Reviews
Matthew Wright
Hungarian composer Bela Bartók’s analytical rigour and folk-inspired voice have established his position as one of the most original voices of the twentieth century, but he still represented a bold choice for the opening event of the 2013 Kings Place Festival. Aurora Orchestra principals Thomas Gould (violin), Timothy Orpen (clarinet) and John Reid (piano) performed his Contrasts trio for violin, clarinet and piano with lyrical intelligence in the beautifully balanced acoustic of Hall One.Contrasts was commissioned in 1938 by jazz and swing clarinettist Benny Goodman, and the clarinet Read more ...
David Nice
Revivals, especially at Covent Garden, too often wrong-foot high expectations. This one should have shone, with two known treasures among the cast (Lucy Crowe and Luca Pisaroni), an experienced Mozart conductor in John Eliot Gardiner and a handsome-enough David McVicar production supervised by its original director (sorry, “Sir John” might slip off the tongue, "Sir David" does not; but when was the honours system ever logical?) Yet while Michael Grandage’s profoundly human Glyndebourne Figaro dazzled as well on tour as at its opening and, by all accounts, in this year’s festival, too much of Read more ...
Toby Saul
In 1970 the American artist Robert Smithson took several tonnes of mud and rock and built a jetty out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Instead of making a single, straight line, Smithson’s jetty curved round on itself and formed a spiral. Since no boat can dock at a spiral jetty, it joined Méret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup and Man Ray’s nail-studded clothes iron as an object whose function was subverted.One man could see a use for it, though. JG Ballard, with characteristic inventiveness, saw it as an invitation and landing place for a giant clock, bringing the gift of time to the desert “ Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kieran Evans’s debut feature, adapted from the novel by Niall Griffiths, achieves a rare and accomplished sense of place in its depiction of Liverpool. It’s a place of chilly but not actually threatening cityscapes, with an air of space and windy sunshine, from which the film’s eponymous protagonists retreat into a private bedroom world.Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and Victor (Julian Morris) catch each other’s eye across the dance floor, and they’re soon spiralling into a relationship. It's gradually revealed that she’s been hurt in the past, and has ended up with a very particular way of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
First, a warning to those who find certain swearwords beyond the pale - this article contains a few of them, but nothing like the number in the play it reviews. Barking in Essex is not a evening out for your proverbial maiden aunt. Naughty words open the action, as Darnley Packer (Lee Evans) is chased onstage by his wife, Chrissie (Keeley Hawes). “You cunt!” she shouts at him. And again: “You cunt!” Darnley, you see, has just made a fool of himself on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where he failed to answer the first question - about what kind of animal Bo Peep lost - correctly and ended Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age. This is a film as much about looking back, about le temps perdu, as it is about the ramifications of sexual orientation.Some talk hesitantly, other unstoppably. They Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This season opener was about closure too. The London Symphony Orchestra was back at the office last night, but this fresh stretch of concerts opened with an opera it has been performing while also acquiring a suntan in Aix-en-Provence. A new cast of singers replaced gaudy costumes and facepaint with elegant evening garb, and semi-acted their roles on the thin strip of forestage not occupied by the massed ranks of the orchestra.The concept of the concert performance has never had more enthusiastic support than at the recent run of seven Wagner operas, amounting to a gazillion hours without Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The American repertoire has featured big-time on the London stage this year but perhaps nowhere more oddly than courtesy the ever-adventurous Orange Tree's staging of a World War Two play from Susan Glaspell, here receiving its world premiere. Long (nearly three hours), defiantly peculiar and yet possessed of an intriguing (and relevant) moral debate, Sam Walters' production marks the start of this sterling artistic director's final season with a slice of the dramatic canon best thought of as one for collectors of curiosities - and at a venue that has made something of a house dramatist of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ardal O'Hanlon is best known as Father Dougal in the much missed Father Ted (created by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan), but he started life as a stand-up and he clearly brought many of his own qualities – although not the dimwittedness – to the lovable Irish priest, as an hour of his latest show proves. He riffs on matters ranging from Catholic guilt and racial stereotyping to monogamy and paedophilia without once offending anyone.In fact, he tells us, his unwillingness to cause offence makes him singularly unsuited to the role of stand-up. Not for him the brazenness of comics such as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The malign influence of the big city on countryside folk has fuelled filmmakers since cinema had the means to produce feature-length productions. In 1927, with the America-made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F. W. Murnau brought the disruptive forces of the urban to a farmer in the form of a woman. Following her back to city, he suffered the consequences. In this tradition Metro Manila, filmed in the Philippines, has nothing affirmative to say about the islands’s capital city.Oscar Ramirez (Jake Macapagal) is a rice farmer in the Philippines’ Banaue Province with a wife and two young Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A mouldered corpse, forgotten for years in a tottering Victorian house that teems with secrets? What Remains was only ever heading in one direction. Gothic from the off, episode by episode it got gothicker and gothicker. By the climax there was a messy Jenga of bodies, which was perhaps not unexpected, but did anyone guess quite how many characters would end up with blood on their hands? Not ex-detective Len Harper, who was no closer to solving the case when he took the law into his.Tony Basgallop’s script, abetted by director Coky Giedroyc’s eager eye for a creepy cranny, has pushed the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Some people have all the luck. Listening to John Etheridge’s self-deprecating description of how his career has progressed (in interviews such as Radio 3‘s Jazz Library, or at a gig, when he is a disarmingly open host), you would think he had stumbled upon Stephane Grapelli and Nigel Kennedy (to name merely the most famous of his many stellar collaborators) while out for a pint of milk. What sounds like luck is of course talent, and last week, during his annual Pizza Express residency, he showed exactly why he is one of the most skilful and versatile guitarists of his generation.Soft Machine Read more ...