Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Frustratingly, the ramshackle rail service from Brighton deposits me at the crammed O2 20 minutes into Robbie Williams's set. After the eerie quiet of the airport-like walkways around the perimeters, the torrid atmosphere inside the gigantic arena is a shocker. It's packed to the rafters with women shrieking and waving their arms in the air while their men sit beside them, sheepishly mouthing lyrics. Williams, clad fetchingly in black, is playing in the round in the centre of the O2's huge bowl, and the first song I catch is his recent number one single, "Candy". This frankly irritating Read more ...
David Nice
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Many of us would be happy to admire it in isolation, especially in the company of Alice Coote, a mezzo as equal to its stature as the original interpreter, Janet Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's a temptation to roll your eyeballs upwards when you hear Jake Gyllenhaal's introductory voice-over, which sounds like a corny photocopied mission statement they dish out to all new recruits to the LAPD. "I am Fate with a badge and a gun," he tells us, in his role as Officer Brian Taylor. He didn't make the laws, but he will uphold them with as much force as it takes. The police are the thin blue line.But Officer Taylor's robotic monotone is violently counterpointed by the images on screen. These are like extracts from TV's Cops With Cameras, except without any edits to protect Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Kurt has fallen asleep on the space-bus on the way home from school. To make matters worse, he has been transported to a strange planet where the buses don’t run anymore, trapped in the apathetic thrall of an evil man at the heart of a terrible conspiracy. To escape the planet you must first travel through its dangerous levels and fight the truly bizarre super-foes sent to prevent you from breaking the evil spell. Bet you’re wishing you forgot your bus pass, eh Kurt?This is a real treat of a platform game, with a beautiful aesthetic and a real sense of humour. A twilight haze overlays Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
We had already been reassured in interviews that Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen would not be shocking, although perhaps this was more a warning to those of us hoping that it might be. Bieito’s radical reputation is well earned, although approaching 50 he is by no means an enfant and clearly not so terrible anymore either.The first scene opens with a soldier wearing nothing but Y-fronts and boots, holding a rifle and running round the stage, presumably as a punishment handed out by Corporal Moralès or Lieutenant Zuniga. In fact, there are bits and bobs of undressing at various stages of Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
If Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games had somehow left you in any doubt about the magnetic screen presence of Jennifer Lawrence, prepare to surrender your remaining misgivings. Playing outspoken, emotionally damaged young widow Tiffany, Lawrence is a firecracker, a powder keg, a force of nature. Watching her, you feel simultaneously secure and on edge, as though you’re in safe hands and yet as though anything could happen. One breathtaking sequence in a diner with Bradley Cooper’s Pat – an “undiagnosed bipolar” ex-teacher with rage issues – begins as gentle deadpan farce and snowballs Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Any gig is partly defined by its audience. Brighton audiences, particularly Brighton Dome audiences, are usually a lively bunch but tonight’s crowd, at least until beyond halfway through, are still as dummies in their seats, quiet as mice. Looking around is uncanny, like observing a theatre watching a Strindberg play or some such. True, they’re mostly in their fifties but that’s a poor excuse. The last time I saw the Dome this dead was when Ultravox played a couple of years back. Matters weren’t, perhaps, helped by the production company’s disgraceful insistence that the bar – which is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Somebody has missed a trick in not promoting Getting On to BBC Two. Where The Thick of It earned its spurs on BBC Four before graduating to a larger audience, and Gavin and Stacey made the comparable journey from BBC Three to BBC One, the sitcom set in an NHS hospital has not qualified for a transfer. It’s a great pity that it has not found a wider audience, because last night’s conclusion to the third series was a masterpiece of subtle revelation and, rarer still for a sitcom, deep humanity. Beautifully crafted by writers Joanna Scanlan, Jo Brand and Vicki Pepperdine, and shot with a lyrical Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You don't see much of Arthur Wing Pinero's considerable output these days. Although he was largely contemporaneous with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Gilbert and Sullivan, whose works have stayed the course, his plays have not, with just a few exceptions. But in that weird way these things sometimes happen, it seems Pinero is undergoing something of a resurgence (in London at least), as a production of The Second Mrs Tanqueray has just finished at the Rose Theatre in Kingston and the Donmar Warehouse is to stage Trelawny of the Wells early next year.The Magistrate will be even less Read more ...
David Nice
Mozart and Wagner were the opposite compass points of Richard Strauss’s classical-romantic adventuring, and Amadeus has often made an airy companion to the rangy orchestral tone poems in the concert hall. By choosing Haydn instead as the clean limbed first-halfer in two London Philharmonic programmes, Yannick Nézet-Séguin came armed with period instrument experience of the master’s symphonies in his dazzling debut concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Last night’s feast also offered the wondrous spectacle of cellist Truls Mørk making light of the difficulties in Haydn’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Even their name, Band of Horses, conjures up something exotic. The Carolina five-piece’s lyrics may occasionally veer towards the angsty but their sound is firmly anchored in their sumptuous sweeping Americana. It earned their last album, Infinite Arms, a Grammy nomination. This year’s Mirage Rock takes that formula and shakes it up with a handful of grit.Last week’s Later with Jools Holland was a taster of the new live show. The band's tweets indicated Jimmy Page was impressed. Last night singer Ben Bridwell came out on stage in a denim shirt and baseball cap looking like a trucker and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The title says it all: Bertolucci’s landmark (if boring) French film has its last word changed from Paris to Halifax – where butter is only used for glazing parsnips. The very idea of Derek Jacobi taking Anne Reid up the scullery is enough to put anyone off their food but the two grandes dames of English theatre add class to the bittersweet romance of Sally Wainwright’s dog’s-dinner of a drama.Jacobi plays Alan Buttershaw who was stood up by Celia Dawson 60 years ago – except he wasn’t. Celia moved to Sheffield and sent him an explanatory note via a friend called Eileen who destroyed it and Read more ...