Reviews
Sam Marlowe
Sex, spending, violence and debt: life in the city is lived raw in this caustic interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedy by Dominic Cooke. The setting is grimy, graffiti-daubed; shiny apartment blocks vie with sleazy strip joints and brothels, and the streets are stalked by gangsters, chancers, trophy wives and gypsy buskers. Shakespeare’s action takes place in Ephesus, a town “full of cozenage”; Cooke’s takes a tour of the urban Eurozone, with a flavour of Italy here, Greece there, winding up, for the maddest scene of all, in a location that looks uncannily like London’s own Harley Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Can the Hanson brothers ever rid themselves of the shackles of “MMMBop” (the 1997 hit that brought them global renown)? More to the point, should they bother to try? These were the burning questions I armed myself with as I prepared to watch a band whose progress, it’s fair to say, I’ve hardly followed in the last 15 years since their falsetto singing and rambunctious head-banging brought the world such joy. So, having done some serious mugging up, and listened to their back catalogue, I was interested to see where fortune would have taken the clean-cut trio with the flowing blond hair.As Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s not long until we’re told, “There is enough money in the world to make everyone in the world a millionaire.” And if everyone was? Utopia and freedom might not be inevitable. Inexorable price rises would restore some sort of balance. Or a crash might follow. But as this extraordinary look into what’s been inspired by the American money motivators who’ve washed up on our shores showed: logic, be damned.The king and queen of money motivators are Robert T and Kim Kiyosaki. They met in a TGI Friday’s when he got an eyeful of her now-bejeaned legs. After they hooked up, he went on to write Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if you haven’t yet realised that 2012 is Dickens Central, there’s no hope for you. The 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth is still two months away, but Claire Tomalin’s biography has scampered out of the starting gate already, as has Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s more scholarly Becoming Dickens. The Beeb is ready with a Great Expectations film this Christmas, and more adaptations to follow. The Museum of London has a Dickens and London exhibition opening on 9 December. (Full disclosure: I am involved with some/many of these things, and my own book – trumpet tootle – on Dickens and London Read more ...
mark.hudson
How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully qualifies for that currently fashionable status "outsider artist", there’s nothing remotely edgy about him. He’s as cuddly and quintessentially English as Thora Hird. Anyone likely to have an opinion on him will long since have formed it. Everyone else will simply be indifferent.While the Cornish primitive Alfred Wallis, with whom Lowry has obvious Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“LSF” is unarguably a monster of a song. In fact, that whole of Kasabian's self-titled 2004 debut album was a cracker, but seeing the entire sold-out Brighton Centre, balconies and all, on their feet, hands aloft, as one, singing the wordless backing chorus of “LSF” is quite a thing. Even when they stop, and five of the six band members wander off, skinny rake guitarist Sergio Pizzorno stays back and conducts the crowd. He keeps walking away from the lip of the stage, teasing and then turning round and throwing his arms in the air, leading them onwards and upwards. The crowd don’t stop Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The archaeological documentary is becoming the obligatory format for tackling legendary tales of the British at war. Someone seems to recreate the Dam Busters raid every six months, the wrecks of battleships HMS Hood and the Bismarck have been tracked down in the ocean depths, and Time Team have excavated various subterranean artefacts from the Western Front.In Digging the Great Escape, we followed a team of historians, archaeologists and mining engineers to the site of the German Stalag Luft III prison camp in Silesia (now Poland), where 10,000 allied airmen were held captive during World Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be, or slava if you prefer, to Valery Gergiev for honouring new Russian music alongside his hallmark interpretations - ever evolving or dangerously volatile according to taste – of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Last LSO season featured some of the less than inspired recent works Rodion Shchedrin has been dredging by the yard. Yet few would begrudge the palm of deep and original musical thought to this past week’s heroine, Sofia Gubaidulina. Gergiev riveted a quarter-full Albert Hall with her stunning St John Passion and Resurrection at the 2001 Proms, and last night he had a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical”, “challenging”, “avant-garde” or even “eye-catching” – to name just a few of the attributes supposed to make an artwork significant, relevant or desirable. As a result, this show of work by recent graduates is remarkably free of melodrama, posturing, narcissism, self-pity or self-importance – tedious qualities so often found in recent art. Read more ...
David Nice
Who is more likely to be an operatic creature of flesh and blood: Puccini's young diva, unexpectedly caught up in the infernal machine of a lustful tyrant, or Tchaikovsky's teenager impetuously pouring out her soul in a love letter to a man she's just fallen for? Usually, you'd go for Tatyana over Tosca every time. At ENO it's currently the other way round. While Deborah Warner's new production of Eugene Onegin unfathomably misses most of the truths in a story we can all identify with, Catherine Malfitano's take on the best if most overdone Italian operatic thriller in the repertoire makes Read more ...
mark.kidel
Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), composed in 1956, is, in many ways, the mother of all electronic music. I can remember discovering it in the 1960s, before I had acquired my first pair of Koss headphones, lying on the floor, strategically placed between two speakers, my ears opened by the copious ingestion of some red Lebanese. The combination of electronically treated live voices with purely synthetic sounds, so much a commonplace today, was then strikingly new. Along with his later pieces Kontakte and Mikrophonie, the German pioneer blazed a trail which is till Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s always struck me as an odd sort of desire: to go to see a movie in which you know someone is going to die a long and painful death, while someone else – or maybe a whole gaggle of people – stand and watch, shedding tears and beating breasts. Of all genres, the “terminal illness movie”, if we can call it that, seems altogether perverse.We see a romantic comedy because we all hope to be in love again, and find it helpful to laugh about the times we thought we were and botched it; sci-fi fuels our imaginations and desire for wonderment; action movies and war films get the adrenalin pumping Read more ...