Reviews
bella.todd
There’s a vivid moment in this Joe Penhall revival when Christopher, a psychiatric patient suspected of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, finds himself caught in the linguistic crossfire between his two rival care-givers. Oblivious to everything but their argument, the doctors continue to shout across their subject as he sinks to the floor, the tormented vertex in a taut dramatic triangle. Never mind the ones inside – it’s the voices outside Christopher’s head that seem to be doing the most damage.When Blue/Orange was first staged, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play at the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Kevin Rowland has gone to great lengths recently to ensure that no one is under any misconceptions: the return of Dexys is no nostalgia trip. Last night’s show in Edinburgh hammered home the point. There aren’t many bands that could return after 27 years (give or take a smattering of gigs in 2003), play for two hours straight, perform only four old songs - even if those were stretched out over 45 extraordinary minutes - and yet still satisfy every demand made of them.Before that raucous, rather moving finale, there was the pressing business of performing the new album, One Day I’m Going to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown (and, just occasionally, the hollow laugh) has however emerged in the form of Roger Rees’s What You Will – a brisk hour-and-a-half’s trot through Shakespeare’s greatest hits, with a little autobiography and a lot of accents thrown in.A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rees can spin an anecdote with style, has plenty to tell, and the elegant shamelessness to steal them when they are not his own. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Circus and church, and a whole lot of other extremes, come up against each other in bewildering opposition in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s re-released 1989 Santa Sangre, a cult film of which it could truly be said, “They don’t make them like this any more.” It’s practically a one-off, visually spectacular and musically vibrant; if you’re looking for equivalents, Buñuel, Ken Russell at his most hysterical, and the Italian horror-and-gore genre of the Seventies (think Berberian Sound Studio) are the nearest you might get.The opening scene finds hero Fenix seriously out-of-his-tree (literally) in a Read more ...
David Nice
Pick the right dream, and you just might retrieve a precious memory, even in nightmarish terrain where everyone else has lost theirs. That message seems to have been uncannily prophetic for Bohuslav Martinů, who began work on Julietta in 1936, soon to face the terrifying clean slate of a longer exile from his beloved Czechoslovakia with the onset of the Second World War. The pity and the pain of severance are already there in this seething operatic adaptation of Georges Neveux's crammed-to-bursting dream play. Director Richard Jones holds them effortlessly in the forefront of a production Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To revive a long-defunct play is dicing with death for a touring theatre company - was the play ahead of its time, or was it not good enough in any time? W Somerset Maugham was a commercial and critical giant in London theatre in the Twenties, but The Sacred Flame - an odd hybrid of whodunnit and (a)morality play - was one that didn’t make it out of its period. But its theme remains unsolved today: the family and medical dilemmas thrown up when a vivid young man is hopelessly crippled, his young wife now unsatisfied, he himself trying to be brave about a position that cripples him Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It is said of many people, but for Diana Vreeland it was true: she remains fashion’s once and future queen. An enduring legend of a notoriously vicious and ephemeral world, the Paris-loving Anglo-American had a magical life as a heralded columnist and editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not blessed with what one may call traditional beauty, Vreeland understood style - proportion, colour, flair, flow and accent. She spoke the way we want all fashion people to speak: “Pink is the navy blue of India”, “Blue jeans are the most beautiful thing since the gondola,” Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sorry) that he is impotent after surgery for the pox. Pinchwife’s wife gets pinched and no one is more cuckolded than he. Mind you, he takes the “if you can’t beat 'em, join ’em” approach in the end when he says “cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive”. Lady Fidget has ants in her pants and her not-so-virtuous group of ladies can hardly move for sexual desire. They are the cougars of their day. Even the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Mid-September: the nights are drawing in and, to quote that well-known costume dramatist John Milton, the period detail is as “thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa”. Downton – praise be! – is back. However, before the third series even gets into its penguin-suited stride it seems that paradise is about to be lost all over again. Lord Grantham has blown most of his wife’s fortune: the Canadian Trunk Line Company has hit the buffers and gone bust. While the crusty aristo refuses to be a failure his dependents have far more important things on their tiny minds. Lady Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Richard Curtis walk into Ann Summers… It’s not the setup for a joke but it is essentially the starting point for Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria – a film the director herself has dubbed “the vibrator movie you can take your mum to”. Wexler gamely takes on the true story of this Victorian medical innovation, folding Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the summer of ’86, The Cult’s Ian Astbury invited The Mission on tour with them. Mission main man, Wayne Hussey, had recently fled the role of guitarist in The Sisters of Mercy to lead his own band. Goth fans had high hopes for them. Some thought they would eventually become bigger than the Cult. Over the next few years, though, both career paths defied expectations.The Cult became a stadium-metal act, and The Mission gradually drifted into making good albums that few listened to. But the Cult’s success was not to last. A row in 1995 saw them go their separate ways. Doldrums and solo Read more ...
fisun.guner
A Dancing Satyr leaps into the air, his head thrown back in ecstasy. His alabaster eyes appear like two pinpoints of illumination in the dimly lit gallery. The bronze figure, which is the first work you encounter in an exhibition spanning 5,000 years of bronze sculpture, is believed to be the work of the famous Greek sculptor Praxiteles, who was active in the second half of the fourth century BC. Having lain on the seabed for millennia, the reveller, now with only one limb intact so that he appears suspended in balletic mid-flight, was recovered off the coast of Sicily only in 1998.Bronze, a Read more ...