nørgård's Symphony No. 1 was completed in 1955. A few years earlier, the composer had written a fan letter to the elderly Sibelius – who was flattered to encounter a fellow musician with such a thorough understanding of his own style. There are plenty of nods to the elder composer in this astonishing symphony, including a brief snatch of Tapiola near the opening. Most Sibelian is Nørgård's temporal control; different layers of music seemingly operating at different speeds, often linked by repetitive string Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A May-September relationship is given a winter chill here. When Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), an American widower in Paris, meets pretty young dance instructor Pauline (Clemence Poesy) on a bus, the ageing male fantasy suggested by the title seems on the cards. A feel-good scene of grumpy, grieving Matthew joining in at Pauline’s dance class also prepares you for a lazy, age-gap romcom. But his puppyish looks towards Pauline as he dances are childishly needy as much as comic, and German writer-director Sandra Nettlebeck has more interesting, unpredictable ideas on old age, youth and Read more ...