Reviews
Kieron Tyler
In summer 2022, one of the year’s most significant archive releases was issued. The Telstar Story was an eight track 10-inch EP focusing on the aural side of how The Tornados’ 1962 instrumental hit “Telstar” was created by independent producer Joe Meek. There were demos, working material from the recording sessions and much more.What gave this eye-opening record added oomph was that the source was the actual masters; tape reels previously hidden in what were dubbed “The Tea Chest Tapes” – boxes of reel-to-reel tapes sold by The Official Receiver in 1968 after Meek’s death the previous year. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre is meant to represent the whole nation – and not just the metropolitan middle classes. So it’s really good to see that Beth Steel – who comes from an East Midlands working-class background and was once writer in residence at this flagship venue – is having her latest play staged here in the Dorfman space. Like The House of Shades, her Almeida Theatre hit from 2022, Till the Stars Come Down is set in Nottinghamshire, in the former mining town of Mansfield, and features a working-class wedding. Although it’s a laugh-out-loud comedy, it does – like the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Reviving Tim Albery’s production of Così fan tutte, now almost 20 years old, again at Leeds Grand Theatre, Opera North have a bet that’s as safe as Don Alfonso’s in the story – that “Women are all the same”. It’s a sure-fire winner, and the best part this time round lies in the balance and contrast of both voices and personalities in the casting of the central pairs of lovers.Albery sees the piece as a kind of Enlightenment-era scientific demonstration, in which truth is to be revealed by an unblinking camera lens. Almost all the action takes place inside a giant “camera obscura”, as we Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Take dollops of Orwell and Kafka, with a sprinkling of Pirandello for a lighter texture, then bake. That could be the recipe for Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror, now transferred from the Almeida to the West End for a limited run.It will probably be bait for the immersive theatre crowd, who get to play the congregation at the wedding of Leyla (Tanya Reynolds) and Joel (Samuel Adewunmi). Though this isn’t event theatre in the style of the hit show Joey and Gina’s Italian Comedy Wedding. This service is soon revealed to be a front for a samizdat play-reading being conducted at the Ministry of Culture by Read more ...
The Handmaid's Tale, English National Opera review - last chance saloon for sub-Atwood baggy monster
David Nice
Never underestimate the enduring power of a great story over an unwieldy operatic setting. Few of us who saw the first ENO production of The Handmaid’s Tale back in 2003 thought the work stood much chance of revival. Yet Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel has justifiably gained even greater hold since then, so here we are on a third run of Poul Ruders’ baggy monster.If there’s a reason to go, it has to be American mezzo Kate Lindsey’s transcendent performance as Offred, one of the many “handmaids” enslaved in the Republic of Gilead to bear children for the wives of powerful men. I missed this Read more ...
James Saynor
The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a novel about Auschwitz is either not a novel, or not about Auschwitz. So that sounds like a “no” to Holocaust movies, too. It was a belief that gathered pace among many thinkers after Schindler’s List (1993), despite the Spielberg film’s widespread acclaim.Mysteries that you puzzle at, surprising twists at strategic points, “character journeys Read more ...
India Lewis
The Dome, as the opening act, Clara Mann noted, is a normally a heavy metal venue (black or dark purple tour bus parked outside, a long queue of piercings and mohawks). It was a lovely confounding of expectations, therefore, to stage Mann’s own plaintive “sad sad” guitar songs (her description) and John Francis Flynn’s inventive and reinterpreted trad folk here. Mann’s voice is beautifully clear, with just the right amount of ornamentation to simplicity, her accompaniment on guitar undercutting her songs without overwhelming their sparse, quietude. A highlight was a song she introduced Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mystery surrounds the provenance of Matthew Vaughn’s new spy fantasy, Argylle. Allegedly, it’s based on the debut novel of the same name by Elly Conway, with Bryce Dallas Howard playing a novelist called Elly Conway in the film. But evidence of the existence of a real-life Conway is hard to find, though there was a rumour that it was a pseudonym used by Taylor Swift (who denies it).But it’s all myth-making grist to the film’s fantastical mill, in which many games are played with multiple identities. Vaughn has previously mucked about with the spy-thriller formula in his Kingsman movies, but Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada ought to be a gift to a choreographer. The film has pathos, good and evil, a bewitchingly gamine heroine, and incidental music by the great Nino Rota, a composer who can find melancholy in the music of carnival and joy in a tragic trumpet solo – a composer who makes you think “Italy” in every phrase. Yet, in the dance adaptation that has just premiered at Sadler’s Wells, that strangest of road movies seems increasingly untranslatable.Not that the show doesn’t contain many pleasingly fluid sequences of dance, which sometimes soar. Choreographer Natalia Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
Twenty years ago, the British-Ghanaian saxophonist Tony Kofi recorded the results of a venture as ambitious as it was potentially audacious: an album of transpositions for sax of music by the master of improvisational quirk and idiosyncratic technique on piano: Theolonius Monk.Plays Monk was, duly, an astonishing debut statement of intent, musicality, and reverent but confident understanding of Monk specifically, and of Bebop’s journeys parallel to Monk’s studio and live recordings for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and Columbia records.During the interim years - and several awards and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The giant crinolines are back, and the winsome little royal children with miniature temples on their heads, and the glorious songs. The King and I is at the Dominion for a six-week run: how does its storyline look under a 21st century follow-spot?Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical, based on a 1944 novel by Margaret Landon, Anna and the King of Siam, ran on Broadway for a record three years, then became a much loved film in 1956, starring the first stage King of Siam, Yul Brynner, with Deborah Kerr as his schoolma'am sparring partner. Anna’s true age and Anglo-Indian background weren’t Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of the depravity of the camps, it is important that the warning from history is regularly proclaimed anew – and heeded.With just a few bleak, snowy back-projections of Silesia’s woodland near Auschwitz (it was enough to chill my soul with memories of a visit 34 years ago) and a lone cellist (Gemma Rosefield) to accompany her on stage, Samantha Spiro Read more ...