Reviews
stephen.walsh
For my money, The Queen of Spades is one of the great nineteenth-century operas, a masterpiece of dramma per musica. There will always be pure spirits who cry “vulgar” at late Tchaikovsky. But the charge is absurd. Anyone with ears can hear the brilliance and refinement of this music, and anyone with feelings can sense Tchaikovsky’s love of his characters, all of them: the frail, the mad, the villainous, the beautiful and the damned. What more can you ask?It remains, though, essentially a genre piece with supernatural attachments, not very responsive to directorial manipulation. Antony Read more ...
Simon Munk
A minus mark for this puzzle game for cannily, if cheesily, being named to hitch a ride on the wildly-popular MineCraft phenomenon. And another minus mark for its barely-a-concept-at-all of mashing together two massively enjoyable and enduring puzzle game series into one.MouseCraft takes the block shapes from Tetris - literally the exact same block shapes: the square one, the S-shaped one, the long-thin one, the L-shaped one – and adds them to a very slightly reworked version of Lemmings.Here, mice are sent scurrying across a laboratory maze by a fiendish cat scientist. The mice must get to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Plays about religious belief present something of a problem. How can theatre-makers, who tend to be very secular-minded, convey the mindset of believers without being patronising? And once they involve people from the developing world, how can they avoid being condescending to different views of humanity? Robin Soans’s new play, which starts in Barbados and examines the case of a gay son who returns to his religious family, stages these conflicts with some empathy.Act One is set in the Barbados home, located in Perseverance Drive, of old Eli, a 70-year-old pastor in the Pentecostal church of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Imagine Dr Watson trying his hand at Moriarty? That’s not the challenge of this Richard III, but the exciting prospect instead is to see an actor usually called upon to be the sidekick and nice guy asked to come front and centre as a diabolical villain.I still don’t doubt that Martin Freeman has the chops for such a transition. That said, he doesn’t quite pull it off. The irony is that while he has brought a new dimension to his small-screen Watson, as a casualty of war fuelled by a certain self-loathing, he doesn’t offer a similar psychological depth to a character who demands it.Freeman’s Read more ...
David Nice
Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev.So you may well have seen the opera staged before: I remember a trapeze-artist cockerel for Scottish Opera, the old tsar kitted out in a purple suit doing a Yeltsin dance for the Royal Opera. Yet unless you’ve come Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Temple Music's enterprising song series, directed by pianist Julius Drake, brought a welcome rarity to Middle Temple Hall last night. Schumann's Myrthen, the garland of twenty-six songs dedicated to his intended bride Clara Wieck, are seldom heard in a complete performance. Even with an interval in the middle, they serve as a reminder of the power and sheer emotional range of Schumann's music. These songs were almost certainly the catalyst which set in motion the composer's miraculous 'Liederjahr' of 1840, in which he wrote virtually 140 solo songs and duets with piano.At the heart of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-agers, of which we’ve seen an awful lot recently, focus on a turning point in a child’s life: not so much the moment they transition from child to adult as the moment a child is first drawn into the adult world - retreat might be possible but they emerge from the experience changed. Boyhood, from the ever ingenious Richard Linklater, offers a genuinely fresh and truly ambitious twist on this cinematic staple.Like the growth chart we see inked on a door-frame, the film provides yearly updates on a child’s development. It’s a labour of love, shot in 39 days over the course of 12 years Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
When Ryan Gander’s wife wanted a designer lamp, the versatile artist knocked one up from junk. She was so impressed he sold it as an artwork and by now has made 55 in his garden shed. Three are here in Manchester, made from foil food trays, a guitar stand and concrete. These pieces are quite unrepresentative of the rest of this highly conceptual show, but in a diverse, major survey there appears to be no truly representative way in.What most visitors first come across, in the 19th-century foyer of Manchester Art Gallery, is a short bronze ballerina. Degas, you might think, rather than Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The latest in a series of "Pinnock’s Passions" concerts at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse saw the doyen of period instrument performance lead a delightful exploration of Handel the musical borrower, entitled "Handel’s Garden". As Trevor Pinnock writes in the programme notes, "throughout his life as a composer he had the habit of taking cuttings, transplanting and grafting from works old and new".In parts this involved playing the original pieces, for instance arias by Reinhard Keiser and Agostino Steffani, followed by Handel’s magpie reworking of them (in Semele and Theodora). Read more ...
Heather Neill
When Daytona was premiered at the Park Theatre last year some of the critics went into contortions to avoid giving away the two "reveals" in Oliver Cotton's plot. The challenge remains, but can there be many potential theatregoers who haven't heard about the shock revelation in the first half and the life-long secret disclosed in the second? If there are, the following may contain spoilers.The premise is pretty conventional: an outsider enters and disrupts the humdrum life of the other characters. In this case, the newcomer is Billy, not a stranger but the estranged brother of Joe, with whom Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perhaps the most surprising - and certainly the most moving moment - of the 2014 British Academy Film Awards was the awarding of Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema to Peter Greenaway. Surprising, not because this wasn't colossally deserved (and in keeping with tradition it was of course announced ahead of the event), but because our most idiosyncratic and subversive auteur has fallen out of fashion in recent years: a 2011 Time Out poll listing the "100 Best British Films" as chosen by industry experts, sadly saw not a single one of his works placed.Furthermore, Greenaway hasn't made a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Movies about the music industry often end up being bombastic or twee or merely idiotic. This one, written and directed by John Carney (who made 2006's not entirely dissimilar Once), picks its way carefully around the pitfalls to tell a story of love, loss and pop songs with sweetness and wit.You wouldn't automatically visualise Keira Knightley as Indie Pop Girl, but she steps up winningly as Greta, a budding songwriter who prizes her music and doesn't want it prostituted on TV talent shows or bastardised to fit marketing strategies. She's in a seemingly idyllic (uh-oh) relationship with Dave Read more ...