Reviews
david.cheal
At 7.55pm I was tired and grouchy. By 9.30pm I was a happy man, thanks to Neil Diamond. Say what you like about this 69-year-old singer and songwriter: he may be a cheesy old showbiz pro, but personally I am partial to a bit of cheesy showbiz, and an hour and a half in his company on the final night of this year’s Radio 2 Electric Proms was a real tonic.With his Thunderbirds eyebrows and his prowling gait, Diamond was an imposing figure whose voice has lost none of its gritty rasp, a quality that lends his songs emotional authenticity. And his rapport with the audience was immaculate – lots Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
We have good days and we have bad days. Ian Bostridge, at last night’s concert at the Barbican, was not having one of his better ones. But time and CD releases wait for no man, and so he gamely ploughed through his programme of music written for three great Baroque tenors (no prizes for guessing what the title of the album is – do you think EMI would pass up an opportunity like that?), and by the end appeared a little more comfortable than at what was a rather tentative start.The concept is actually quite an interesting one. Most of us could tell you about that castrato-extraordinaire Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious Clytemnestra. Spare in story as they are, classical myths contain overwhelmingly strong capsules of emotion. It’s because Pina Bausch was so acute at extracting for dance-theatre the most piercing emotions that I find myself hostile to the frigidity of her dance-opera Iphigenie auf Tauris.Showing at Sadler’s Wells this week, Iphigenie - created a quarter- Read more ...
kate.bassett
Stewart Lee is pretending to be mildly crap. He keeps discussing how he is none too funny, but the point is that his commentary on his own shortcomings thereby turns into a droll running gag. He achieves this with deadpan relish. His delivery is, of course, characteristically sardonic, albeit with an amused glint in the eye. He also frequently stops to spell out how the mechanics of his routine are supposed to be working: po-faced mini-lectures on the art of being hilarious.In Vegetable Stew (no fancy set, just a mic stand and a stool), he appears to be making excuses at the outset, stating Read more ...
fisun.guner
Give me a small side order of Cézannes over a great feast of Gauguins any day. This small, perfectly formed survey will surely be noted as one of the best exhibitions this year, the type of exhibition at which the Courtauld Gallery clearly excels: small, tightly focused, and exploring just one aspect of an artist’s output in order to illuminate his practice as a whole.This approach, though limited by resources, easily competes with that of the flashiest blockbuster. What’s more, it’s an approach that frequently outdoes the big tub-thumbing surveys. And given the paintings on view in this Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Americans are chastised, often wrongly, for possessing a scant sense of irony, so I mean it as no criticism whatsoever of The Kids Are All Right to point out that the title of Lisa Cholodenko's wonderful film is altogether un-ironic. In less caring or careful hands, or a not so fully empathic context, this might be a portrait of irretrievably damaged youth with the parents deemed responsible, of the sort that proliferates on the London stage. Instead, the movie embraces conflict and confusion, lustful impulses and our capacity to wound, all the while suggesting that life in its imperfections Read more ...
carole.woddis
With controversial documents – WikiLeaks and the David Kelly toxicology reports – once more hitting the headlines, Iraq is ever with us. As are its ghosts. Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End, winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, now at the Arcola Studio in Hackney in a spare, eloquent revival by Jessica Swale, figures three of them. It is a painful reminder of the human cost of a desperate and degrading period in their, and our, history.Any accounts from Amnesty or the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture tells you that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If any play of the past two decades deserves the label legendary it must be Sarah Kane’s debut, which was condemned as “this disgusting feast of filth” on its arrival in 1995, but is now firmly ensconced in the canon of contemporary playwriting. Although the shock of its original production, which in retrospect simply heralded the appearance of a distinctive new voice, has led audiences to expect a similarly frightful experience every time it is revived, subsequent productions have emphasised the play’s poetry and its relevance.But, it must be admitted, the story does sound grim when you Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I was a very good soprano.” Of all the sentences you’d not expect to hear tumbling from the mouth of Keith Richards, that one is up there with "Tap water for me, please, and I do hope this vegan restaurant is non-smoking." He has the addled larynx of a Fag Ash Lil who, when not mopping and dusting, perches on a barstool glugging gin and puffing on Bensons. But once upon a time little Richards did once sing for the Queen. Got a free bus ride up to the London and all, he recalled with a wide-eyed cackle. When his voice broke and he was relieved of his cassock, he was most put out. “We sang our Read more ...
mark.hudson
If you'd been a painter at the time of Impressionism, what would you have done? Rushed to Paris to become a disciple of Manet or Monet? Taken the Symbolist route with Odilon Redon or headed to Brittany to whoop it up with Gauguin and co? No, the chances are you'd probably have got it wrong and, like the so-called Glasgow Boys, hitched your talents to a now virtually forgotten figure like Jules Bastien-Lepage. Jules who? Exactly.A loose group of some 20 painters, the Glasgow Boys worked at a time when Scotland’s industrial capital, the second city of the Empire, was asserting its cultural Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Those who want a taste of the way the West End used to be - that's to say, bustling star vehicles where the furniture isn't the only amply upholstered aspect of the evening - will relish When We Are Married, the 1938 J B Priestley comedy that tends to hove into view every 10 or 15 years, or thereabouts. But I wonder whether theatrical pleasure-seekers will be prepared for the tetchiness and rancour that have come to the fore of this once time-honoured comic warhorse. Indeed, take away the rather hurriedly upbeat finish and you could be mistaken for thinking that Strindberg had suddenly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.To the passions of love and death – those stalwart emotional bookends of the Read more ...