Reviews
David Nice
Russia’s Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, has enjoyed imaginative treatment on the British stage and screen. Brighton Theatre’s now-legendary Vanity conjured the world of the verse-novel Eugene Onegin vividly with three actors and minimal props. More folk will remember the cinematic Queen of Spades, with Anton Walbrook’s crazed gambler terrorising the ancient Countess of Edith Evans to death for her secret of three winning cards. Could this sparest of tales, zooming between irony and fright, work equally well on a small stage?Well, yes, but only by forgetting the special qualities of Pushkin's Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Armed American soldiers stand in the stone window frames of a ruined building in Berlin, curious and disturbing echoes of those classical statues that so often were used to add portentous significance to a facade; but here in a 1961 photograph by Don McCullin, they are overlooking, with some intensity, the East German military on the other side. The Wall has just been built.Chronicling another painful divide in 1964, McCullin photographed a distraught, silently screaming widow, a Turkish Cypriot victim of that civil war, as she is restrained and held by other women, in an oddly dignified Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What goes around, well, goes around in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which manages the dual feat of being at once scare-mongering (hypochondriacs should stay well clear) and stultifyingly dull. A variant on the we're-all-essentially-connected school of cinema that includes Babel and the recent London Film Festival opener, 360, the film charts a virus's progression from a seemingly inoffensive cough to a pandemic capable of felling one in 12 people on the planet, in which case I assume Hollywood itself might have to call it quits.That would be no bad thing if this represents the best that Read more ...
carole.woddis
Sometimes theatre people do mad things. Like stay up all night and the following day to “celebrate” the King James Bible and a theatre’s house-move to new premises. Its 400th year has been a good year for that collection of stories currently being advertised elsewhere as “the book that changed the world”. And for the Bush Theatre's outgoing artistic director Josie Rourke, having moved into John Passmore Edwards’s elegant Victorian Library round the corner from its old Shepherds Bush Green stamping ground this weekend, “There’s no finer act than to open a new theatre - it’s the single most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you probably can.Though Downton is an original story, you get more déja vu moments than in the 27th televised version of Pride and Prejudice, and the way the speeding narrative seems to fling out another major dramatic development in between each ad break - and we know there are far too many of those - is like being trapped in a carriage being driven Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the interference of aid organisations? Are the motives of those drawn to troubled countries purely altruistic? And what real hope have they of making a difference, after the media has lost interest in a conflict and left?Feehily’s drama is painstakingly researched and it asks some big, discomfiting questions about the West’s relationship with nations it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We first see Lucy (Emily Browning) as a receptacle, letting a medical tube snake painfully deep down her throat. Australian novelist Julia Leigh characterises such behaviour as “radical passivity”, and her Jane Campion-mentored debut as director makes Lucy find its degrading limit.Browning made her name as a juvenile lead in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), going the familiar route to adult stardom as a scantily clad assassin in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. Often nude here but rarely erotic, she plays a student whose sex life functions like bulimia, giving control Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Five Keyboard Concertos Ramin Bahrami, Gewandhausorchester, Riccardo Chailly (Decca)We’re spoilt for choice in these concertos; Perahia, Schiff and Hewitt have given us excellent versions, and another new one by Alexandre Tharaud has just been released by Virgin Classics. I prefer Bach’s solo keyboard music played on piano, but I’m willing to concede that period instruments can suit the keyboard concertos better, given the delicious contrast in timbre between harpsichord and bowed strings. These readings, played by the Iranian-born pianist Ramin Bahrami, are good enough to make me never Read more ...
graeme.thomson
As this rampant return to our screens repeatedly underlined, one of the great joys of watching The Comic Strip throughout its 30-year frenzy of frantic - if intermittent - silliness has been never knowing what precise manifestation of oddness lurks around each corner. Where else, after all, would you find "Babs" Windsor popping up – utterly gratuitously – to give Tony Blair a meaty snog? Or Ross Noble ambling into frame as a socialist tramp, shortly to be throttled and thrown from a moving train? Or Margaret Thatcher giving full vent to her inner Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson, smeared over Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is the kind of film you would very much like to like. It’s a low-budget British effort with a perfectly decent cast who are all easy on the eye. It makes the most of the windswept Isle of Man, where so many films just take advantage of tax breaks while pretending they’re in Barbados. You would like to like it. Unfortunately, as with so many low-budget British films, it just doesn’t come up to the mark.Years ago, when single dramas still proliferated on terrestrial television, Albatross would have been a perfectly acceptable, slightly lightweight Screen Two. With that door now slammed Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The objective: Beethoven’s symphonies. All of them. In numerical order, one after the other. Not only that, but a “powerful” work written in the last century to go with each one. That is Sir Mark Elder’s self-imposed mission for his 12th season with the Hallé. He has described it as the orchestra’s “first Beethoven cycle of the 21st century”. Is that a veiled promise of others to come? Perhaps in another 50 years, which is when the Hallé last tackled the cycle.Not that Elder will conduct all the symphonies. He is directing five, but vacating the rostrum for Markus Stenz, now in his third Read more ...
David Benedict
Given that Edward Bond, that most austere of playwrights, has refused to allow a London production of his most notorious play, Saved, for over a quarter of a century, it’s neither surprising nor unwise that having been granted the rights, director Sean Holmes is respectful of the text. You can, however, have too much of a good thing. Long before the three hours and five minutes' running time is up, you realise that in this over-deliberate production respect has curdled into reverence.It’s not hard to see why. This, after all, is a rare opportunity to set the record straight on a play Read more ...