Reviews
aleks.sierz
The news last week that Michael Grandage will step down next year as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse feels like one of those moments when an era ends. His ability to programme not only the small Donmar but also to bring excellent productions to the West End — notably Jude Law in Hamlet — is exemplified in the current mini-season at the Trafalgar Studios, which opened last night with American playwright Beau Willimon’s new play about the New Orleans floods of 2005.The concept of the play is simple. Following Hurricane Katrina, two African Americans, Malcolm and EZ, find themselves Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are any number of ways, it's increasingly clear, to approach A Number. Caryl Churchill's astonishingly prismatic and beautiful play about genetic cloning, nature versus nurture and the ineffable mystery of existence as amplified by Shakespeare in a certain well-known tragedy gets its latest London airing this week. To be (happy) or not to be (happy)? That's among the various questions raised in a two-hander (albeit with four characters) that runs less than an hour; any longer than that and your brain just might explode.Jonathan Munby first directed this play four years ago at the Read more ...
howard.male
”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green light) that it’s hard not to contemplate the notion that there’s some kind of grim finishing school that all blossoming sadistic bastards are obliged to attend before getting their licence to kill.But while Morse would have snorted dismissively at the machete-inflicted carnage and suggested to Lewis that it was time for a pint, DCI Banks - taking Read more ...
fisun.guner
“Henry VIII is the only king whose shape we remember,” David Starkey tells us in the first of a new series of “polemical essays” on British art. To demonstrate, he reduces the king’s form to its bare Cubist geometry. He sketches a trapezoid for the chest – an impressive 54 inches in life, as attested by his made-to-measure suit of armour; two “chicken-wing” triangles for the puffed sleeves; two simple parallel lines for the wide-apart legs. Oh, and a small, inverted triangle for the codpiece. This last addition, as originally drawn-in for comedic value by the Tudor historian G R Elton, and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.Probably the most impressive thing about the impressively impassioned account of Enescu's great single-movement tone poem Légende was Hardenberger's control of dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. The expressive feel and sweep of this late-Romantic work was perfectly communicated by both Hardenberger and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The long-delayed sequel has earned no more than a small, insignificant footnote in movie history. Psycho II, Gregory’s Two Girls and Texasville, to name only three disparate examples, were all superfluous post-scriptums to much venerated, much earlier films. There is at least a pretext for another trip to Wall Street. Since Gordon Gekko last blew the fumes of his fat Havana in your face, money has learnt to talk louder than ever. But there’s another reason why, 22 years on, Oliver Stone’s sequel to his portrait of Reaganomics in action counts as much less of a despoliation: the original was Read more ...
alice.lagnado
“Last summer we played a gala performance at the London Coliseum which included extracts from Spartacus, and most of the brass players wore earplugs because the music was relentlessly loud,” says Paul Murphy, Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, the orchestra of the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
From the conductor’s podium, the music is more filtered than for the musicians, Murphy says, but even so, after some performances he occasionally suffers bouts of tinnitus. “Although it is true that sometimes we can perceive pieces to be louder than they actually are, particularly those that Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Ailish Tynan plays a short, fat, bald man in David Alden's staging of Handel's Radamisto at ENO. It is, she says, an occupational hazard when venturing into the cross-gender world of 18th-century opera. That Tynan is one of our brightest young stars - a shining lyric soprano equally at home in the rarefied world of song as she is in opera - only adds to the somewhat surreal prospect of hearing that voice emanating from a grotesquely fat-suited body. Tynan herself is a pretty, five-foot bundle of fun whose songful Irish brogue is entirely in keeping with the voice she produces. Getting a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
A few years ago a friend told me that Brighton resident Nick Cave had been spotted singing "The Wheels on the Bus" at a local nursery. This might have been an apocryphal incident, but it still highlights a predicament of the older rock star. How do you deal with life's quotidian issues – the daily grind – while still rocking out? Cave’s fiendishly simple solution? Ignore the problem and do both, combining school runs by day with explosive gigs like this one last night.Grinderman might feel like a perverse back-to-basics outlet for the UK-based Australian, but, two albums of literate, swampy, Read more ...
David Nice
As experienced Wagnerian Jiří Bělohlávek came on to launch the BBCSO's new season in mid-air with the Tristan Prelude, I wondered whether the world's finest interpreter of Isolde's serving maid Brangäne, lustrous mezzo Sarah Connolly, was waiting to up her game, and her range, and tackle the Liebestod. Sadly not: that remained, as often in concert, Music Minus One. Connolly was there for a different kind of game-upping - a noble attempt to enter the charmed circle that's developed around the memory of the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with husband Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs.Hunt Lieberson Read more ...
james.woodall
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Goethe's Faust to the German soul, though I did once have a German friend who valued George Eliot's Middlemarch more highly. If there's a real English competitor to Goethe in the literary stakes, it is of course Shakespeare, but that doesn't really work either, because, when not thinking of Goethe, many Germans consider Shakespeare neither better nor worse; simply theirs.Goethe of course wanted to infuse his then fragmented culture - the late 18th century - with something as apparently unifying as Shakespeare, though the German writer's country, as Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It will come as no surprise that a critic should instantly become a fan of a comic whose debut show at the Edinburgh Fringe (for which Alun Cochrane received a Perrier Award nomination) was a show titled My Favourite Words in My Best Stories. Anyone who loves words is a hit with me - we’re ploughing the same furrow after all, just in different ways.In fact, the first time I tried to see that show in 2004 I was the only person at a London preview; there had been a misunderstanding between his promoters and the venue, and Cochrane and I had turned up for a gig that no one else knew was Read more ...