Reviews
Gary Naylor
There are genres of theatre that demand buy-in from the audience – musicals, opera and the daddy of them all, pantomime. The usual entry price to the house, the suspension of disbelief, requires supplementing with an active desire to meet the production halfway. So it is with comedy. Crudely put, we could all sit there like Mount Rushmore if we wanted to, but what good would that do?April De Angelis’s new play makes that demand and rolls in another: that we civilians take an interest in the in-jokes and squabbling of actors (yes, the dread word "luvvie" hove into sight on a couple of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Industrious screenwriter Steven Knight has brought us (among many other things) Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes and even Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but This Town may not be remembered as one of his finest hours. Here, we find Knight revisiting his Midlands background for a story that begins in 1981, during Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister. There’s rioting on the streets, unemployment is soaring and Bobby Sands is on hunger strike in Belfast. Ska and Two Tone music are all the rage, and the soundtrack is littered with old faves like “The Tide is High”, “Pressure Drop”, “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a Nineties psycho thriller in Mad Men clothes, undermining its Sixties suburban gloss and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s desperate housewives with genre clichés, yet sustained by the courage of debuting director Benoît Delhomme’s un-Hollywood conviction.Alice (Chastain) and Céline (Hathaway) are friends and neighbours, bonding over their eight-year-old sons Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell, pictured bottom with Hathaway) and Max (Baylen D. Bielitz). They team up, too, over Alice’s desire to return to work in journalism, inevitably dismissed by respective husbands Simon (Anders Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“So Ends Another Life” is strange. Very strange. The song’s dolefulness is immediately set up with a strummed guitar along the lines of the intro to The Bee Gees’ “New York Mining Disaster.” “In a world of agitation, there’s no time for compassion” are the opening lyrics.As it continues, the song asserts that life goes on until you don’t belong. The chorus bleakly commences “so ends another life.” It takes the Gibb brothers’s most maudlin moments to the Nth degree. The arrangement’s use of brass and strings enhance the Bee Gees feel.Next up on the album featuring “So Ends Another Life” is “ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Menier Chocolate Factory has made something of a habit of late out of trawling unexpected corners of the contemporary American repertoire. A happy result of that last May was the local premiere of the Off Broadway show Marjorie Prime, and now the same director, Dominic Dromgoole, is at the helm of a comparably interval-free play that has yet to reach New York: Paul Grellong's meaty, if sometimes murky, Power of Sail. As with AI in the earlier play, the issues here are certainly timely: freedom of speech and the depredations of cancel culture in modern-day Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is Passion season, and Bach’s St John and St Matthew – as well as his less well-known Easter Oratorio – have been well covered on theartsdesk in the last few weeks. Whether with large choir, small choir, or one to a part with no separate chorus, there have been plenty of great performances to be heard this year. The Academy of Ancient Music’s St Matthew Passion at the Barbican yesterday was an example of the latter and was up there with the best, if not perhaps benefiting from the acoustic of Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, as reported on by Simon Thompson.The Barbican, both in its size and Read more ...
James Saynor
The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema before AI takes over completely. In the battle for credibility between monsters and actors, the actors here come off decidedly worse.From what I can make out, in reality, the Earth’s large creatures are generally the kind and peaceable ones – whales, elephants, the Jolly Green Giant etc – while the little ’uns like us cause all the trouble. Of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of MJ the Musical may be keeping a portrait of the King of Pop that has acquired all his scars, physical and psychological.Few of them, though, are on show in this version of the ongoing Broadway hit. The MJ we meet there is forever frozen in 1992, pony-tailed and dressed in sophisticated black and white. The first scene shows him in a rehearsal room, meticulously fine-tuning numbers for his Dangerous tour with a producer and a troupe of dancers. A young black boy whose mother can’t find a babysitter has accompanied her there. Jackson Read more ...
Jack Barron
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by the airburst of the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy. Shiota’s perfect weather was instantly and irrevocably translated into a brightness totally beyond the imaginative powers of the humans that brought it into being. It is a brightness that blinds, burns your clothes away, and flays the skin beneath – as Shiota discovered, when she stumbled across her brother. It illuminates your very Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across two centuries and on the other side of the world. It’s a resonance that ripples through Laurence Boswell’s eloquent, beautifully acted and staged, and sweetly optimistic production. As sole performer, Greg Hicks is Dostoevsky’s narrator and unnamed protagonist, as well as the numerous people, real and imagined, that the man meets on his journey from suicidal anguish to enlightened optimism, and a new lease of life as an albeit unheeded Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter Week music with a sense of suspense and anticipation built into vocal and instrumental lines that build and strive and stretch towards a climactic revelation that, until the very end, remains just out of reach. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Peter Whelan – much-garlanded director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra – led the Orchestra (and Choir) of the Age of Enlightenment (along with a quartet of accomplished soloists) in a programme that prefaced the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced on her 2007 and 2010 albums Cherlokalate and The Fallen By Watch Bird. Not that her new album is rooted in past ventures, more that it appears she has taken a step back to consider what she has done, and has found this reflection comfortable.And there is a lot to ponder. Weaver, who thrives on embracing new musical and wider cultural discoveries, has her own résumé to contemplate. Her first solo album was issued in 2002. Just before this, there was her Read more ...