Reviews
Matthew Paluch
In String of Rites, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned three works as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps. It opened with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s double bill, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Both scores are by Igor Stravinsky, created for the original choreography by Nijinsky and Michel Fokine respectively. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Rite is dark, both visually and in emotion, and stems from the same concept as Nijinsky’s - pack mentality and what fate this can project onto the "chosen one". But Dolan’s look is visually different. The 10 dancers are Read more ...
mark.kidel
In spite of a text that feels at times like Shakespeare by numbers, Andrew Hilton’s tightly-knit company has once again pulled off an evening of captivating theatre. As in other productions from Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the casting is pitch-perfect and the acting first class, down to the star performance of a hilariously mournful black dog.Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early piece, and although there are plenty of the touches of the genius that will illuminate the bard’s greatest plays, this tale of love, friendship, inconstancy and betrayal is almost too smoothly constructed. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sandie Shaw: Sandie/Me/Love Me Please Love MeThe former Sandra Goodrich probably would have emerged in the Sixties as an embodiment of the era. She could have been a model, actress or a TV presenter. But it was music that found her, and it suited her a treat. The reissue of her first three albums – each supplemented by the relevant singles and B-sides – is a powerful reminder of her potency. When The Smiths brought her on board for “Hand in Glove”, it further stressed her pivotal role in British culture.Her naturalness obscured the fact that she was a great singer. Ease of delivery did Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sunken Garden is described officially as a “film opera”. Two words. Emphatically unhyphenated. No attempt made to neologise or fashion some third-way genre terminology. It’s not a symbol that bodes well for mutually-informed, sensitive interdisciplinary thinking, but in Michael Van der Aa and David Mitchell’s work English National Opera have come one tiny, shuffling step closer to realising that elusive multimedia idée fixe that has so preoccupied the company under John Berry.First we had the atrocity that was Mike Figgis’s Lucrezia Borgia (soft-core rompings on screen and wooden barkings on Read more ...
David Nice
Or, The Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Seizième, as imagined by a bourgeois teenager who fancies himself to be Bougrelas, heir to the Polish throne. That's one way of looking at the concept so dazzlingly carried through by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod with the French wing of their Cheek by Jowl Company. It’s a chaotic tale told by a big kid, as the 23 year old Alfred Jarry still was when he part-engineered a scandal for the 1896 Paris premiere of Ubu Roi, a platform at last for the savage, potty-mouthed and pot-bellied anti-hero Jarry had dreamed up years earlier in revenge against a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The family can be a knot of hatred as well as a cradle of love. Rather late in this new play by Tanya Ronder comes a scene in which a separated husband and wife try to untangle this knot, and end up by tightening it. And this takes place around a table, which is silent witness to this epic tale which spans more than a century, and uses nine actors to create some 23 participants over six generations.By a happy coincidence, this story of a wooden table takes place in a new wooden theatre which the National Theatre has built in its riverside front yard (pictured below, © Philip Vile) as a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Does Caroline Aherne hate women? Surely not, but given that there have been plenty of painfully humourless so-called comedies over the years with this heavy a reliance on recurring jokes about older women’s breasts you could be forgiven for hoping that one of the country’s most high-profile comediennes might use her position to produce something a little less puerile than The Security Men.Aherne and Pope's foursome at least seem to be having funThe flimsy hour-long programme was co-written with Jeff Pope, who worked with Aherne on 2009‘s The Fattest Man in Britain. The Security Men reused a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1-4, Paganini Rhapsody Valentina Lisitsa, London Symphony Orchestra/Michael Francis (Decca)Read the press notes before listening to this double CD and you’d be forgiven for feeling some trepidation; Valentina Lisitsa is a Ukrainian pianist who was catapulted to megastardom via the medium of, er, YouTube. Then you find out that time constraints prevented Lisitsa from meeting conductor Michael Francis before the sessions. He had to make do with emailled video clips. So it’s a delight to report that much, though not all, of the music making captured here is Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Director Joseph Kosinski's second film feels dispiritingly like his first, the bastion of excitement and originality that is TRON: Legacy. That film was an empty shell which at least managed not to be catastrophically irritating. Oblivion stars Tom Cruise, proving yet again that his ego is in inverse proportion to his physical stature. He plays "one of our best" in a soulless film which has the gall to place tangible cultural pursuits on a pedestal whilst clonking you round the head with sterile CGI.The year is 2077 and, yes, Tom Cruise is still an action-man. His Jack Harper bounds about Read more ...
David Nice
"You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screamings, as I am in my Parisian sexuality," declared Francis Poulenc, who died 50 years ago this January at one with his God and his cheerful, not exclusively but mainly gay, promiscuity. Alas, the Revd Richard Coles and Anne Atkins, nearly scuppering all the joy of the CLS's mini-festival finale in a “discussion” before the concert proper had even begun, didn't seem to know at all .Having proposed some sort of imaginary tussle between God and sex for the soul of our lovable Frenchman, the two went off at a waffly, self- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The cup of tea is a national institution that brings comfort and good cheer to millions. So is Victoria Wood. Blend them in a pot and you’ve got a pleasing brew called Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea. It might not have been so. When Wood last ventured out into the former Empire it was to visit all the places in the world named after Queen Victoria. The concept felt slightly stewed. Not here.Broken down into two distinct chapters, Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea spent the first hour explaining precisely where the humble cuppa came from. Put very reductively, its precious leaves were originally Read more ...
Simon Munk
The bassline starts, "1979" flashes up on screen and, over a scratchy recording, the voice intones "Walking down the street, I get punched; you're walking down the street, you get punched".PunksNotDead's not going to hold your attention for more than a few minutes, but in those few minutes, this hyperkinetic, luridly day-glo explosion of punk attitude and violence encapsulates everything that's great about the indie games scene – it's the ideas, stupid (and they're free).PunksNotDead sees your stickman ambling along a street filled with fluoro-pink people, cars and lampposts, except some of Read more ...