Reviews
Sarah Kent
The downstairs of the Whitechapel Gallery has been converted into a ballroom or, rather, a film set of a ballroom. From time to time, a couple glides briefly across the floor, dancing a perfunctory tango. And they are really hamming it up, not for the people watching them – of whom they are apparently oblivious – but for an imaginary camera.We seem either to be witnessing a film in the making or the reenactment of a well known scene from an old movie. There they are again, upstairs. This time the couple appears on screen performing the same sequence (main picture), but for a camera on a dolly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This three-part drama arrives trailing clouds of big-byline glory. Michael Sheen directed and produced it (as well as making fleeting appearances on screen), James Graham wrote it and documentary-maker Adam Curtis co-produced it.But what is it? Part social commentary, part Welsh myth and part travelogue, it tells the story of a family from Port Talbot, the Driscolls, who get caught up in a cataclysmic industrial dispute at the steelworks and end up going on the run. In an ironic and not very subtle inversion of the never-ending saga of Channel boat crossings, they flee across the Welsh border Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s tempting to see the second gala created by Ukrainian-born Ivan Putrov as a reflection of the shift in Ukraine’s fortunes since his first one in March 2022. Somehow, just weeks after Ukraine was invaded, Putrov and his fellow student in Kyiv, Alina Cojocaru, brought the world’s finest principals to the London Coliseum for a show-stopping gala that was as moving as it was finely executed.Now Ukraine languishes for lack of munitions, its hard-won gains in the balance again, and Putrov has had to rally support for his second gala – which funds young arts students in Ukraine – in a fraught Read more ...
India Lewis
After a first read of the blurb for Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be forgiven for assuming that this is merely a gimmick.The book does what it says on the tin: each "chapter" begins with the next letter of the alphabet, with the content then roughly alphabetised within this, all of the sentences based on “half a million words from a decade’s worth of journals”. However, this book, written in her familiar, autobiographical style, flourishes against its constraints.Perhaps best known for writing about the decision of whether or not to become a parent (2018’s Motherhood), Heti Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of the first series of Kin found Dublin’s Kinsella crime family ridding themselves of bloodsucking drug baron Eamon Cunningham, but this was not an unalloyed blessing. As this second series opens, the Kinsellas are having to make new arrangements with the Batuks, the Turkish family who are the source of all the local drug supplies. Snag is, the Turks want the Kinsellas to repay Cunningham’s outstanding debt to them of €70m. Oh, and another thing – they want the head of Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox), since he killed a senior member of the Batuk clan.Difficult decisions have to be made Read more ...
Robert Beale
Placing the UK premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto (for cello and orchestra) after Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was probably an inspired idea from the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Joshua Weilerstein.In its day, the so-called “Military” Symphony was not only striking on account of its use of novel instrumental effects – the “Turkish music” sound of triangle, cymbals and big drum for one, and clarinets (heard, military-band style, alongside oboes and flute) for another – but the clever and comical way they were brought into a context that was otherwise seemingly orthodox and almost Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's probably fair to say that Paul Foot is an acquired taste for some; his absurdist, poetic comedy isn't for everyone but he has built a strong and loyal following without the help of television exposure. And now in Dissolve, which debuted at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, his comedy takes a more personal turn as he describes the mental health problems that have dogged him for decades.Foot draws the audience in gently with some trademark whimsy though, as he describes the “disturbances” in his head and also tells a convoluted tale about a bird. Yes, it's a contrived metaphor he tells us, but he Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The dolefulness of the title Loss of Life is reflected by what’s in the grooves. The lyrics of the Todd Rundgren/Queen-esque fifth track “Bubblegum Dog” include the line “None of this seems like fun but maybe that’s the point, man.” Further in, “Nothing Changes” seems to be about wanting to be rescued from an enervating stasis.Such melancholy is accompanied by an archness. With its key line “nothing prepares you for loss of life,” it is not possible to take woozy album closer “Loss of Life “ as a po-faced rumination on ceasing to exist. A Day-Glo sense of absurdity is in-keeping with the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lou Christie fancied offering some social comment. The lyrics of his May 1967 single “Self Expression (The Kids on the Street Will Never Give in)” tackled inter-generational conflict: “Papa I don't see things your way, Like choosin' my own religion, Like where I hang out's my decision, Self-expression all the way.”On the flip, the mind-blowing “Back to the Days of the Romans” observed a society in decline. “We're repeating Roman history,” sang Christie with gusto. “On the streets where kicks are our beat, It's a tortured way of livin', It's not a new bag, Letting your conscience sag, The Read more ...
David Nice
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as the ill-fated Miles in his operatic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The upheaval Hemmings wrought in Aldeburgh’s Crag House when Britten and his life-partner Peter Pears were living there has potential for a similar ambiguity to the opera’s carousel of what’s innocent and what’s “depraved,” and Kevin Kelly has realized the essential drama in it.The main problem is that no 12-year-old of unbroken voice was going to act in a more explicit take than the opera’s on who is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such previous successes from this same author as The Ferryman and his mighty Jerusalem. Telling of the toxic legacy of a Blackpool stage mother, the play follows The Ferryman in granting pride of place to the inestimable Laura Donnelly (Butterworth's partner), and this dramatist's collaboration with his similarly Tony-winning director, Sam Mendes, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Thursday night at Islington’s legendary Hope and Anchor: a challenging time and place to get an audience going, not least following the very assured edgy-yet-sweet singer-songwriter Daisy Veacock, another newish-kid-on-the-block on the edge of the recognition so many young artists yearn for.Tom Webber, the boy-wonder from Didcot, now a fully-grown man, is clearly a little nervous, and it takes him a few songs to really get into his crowd-winning magic stride. The new material, four out of six in the early part of the set - need more running in, and placing them at the opening, nerves Read more ...