Reviews
mark.kidel
Performing Shakespeare in a former cigarette factory in South Bristol has become something of a ritual for Andrew Hilton and his close-knit company. Any act of ritual requires a dedicated space and the red-tiled floor on which the drama unfolds on this most intimate of stages has taken on a certain aura. With the minimum of sets and props, a deep probing of the text and the minimum of modish theatrical artifice, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory proves year after year that less is more, at least when it comes to awakening the imagination.Hilton uses the space as an alchemical vessel, a place Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.But back he is, and entirely on form too. That said – look away now if you deplore journalistic cliché – this was very much a concert of two halves: a solid but buttoned-up take on two early Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain in Joan Jett-like form as an imperilled hipster, the movie goes heavy on portentous sound effects and creepy-crawlies. What it lacks pretty much entirely is common sense. On the other hand, who submits to such genre pictures for logic? The whole point of director Andy Muschietti's movie is to trot out a time-honoured arsenal of horror film Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At what stage will the trend among journalists and documentarians to regard anything relating to the internet with suspicion or, worse, ignorance come to an end? Although I recognise that my relationship with information technology has never been exactly typical, this stuff has been easy enough to access for more than half of my life now. And I’m not exactly young. Google and the World Brain, the first of this week’s two technology-themed instalments of BBC Four’s usually excellent Storyville international documentary strand, argued that attempts to preserve the entirety of human knowledge Read more ...
Russ Coffey
These days not all sensitive folk-rockers with trembling voices can bank on easy audiences. Villagers main man Conor O’Brien is one who can – he’s been selling out concerts like nobody's business. This gig was no exception. O’Brien may be plaintive but he also has the reputation for being one of the smartest, artiest writers around. One critic has described his new LP {Awayland} as the first great album of 2013. Like its strange brackets, it can also be quite challenging.Almost every moment of gentle beauty on the record is matched by another of jarring electronica. Last night, although some Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is this the most poetic title in London theatre today? Anders Lustgarten’s new play joins a ragged march of work, from David Hare’s The Power of Yes (2009) to Clare Duffy’s Money: The Gameshow (currently at the Bush Theatre), which attempts to tackle the global financial meltdown. Unlike these other shows, however, it’s USP lies in its claim to offer a solution to the pains and penalties of economic austerity.Set in a dystopic version of current times where, to the tune of David Cameron’s plummy praise of the market, all social services have become businesses, the play rapidly spray-paints a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Even singular sensations grow older - yet A Chorus Line, which coined the phrase, seems ageless, so sure is it of its place in musical theatre history, so locked now into our theatrical consciousness. It is, no question, a wonderful show whose fabric of book (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante), music (Marvin Hamlisch) and lyrics (Edward Kleban) is seamless and, more importantly, whose vision - as originated by choreographer/director Michael Bennett - has achieved a kind of immortality.Bob Avian, who assisted on the original staging back in 1975, is now the show's guardian and watching this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"New Sars-like virus claims first Briton" according to a headline in yesterday's Times, news which will have sent spasms of alarm through Utopia-watchers. A couple of episodes ago we heard how the original Sars outbreak had been a fictional creation, and this series-closer began with overheard news reports of another attack of Russian flu in Britain, which was provoking "scenes of disorder". But we know that these outbreaks too have been fabricated, as an excuse to dose up the population with the antidote.Utopia's tortuous and bindweed-like plotting has had us pondering over what, exactly, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The arts are in a bit of a state just now. Okay, we all knew that. The money that was there in the past - and where it was coming from - just isn’t the same any more. Finding a new way of doing things is the buzz. Looking outside the box.Maybe someone should call in Alex Polizzi, who’s just begun series two of The Fixer, the family business first-aid programme that aims to turn around enterprises hovering on the edge of financial disaster (amazing, given current times, that some are still hovering at all). Tolstoy was not wrong - unhappy families sure have something special about them, and Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein, there is a small abstract painting, Untitled, 1959, executed just before the artist found himself at the heart of the Pop Art movement. The painting is, by any measure, a failure. It is lurid and fussily composed – an ugly streak of red, blue and yellow terminate in a smudge of black. But in it we detect the desire behind Lichtenstein’s innovative aesthetic achievements: it’s too bold and too vibrant.It was in 1961 when Lichtenstein found his signature style of mimicking comic book images. By using a method of painting Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Brilliantly played by Saskia Rosendahl, the eponymous teenage heroine of Lore (full name, Hannelore) faces a demanding double journey: both the physical slog through end-of-war Germany, a country fallen into chaos, and the more complicated process of acknowledging, like the nation itself, past Nazi complicity. On the cusp of adolescence, she's forced into adult responsibility for her younger siblings, just as her inner world of sexual feeling is awakening - everything pushes her towards maturity, and she must cope or perish.Australian director Cate Shortland’s second feature combines a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. The channel turns its attention to Aylesbury, a young offender institution heaving with the sort of hoodies the Prime Minister may not after watching this first episode feel quite so inclined to hug.Aylesbury Read more ...