Reviews
Ismene Brown
Apocrypha is a word that has acquired a dubious meaning, for books of questioned value and authenticity, texts in various religions that may not necessarily be held divine. The Belgian-Moroccan dancemaker Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's dance work Apocrifu applies the word and its queries to the holiest of texts themselves, the Koran, Bible, Kojiki, in a secular era where religion is more about politics than faith. This might sound dubious material for a remarkable evening when you were choosing dance shows to see at the Brighton Festival - the transvestite cabaret probably sounded a better bet. Wrong Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Surely, any film called Win Win and starring Paul Giamatti is being deeply ironic? After all, you don't expect the hangdog star of Sideways and Barney's Version to do the feel-good Hollywood thing, and it seems of a piece with Giamatti's baleful, ever-defeated demeanour that a scene of him jogging along should end with the actor coming to a panting halt.Life isn't easy in the Job-like landscape in which Giamatti has specialised on screen, to the degree that a clanking boiler beneath his Win Win character Mike Flaherty's New Jersey office begins to sound doomily apocalyptic. Even his six-year- Read more ...
judith.flanders
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass only five decades of a nearly seven-decade-long career.A Swiss artist (he was one of the few, or perhaps Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Which came first? The low national self-esteem or the shit national football team? Is it possible, in the interests of blending in with one’s countrymen, to stimulate in oneself a love of the beautiful game? And can Britishness be boiled down to an application test? Total Football, from the two-man company Ridiculusmus, is a fleet-footed comedy which investigates the shifting parameters of what it means to belong in a country where symbols of national pride are hard to come by. Unless you count Wayne Rooney.The drama, to be reductive about a playful, shape-shifting think piece, Read more ...
David Nice
Gustav Mahler died, according to his wife Alma’s memoirs, at midnight on 18 May, 1911. Anyone mystically inclined to connect noughts and "o"s – you see it crossed my mind – might find some spooky link between 00:00 (pedantically, the time of death was 23:05) and the fact that, for this centenary concert, indisposed conductor OramO (Sakari) was belatedly replaced by OnO (Kazushi). What transpired was delight – near-delirium, in fact – that a supreme master had total control of the composer’s Second (Resurrection) Symphony: a theatrical celebration of life and death rather than a transcendental Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. This at any rate was the claim of a scenic documentary which joined Augustus John and his young protégé James Dickson Innes on their productive two-year sojourn at the foot of the mountain.It’s a mountain in the Welsh sense of the word mynydd, being at 854 m/2 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding Filter's interest in the synergy between technology and text with a subset of Shakespeareans who have been wandering the Forest of Arden on and off for the past two years, Silence plunges its expert ensemble into the forest of metal that makes up one aspect of Jon Bausor's set. Will the result be as you like it?Technophobes may moan, even as others Read more ...
josh.spero
Although in perhaps a less ostentatious manner than is familiar from Louis Theroux's documentaries, BBC Two's Wonderland last night nevertheless took the well-worn path of finding an odd-seeming community and examining its customs, morals and characters. In this case, it was the 20,000 Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill, north-east London, who - we were led to believe - had some pretty funny ideas about love.The superficial oddities of the culture must have seemed so inviting to the film-maker, Paddy Wivell: pious observance of hundreds of biblical rules of behaviour, from circumcision to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Feminism it certainly isn’t, though it is bizarrely refreshing to observe that the heroine fleeing a maniac in a state of comely undress is in her mid-forties. It might be baby steps rather than huge strides of progress but nevertheless, The Orphanage’s Belén Rueda once again makes a cheeringly mature and cerebral, yet still hauntingly beautiful scream siren. It’s a shame that Julia’s Eyes as a whole lacks her class and consistency.The Spanish director Guillem Morales’s second feature (after 2004’s The Uncertain Guest) is an entertaining shambles which begins with the death of Sara ( Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There must be at least 100 more interesting pianists in the concert world than Lang Lang, but perhaps he is just the best publicist around, because nothing else can explain why such a vacuous display as he gave last night at the Royal Festival Hall could bring a standing ovation. Most of the evening felt like being on a plushly cushioned chintz sofa with Tinkerbell, listening to Bach, Schubert and Chopin being served as a cream tea. Lang Lang Inspires is the slogan at the Southbank Centre all this week, but what is inspiring? His art - or just his vast skills as a public communicator, with 40 Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A stench of decay rises from Howard Davies's production of this 1903 drama by Anton Chekhov. Ranyevskaya’s wooden home, designed with characteristic visual eloquence by Bunny Christie, is quietly rotting. Weeds sprout through cracks, the windows are filthy; an ugly pylon raises its arms in the foreground, its wires stretching into a future of seismic political and social change for which the family – and Russia itself – are so ill prepared.This is a staging of admirable complexity, in which our sympathies are engaged only to be repelled, and tenderness and longing are often met with the most Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once more unto the beach, dear friends. Pirates of the Caribbean is back for a fourth raid of the world’s wallet. This time it’s in 3D. As in Dumb, Dumberer and Depp. Film scholars may also wish to note that Pirates 4 was actually shot 6000 miles away in Hawaii. Among those places closer to Barbados are Zimbabwe, Syria, Greenland and Antarctica.If one weren’t slightly wise by now to the jaw-dropping cynicism of Tinseltown’s service providers, the film which calls itself On Stranger Tides would take the breath away. The latest instalment comes courtesy of the following rationale from Jerry Read more ...