Reviews
Kimon Daltas
There were a small but substantial number of children dotted around the auditorium at the opening night of The Perfect American, and one hopes they hadn’t been led to expect singalong-a-Disney, all bright colours and catchy tunes. The piece takes place in the last few months of Walt Disney’s life, as his diagnosis with late stage lung cancer prompts introspective angst about the meaning of his success and legacy, and the terrible contrast between his own mortality and the agelessness of his creations. The great man’s personal flaws are laid bare.Directed by Phelim McDermott – of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ian Dury: Lord Upminster / Ian Dury & the Music Students: 4,000 Weeks HolidayAs a single, "Spasticus Autisticus" was never going to be an easy sell. Ian Dury's reaction to the United Nation’s declaration of 1981 as the International Year of the Disabled was caustic and confrontational. Witty too. The BBC decided it was in poor taste and gave it no airplay. Yet it featured in the opening ceremony of last year’s Paralympic Games and the BBC broadcast it. Dury would have appreciated the irony."Spasticus Autisticus" was the first single released by Dury after he had left Stiff Records. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Take a spoonful of paranoia thriller Arlington Road and shake'n'bake it with a dollop of Homeland and you'd have the bare skeleton of The Americans, tonight's new import from the American FX channel on ITV. It's 1981, and in the midst of Washington DC suburbia, where the lawns are manicured and dad washes the car on Sundays, lurks an unseen threat. It's married-with-kids couple Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, who are sleeper agents of the KGB.Opening with a speedy extended chase sequence, eccentrically soundtracked by the percussive yomp of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk", this pilot episode skilfully Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Adams: Nixon in China Peter Sellars (director), Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Chorus and Ballet/John Adams (Nonesuch)If, like me, you prefer your opera recordings to be heard and not seen, make an exception for this DVD of Peter Sellars’s remarkably lucid staging of John Adams’s Nixon in China. A work which, as David Nice pointed out when watching the live relay of this production, is probably the only opera composed since Britten’s death to gain a secure place in the repertoire. It’s hard to imagine the piece looking better, the vast Met stage perfectly suited to the work’s quasi- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We know that David Mamet doesn’t beat about the bush. He tackles sensitive issues and the least attractive aspects of human nature head on, while his characters use language as weapons against each other with such ferocity and guile that the audience is left with a sort of battered admiration.That’s Mamet at his best: American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plough, Oleanna. But Race doesn’t see the playwright at his best. Some of this play’s failings are evident in the title – it’s too self-conscious, too obvious, too intent on nailing the big theme. At the same time, it falls short Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Apparently Bellini’s I Puritani was Queen Victoria’s favourite opera. That wasn’t quite reason enough for director Stephen Langridge to condemn the cast of his new Grange Park production to this extraordinarily ugly sartorial era, but unfortunately he found his justification nonetheless – looking across the Channel to the scientific explorations and experiments of Paris’s notorious hospital la Salpêtrière.André Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière sees a half-naked women slumped in a faint while all around her medical students, starched, wing-collared and suited to a man, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midsummer’s Eve may still be a month away and the evenings more bracing than balmy, but despite a serious chill still in the air the Globe Theatre yesterday proved yet again that it exists in its own microclimate. It’s a theatre and a company made for comedy. Such is the laughter, the sense of occasion, the energy of the crowd, that you find yourself swept up in the joy of it all – enjoying a summer holiday, if only for the evening.Dominic Dromgoole’s new A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers no interruption to the Globe’s sequence of hit comedies. Who couldn’t love a production that comes with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Unfortunate title aside, Psychobitches is a wonderfully original idea - what if famous women through the centuries were alive today and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist? In a quasi-sketch format using the talents of 10 credited writers, it's a neat construct that allows writers' imaginations free rein, unconstrained by time, place or actual facts, and gives a roll call of talented actresses (and the occasional bloke) a chance to do their very best impersonations.Last night's opener of a five-part series (expertly directed by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson) started with Rosa Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Lady Barber (1869-1933) née Hattie Onions, had her portrait painted in sumptuous style about 30 times, mostly in a sub-Orpen vein, and almost all by the unknown Belgian Nestor Cambier. But that was the very least of her occupations. Her husband, the lawyer Sir Henry Barber (1860-1927), had made a fortune in Birmingham property, and became quite the gentleman. Retired in his thirties, he took to riding to hounds and judging horses in the company of royalty, while his wife created a nationally known alpine rock garden around their mansion in Henley-on-Thames.Their largesse funded what in fact Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When the public “got” or did not “get” the original Rite of Spring of Nijinsky and Stravinsky exactly 100 years ago this week, they couldn't call on emotional logic or aesthetic familiarity or symbolic recognition to help. Only imaginative reflex could cause some people to describe in words (the “fearful regrouping of the cells”) or pictures (Valentine Gross’s vivid, instant pencil sketches) what the iconoclastic piece felt like to experience.That, in a sense, holds good for every dance work. Even story-ballets should repel instant verbal description or understanding (or they’d be poetry, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The life of the stand-up is a balance, often precarious, between those stage moments when things seem to be going just right, and the ones which look like they're about to go very wrong. The hero of Tom Shkolnik's debut feature The Comedian, Ed (Edward Hogg), seems to be making decent progress with his club appearances, but when the chance of a new relationship comes along it puts the previously settled balance of his life right out of kilter.There's something immediately attractive, almost provocatively downbeat about Shkolnik's film that announces a director who knows what he Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Don't Starve is a game about survival. Deposited in a strange land rendered in a playfully creepy style like an Edward Gorey cartoon come to life, you - or rather the intrepid Gentleman Scientist, Wilson - must gather resources, craft tools and find food while avoiding the various nasties that lurk in the dark. “Don't Starve” is both the title and your most immediate task but there is more than just a rumbling tum out to do you in - poisons, werepigs, spiders, tentacles and worse all want a piece of you. The game's real bottom line is a much more broad “don't die”.If you read the above and Read more ...