Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
There be dragons aplenty, angels, demons and ghastly creatures both fleshy and feathered in the Globe Theatre’s inaugural production of Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe’s take on the familiar Faust legend, bold in its religious content, was a controversial hit of its day, but the play’s almost medieval apposition of high thinking and knockabout farce by no means guarantees it success in the contemporary theatre. If Matthew Dunster and his team of actors fail with any of their audience it won’t be for want of trying. Throwing themselves at the material with characteristic Globe energy, Read more ...
fisun.guner
As one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge, she was variously known by the nicknames "La Mélinite", "Jane la Folle", and "L’Etrange". The first was after a brand of explosive, the other two attesting to a little craziness. Jane Avril’s eccentric dance movements evoked the involuntary spasms of female hysteria patients. But while photographs exaggerate her childlike demeanour (she wears her hair in ringlets and poses in a range of shepherdess bonnets, a look popular in 19th-century music hall), as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s muse, she was transformed into a somewhat haunted figure far older than Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in the same week that a documentary charting their rise hits cinemas, the contrast between the life they were born into and the one they have carved out couldn’t be more marked.Opening with the Aha Shake Heartbreak hit "Four Kicks", people screamed and danced about to the roaring of electric guitars and the growling twang of Caleb’s voice. But Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Denis Villeneuve’s impassioned, decorous adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s award-winning stage play sees a dead woman bequeath her children a mystery, which in turn unlocks the secrets of her past and ultimately theirs. The Oscar-nominated Incendies is an arresting and satisfying fusion of political thriller and family drama. Handsomely shot and mesmerising throughout, it’s a film told most memorably in the sensitive and resonant performances of its lead actresses.Incendies begins on a desert plain, as Radiohead play unmistakably on the soundtrack (the track "You and Whose Army?"). As the camera Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Allen and his support Josh Bray are two sides of a coin. Of the two folk-rockers, the smoother, more polished Allen’s the heads. Bray is rougher, more unknown. But last night they both showed the depth of quality that exists in contemporary commercial roots-influenced music. Allen is touring his second album, Sweet Defeat. Its beautifully crafted songs and refined production have impressed the likes of Jools Holland, and last night he took it to a new level. But Bray, whose debut Whisky and Wool wowed theartsdesk, fought past poor sound to show he’s not far behind.Both Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Continuing BBC Four's trend of creating surprisingly watchable programmes out of dowdy and unpromising ideas, this survey of the plants gardeners love to hate was a mine of information and offered plenty of food for thought. And for that matter, plenty of food, since it appears that wheat has only survived to become one of our top crops because, several thousand years ago, it was genetically beefed up by getting spliced to a weed.What is a weed, anyway? Presenter Chris Collins, a seasoned horticulturist despite his protection-racketish demeanour, came up with several plausible definitions. He Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a lovely moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Peter Quince assigns roles to his company of rude mechanicals. Unsatisfied with the part of the hero, Bottom interrupts, insisting he be allowed to play not only Pyramus but heroine Thisbe too, as well of course as the murderous lion. It’s hard not to see just a little of Bottom’s eagerness in Simon Callow’s Being Shakespeare – a one-man show penned by Jonathan Bate that casts Callow as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Lear, Falstaff and Puck.Originally conceived and performed as The Man From Stratford, Bate’s play has now been reworked Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s the oldest coup de théâtre in the postmodernist playbook – the curtain rises to reveal an audience staring back at us – but still, in the opening seconds of Willy Decker’s Peter Grimes, one of the most effective. Our theatrical doubles here are sinister creatures indeed, massed rows of sombre Victorians whose brutal Christianity is no less severe than the angles of John Macfarlane’s set. As gazes meet across the courtroom in that moment we confront ourselves, discover ourselves in the folk of the Borough, implicated absolutely in their tragedy. Returning for its first Covent Garden Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you have begun to tire of blokey-jokey films such as Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Hangover, then try this female-oriented movie that covers some of the same territory but from the distaff side. It’s well written and acted, and realistically portrays female friendships and how women really talk about men when they’re in all-female company - but most of all it is deliriously, side-splittingly, laugh-out-loud funny. Chick-flick it ain't.If you have begun to tire of blokey-jokey films such as Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Hangover, then try this female- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lightning hasn't quite struck twice at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where Trevor Nunn's dazzling reclamation of early Terence Rattigan (Flare Path) has been followed by the same director's transfer from Chichester of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard's first play. How does this 1966 gloss on Hamlet by way of Beckett hold up today? Engagingly enough, not least when its two tireless leads are in full existentialist flow. But some may nonetheless feel a degree of exhaustion, however much they'll want to cheer Samuel Barnett and Jamie Parker on.I remember being knocked sideways Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...If day one was a warm-up, and day two when the energy levels peaked, this was where we just got swept along in the sheer diversity of the festival Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With so many of the premieres and rediscoveries of the summer opera season coming from the bel canto repertoire, it’s lovely to see Garsington Opera striking out in a different direction. Following on from last year’s L'Incoronazione di Dario (and culminating aptly next year in L’Olimpiade), the company this year offer up that exotic rarity La verità in cimento – a middle-period Vivaldi opera, behind the veil of whose unfamiliar title are hiding a harem of flashing-eyed arias and seductive orchestral writing.Confounding any Orientalist expectation of palm trees and turbans in his designs, Read more ...