Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this unflaggingly gripping documentary [****].Though the feats of Bradley Wiggins and this weekend's Tour de Yorkshire have brought a sense of cheery optimism to the British public's view of cycling, Armstrong's story (and the climate of drug-assisted skulduggery in cycling which prompted it to happen) can hardly fail to leave any onlooker nursing a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Common, Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC One drama about the effects of the joint enterprise law, seems at first sight to lack the topical horsepower of projects like Hillsborough. McGovern doesn’t disappoint, however, crafting from the apparent obscurity of an eighteenth-century statute intended to discourage aristocratic duels by implicating both parties a riveting, corkscrew-plotted narrative that brings to overdue public notice an easily abused and abusive regulation that today targets the opposite end of society.The didactic drive can, in lesser hands, flatten subtlety and exaggerate the obvious Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Royal Opera House’s Maria Stuarda is the third major production of Donizetti’s historical opera in less than two years. First there was David McVicar’s kitschy-traditional production for the Met, then there was Rudolf Frey’s baffling concept-drama at Welsh National Opera, and now directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier add their voices to a conversation still trying to make sense of these passionate warring queens with their determinedly dispassionate music.The historical specificities of Donizetti’s story make it particularly resistant to directorial innovation. Whichever way you play Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: CSNY 1974Considering that their 1974 tour was the world’s first series of dates limited to outdoor stadia since the Beatles in 1966, it’s appropriate the long-gestating collection chronicling Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s mammoth jaunt is an all-encompassing three-CD box set which also includes a DVD and a hefty, copiously illustrated booklet with a definitive in-depth essay on the tour.Although previously bootlegged and not hard to find, the dates did not – curiously, since it was a landmark tour designed to rake in cash – spawn a live album Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
Wife. Mother. Yorkshirewoman. Cyclist. Legend. Beryl Burton was perhaps the greatest sportswoman this country has ever produced, and we ought to be ashamed of the fact that many of us will have to Google her to find out what her achievements were.Born in Leeds in 1937, she dominated women’s cycling in the 1950s, '60s and '70s – becoming five times world pursuit champion, 12 times national champion, and best British all-rounder for 25 consecutive years. She won nearly 100 domestic titles, and her 12-hour distance record – of a staggering 277.25 miles – has never been broken. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ned Rorem: Piano Album 1, Six Friends Carolyn Enger (piano) (Naxos)The prolific Ned Rorem will be 91 this autumn. He's still an active composer, and the 33 short piano pieces collected on this engaging, low-key CD are all tributes to friendship. Few of these works exceed two minutes, and there's not a dud among them. Many contain material that was developed into larger-scale pieces, though they feel more like elegant line drawings than crude sketches. Rorem's sophisticated, unashamedly tonal style never palls, and the lack of superficial flashiness is a virtue. This music isn't Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Speaking from the stage before curtain-up on The Barber, Longborough’s founder and chairman, Martin Graham, stressed the hard work put in by director Richard Studer and conductor Jonathan Lyness on their two 2014 productions, this one and Tosca. He wasn’t kidding. Read the programme and you find (for both operas): director, Richard Studer; designer, Richard Studer; costume, Richard Studer. Lyness conducting both works. These are not jet-setting artists descending on Gloucestershire with their brainstorming concepts, but dedicated craftsmen doing their best for the works in hand. And it shows. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Digital Revolution begins with an archive section taking you back to the 1970s when Ralph Baer developed a video game allowing punters to play ping pong on TV (below right: poster for the original Pong arcade game) and Steve Jobs worked on Break Out, in which a virtual ball bounces off a bank of horizontal lines. It reminded me of the hours I spent as a child hitting a tennis ball against our garage door; the video equivalent is similarly mesmerising, except the satisfying thwack of the ball thudding against wood is missing along with all other physical sensations.The Quantel Paintbox of 1981 Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
An anonymous voice screams “Please stop” over the opening credits of Noel Clarke’s sci-fi thriller and after about fifteen minutes of watching it those words are sure to haunt your thoughts, as this dull slog runs out of ideas far too quickly for it to sustain any semblance of tension or real worth. This is Clarke’s third endeavour in the director’s chair - after Adulthood and 4.3.2.1 - and it’s a disappointing and confused effort that relies on the outdated Hollywood action formula to pull its narrative along.To its credit the core idea is an intriguing one. Ryan (played by none other than Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The posters all over the Underground scream Richard Armitage. As far as they are concerned The Crucible is the finest one-man-show since Clarence Darrow. But what we get in performance is something much more thrilling (if less pin-uppable): a ferocious ensemble piece, fresh and urgent, that turns the moral and emotional screw over three and half exhilarating – yes really – hours.If ever there was a play worth gutting the Old Vic to turn it into a theatre-in-the-round then it’s Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – a work which invites us all to judge and be judged, to gaze suspiciously at our Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Sometimes, if you get really proficient at a game you might be lucky enough to enter the psychological state known as "flow", where you become so focused and at one with the task in hand that time seems to compress, everything starts to feel just right and the game could almost be said to be playing you. You are in the zone. Some games more than others seem to actively invite players into this special place, and Fluid SE* practically demands that you jump in with both feet if you are to have any chance at all.At heart, Fluid SE is a time trials racer mixed with a dash of Pac-Man. You have to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Janet McTeer has admitted that she had to read Hugo Blick's screenplay for The Honourable Woman three times before she could understand what was going on. Therefore anybody hoping to drop into this as a casual viewer can expect to find the learning curve slippery and featuring a pronounced adverse camber.McTeer wasn't in this first episode, but there were still plenty of stellar names to be going on with. Stephen Rea (pictured below right) plays the world-weary Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, the outgoing head of MI6 and a man reduced to microwaving himself solitary suppers in his apartment by Read more ...