Reviews
sue.steward
A soundtrack of "Purple Haze", "Hey Joe" and other eternal Jimi Hendrix hits, is currently drifting out of the Snap Gallery along the swanky Piccadilly Arcade in Mayfair. A boutique exhibition space, Snap sits incongruously amongst purveyors of "fine" jewellery and gentlemans’ tailoring and its front windows are transforming the chi-chi mall with Gered Mankowitz’s photographs of the Sixties guitar genius, Hendrix.Two large portraits shimmer under acid pinks and blues like sophisticated versions of Warhol’s negative/postive prints. “Soft-sharps”, as they are known, they cause colour tones and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No modern comedy worth its salt misses the chance to keep you chortling as the end credits roll. Bloopers, bleeps and assorted outtakes off the cutting-room floor generally provide the fare. In The Other Guys we take a different tack. Whizzy graphics illustrate the extent to which corporate greed has raped the American economy. It’s powerful stuff. The only wonder is what it’s doing bolted onto a film without a serious bone in its body. Take the following gag about speeding to a crime scene in a Prius. If you find it offensive, you should certainly avoid the movie and maybe the rest of this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily, this excellent documentary proved that I was right all along by building a watertight case for regarding him as something of a neglected legend.Not neglected by the record-buying public, of course, because Alpert’s string of Tijuana Brass albums in the 1960s made him the top-earning act in the USA for a three-year period. In 1966, four of Alpert’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Middle-class family angst is this season’s theme at the Royal Court Theatre. And, in his new play about sex and intimacy, which opened last night, playwright Nick Payne puts the lust in Wanderlust and creates a contemporary tale of wandering hands and wandering affections. We are in a nice suburban part of England, and the mix of pain and pleasure will be all too familiar to most audiences, whether they are teenagers who can squirm at the antics of the youngsters, or middle-aged couples who might find the more mature characters shockingly recognisable.Alan and Joy are a professional couple Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a strange thing that boxing, that most dramatic of sports, hasn't been the subject of more plays. It has a protagonist and antagonist, the ring is a ready-made stage, and the sport has thrown up more than its fair share of larger-than-life characters. So, as with buses, when you're waiting for one to come along, two arrive in quick succession; Roy Williams's Sucker Punch, which was at the Royal Court earlier this year, and now the equally brilliant Beautiful Burnout. Comparisons are invidious, so I won't make any, other than to remark that they are two very different beasts.Bryony Lavery Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by Corrie’s creator, Tony Warren, and be done with it. But Daran Little, himself a former writer on the show, resisted that urge (well, mostly) when penning The Road to Coronation Street, an affectionate and witty prequel that told us how the soap came about, or rather, how it almost didn’t.Although Corrie is now a staple of British TV (and many have Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“I think men will enjoy the thriller aspect,” pronounces the heroine of this audaciously tortuous tale. “The machismo, the twists, the sex.” She may well be right; but if the men get all the best lines, there’s plenty here for women with an appetite for a bit of slick chicanery to relish too. Margaret, writer and celebrated shrink, is describing her own latest pot boiler. But she’s also summarising the plot of Richard Bean’s play, in turn based on David Mamet’s screenplay for the movie that marked his directorial screen debut back in 1987.It’s just one of many moments in this smart-talking, Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s something deliciously extravagant about this Pinocchio by composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton. It’s remarkably faithful to Carlo Collodi’s picaresque text, and so we get everything. Elaborately costumed characters enter with spectacular props, then disappear having barely made their point, my favourite being the four top-hatted black rabbits who threaten to escort Pinocchio offstage in a coffin after he’s refused to take his medicine.This revival of a piece first staged in 2007 is on a massive scale – elaborate sets, dancers, puppets, acrobats and a large chorus, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Design For Living is one of Noël Coward’s less performed plays but it fair crackles with bons mots - you know you’re in good hands when delightfully old-fashioned words like “horrid”, “bloody”, “cheap” and “vulgar” are tossed around with, well, gay abandon. What a shame, then, that Anthony Page’s production, while wonderfully easy on the eye and despite some spirited performances from its three leads, doesn’t quite catch fire.Even though it’s about three bohemians - Otto, a painter, playwright Leo and designer Gilda - nearly 80 years ago Design For Living was considered a very daring sex Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The pairing of Philip Glass and Franz Kafka is a natural one. A shared fascination with obsession, with developing a simple premise to its most densely worked-out, most logical conclusion is evident in both, and it is only perhaps surprising that it took until 2000 for Glass to produce In The Penal Colony. Exploiting the minimal surroundings of the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre to maximal effect, this UK premiere production forgoes inference and suggestion in favour of all-out confrontation, etching its message brutally into the audience.Adhering to the outlines of Kafka’s original Read more ...
judith.flanders
Rachel Whiteread is best known for her exploration of space, of presence and absence, of how we look at what is present – and absent – in the textures of our lives. House, her life-sized cast of a house in a derelict street in East London, first brought her to fame, and more recently Untitled (Plinth), her mockingly affectionate take on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, a resin-cast replica of the plinth itself, literally shaped a new viewpoint of that absence in the heart of the West End. Now in two exhibitions of (mostly) drawings and some sculpture, the viewer can follow along, looking Read more ...
judith.flanders
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their enduring credit, then, that their performances look as fresh and as spontaneous as they do.In Hymn, artistic director Judith Jamison’s tribute to Ailey, her mentor and the company’s founder, she tells, in voice-over, of loving "spectacle, yes", but also "social statements, yes", wanting to transmit not only Ailey’s own "blood memories", his lines Read more ...