Reviews
Veronica Lee
It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.Henry’s ethnicity plays a big part in Cradle to Rave: A Musical Journey, as well, of course, his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Processed through the screenwriting circuitry of Andrew Davies, TV's novel-adapter par excellence, it has emerged as a superior soap tailored with mercenary expertise for that demographic sweet spot that is 9pm on a Sunday night.Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel, which was published the year after its author's death, is a story of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? But the first night of the Berlin Philharmonic's four-day stay in London (yesterday, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight and tomorrow, the Barbican), in which three of the four pieces required conductorless chamber ensembles, did seem decidedly show-offy. Can these very fine orchestral members really rattle off a quartet as well as a symphony? Not without Simon Rattle, they can't.That's not to say that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nobody who plays Ashton Kutcher quite like Ashton Kutcher and, in this pleasant and undemanding romcom, he plays another cute guy whom all the girls (and boys of course) swoon over. This time he’s Adam, the sweet and rather vulnerable twentysomething son of Kevin Kline’s rascally-old-devil father, who's three-times divorced, still doing drugs, and chasing young women as his 60th birthday looms.In fact, it’s that paternal girl-chasing on which this initially episodic film turns after we have met Adam and Emma (Natalie Portman) at several points in their lives - first as teenagers Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra.At Sadler’s Wells in an intensely emotional new production this weekend inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Cuando yo era (When I Was…) she exhibits her trademark adamantine sombreness, dressed inevitably like a granny (she did so when she was 20, she does so now she’s 40), frowning Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Forked lightning glimpsed through an aeroplane window, a silken dancer spilling stars in a snow-filled sky, a dragon tattoo etched on a man’s back: we’ve grown to expect seductive alchemy of images from the work of Quebecois master of visual theatre Robert Lepage, and in his latest show he doesn’t disappoint.For all that, The Blue Dragon – which picks up the action of director, writer and actor Lepage’s Eighties breakthrough The Dragons' Trilogy 25 years on, and is co-written with a collaborator on that piece, Marie Michaud – is a comparatively distilled piece for a theatre-maker who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance.Now Treme is here, though at the moment sadly confined to the elite mini-monde of Sky Atlantic. Having watched the pilot, I felt ill equipped to deliver a definitive judgment of Read more ...
David Nice
Too many column inches have been devoted to Percy Grainger’s sado-masochistic sexplay and celebration of blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon supremacy, but it’s his music I love. And have done ever since they celestially sounded the wineglasses for Tribute to Foster, his fantasia on "Camptown Races", at the 1982 Aldeburgh Festival (Britten had been an adoring fan). None of our main orchestras has yet taken up a similar gauntlet on the 50th anniversary of the Australian-born one-off’s death. So hurrah, in principle, for the smaller-scale enterprise of Kings Place’s four-day festival devised by pianist and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Look past the cum buckets, the trucker pussy, the fuck you-ing and cunt-hungry beasting (librettist Richard Thomas's words, not mine), the mountainous titties and cheap promotional candy that had been confected for the legions of rubbishy celebrity opera virgins scattered in the Royal Opera House audience at last night's world premiere and you will find a profoundly conservative, and mostly not unattractive, new opera in Anna Nicole.Most conservative was the story. Put-upon female has life destroyed for evening's entertainment - ie, classic operatic fallen-woman porn. Ask Violetta, Lulu Read more ...
judith.flanders
Louise Bourgeois died last year at nearly 100, a revered figure: survivor of the Surrealist movement into the 21st century, a pioneer of autobiographical expression, whose fame came only late in life. Tracey Emin, by contrast, found fame early, coming to the attention of the general public in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation show at the Royal Academy while she was still in her thirties. Both, however, work a single-mindedly autobiographical vein – indeed, open their veins figuratively to pour their lives into their art. The idea of a collaborative work, therefore, seems natural.Bourgeois created Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Men. They say these strange creatures never leave the playground. Even when the years have passed, boys stubbornly remain boys, chatting rubbish, competing manfully and finally burning out. In Enda Walsh’s Penelope, which was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival last year and now visits London, four men compete for the love of one woman, and they are as likely to be found bickering over a small barbecued sausage as they are to be seen fighting to the death with knives. The only question is: can they also work together?Penelope, produced by Galway’s Druid theatre company, was commissioned by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.The revelation didn't come immediately - nothing in Wagner comes immediately - though it didn't take long for the music to start having its Read more ...