Reviews
Heather Neill
If only there were more Chekhov! Theatregoers in England, for whom Anton Pavlovich is little short of a god, must have wished this often enough. The handful of great plays come round almost as frequently as Shakespeare. Yet, as well as a couple of lesser plays and some crude farces, Chekhov wrote almost 600 short stories, counting the comic squibs with which he helped to support his family as a very young man. Some of the more mature ones are masterpieces, works of extraordinary imagination and psychological insight. He occasionally adapted them himself and others have done since. Now William Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It’s no exaggeration to say that The Wizard of Oz has a special place in the hearts of millions. For many, their last trip over the rainbow will have been watching its 1985 sequel Return to Oz, a commercial flop berated at the time for a too tenebrous tone. Yet Return to Oz was the stuff of numerous childhood nightmares, and so it's gone on to achieve cult status. That film's mixed fortunes proved what anyone could have guessed - that following in the colossal footsteps of Victor Fleming's 1939 MGM musical was never going to be easy.In Sam Raimi's prequel Oz The Great and Powerful, he Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
He may have been lampooned in his lifetime as the man who kept a pet wasp, but Britain owes much to John Lubbock, the Victorian MP whose legislation gave the country its first bank holiday. His Ancient Monuments bill of 1882 (nicknamed the “monumentally ancient bill" for how long it took to get through Parliament) was even more far-seeing, paving the way for the Heritage movement as we know it.It would be hard to imagine Britain today without the National Trust, English Heritage and the other crusading organizations whose representatives people BBC Four’s thoughtful three-parter Heritage! The Read more ...
David Nice
Curious and curiouser. Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto, centrepiece of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s latest Philharmonia concert celebrating the Polish master’s centenary, adds ballast to the idea that the composer, like Schoenberg and Tippett, burrowed into a specially comfortless rabbit warren in his later works. On the other hand his Concerto for Orchestra, begun two decades earlier in 1950, proved its mettle as a serious audience-pleaser. Yet if you asked an unprepared listener to name that composer, the answer would most likely be – not Bartók with his work of the same name but that other, much more Read more ...
Simon Munk
Like a faded star, wearing the moth eaten dresses of her past, still stalking a shuttered Hollywood set, Lara Croft has seen better days. Ah, the old days – she made or broke consoles, appeared on fashion magazine covers, had Angelina Jolie play her in the movies.Lara Croft was the originator and undisputed queen of action-adventure. That was the old days. Her star has long faded, her crown snatched by the cheeky new tomb raider on the old block – Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series. But wait, what's this? A new, younger Lara? Could it possibly work? Thankfully, this audacious reboot doesn't Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
In November 1973 a 20-year-old music scholar from St. John’s College, Oxford conducted the first ever concert by the newly founded Tallis Scholars, in St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford. Anyone who was there might have sensed that a new era was beginning. David Munrow was still alive: the period instrument revolution was just taking off. But Peter Phillips seemed to be inaugurating a new generation of Renaissance and Polyphonic singing - an expertise on show this week at a sensational recital in St Paul’s Cathedral - such as this country had not heard before.Except that, modestly, he would insist it Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert - a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier - took a while to draw attention from the farthest reaches of this unfriendly recital space. Could it be that the Prelude of the C major Prelude and Fugue was too assertive, strident even (not a word one normally ever associates with Uchida), or that the, to my mind, inappropriate rubato somehow disturbed the perfect equilibrium of the music? The opening of the F sharp minor Prelude settled the Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Catching rabies from a corgi, living on a council estate, becoming an uncommon book addict, painting the town red, incognito on VE Day, parachuting into East London on a date with James Bond... what a strange fantasy life our Queen has led.*Now Peter Morgan and Helen Mirren, the writer-actress team whose film The Queen remains a very high-ranking entry in this fictional league, enlarge the canon with The Audience, loosely inspired by the weekly confidential meetings between the Queen and Prime Minister, of whom there have been 12 (so far) over her six-decade reign.The reason to see it is Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In one of the great US sitcoms, Seinfeld, the mantra of the show's producers was "no hugging, no learning". Well, Parks and Recreation - which may end up occupying a similarly lofty place in comedy history - takes the opposite tack. Warm and wonderfully witty with characters and relationships that actually evolve, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur's sitcom also features TV's finest comedy ensemble. This perky, award-winning comedy has taken an absolute age to reach us, considering it debuted in the US in 2009 (where the fifth season has already aired). As with other such imports, BBC Four Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen Soderbergh would have us believe that this might be his last movie, which is difficult to believe. But if so, he's bowing out with one his sharpest, most devious and most watchable pictures, in which a shrewdly-chosen cast does full justice to a screenplay over which Scott Z Burns has pored painstakingly for more than a decade.Our subject at first seems to be the evils of Big Pharma, the giant drug corporations which seek to exploit human weakness and the stresses of 21st century life to keep their market share high and their stock prices soaring. Their questionable ethics and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Scores of reddish-bronze skinned men, and a few women and children, in full regalia, festooned in face paint, feathers, jewellery and decorations of all kind. They stare out at us, impassive and imperturbable, immortalised by George Catlin (1796-1872), the most famous American artist you have never heard of. His work is embedded in the American consciousness, if not its conscience. This succinct and representative selection visits London 170 years after the sensational exhibition of his Indian Gallery in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1843, when 500 of his portraits of American Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Five male Filipinos in Tel Aviv live double lives. By day, they care for dying Orthodox Jews; by night, they are a drag act, the Paper Dolls. Based on real life, this play tells an incredible story that must be heard. Unfortunately, this production is not necessarily the one to tell it.The story conveys how connections can be forged between clashing cultures. Elderly Jewish men and young Filipino transsexuals can have the same values; the same need for a sense of home; the same longing for companionship. Somewhere here is a heartbreaking, poignant play, focusing on one of this drama's many Read more ...