Reviews
David Nice
Is that asking a lot? Probably not, considering what's already been achieved at this year's BBC Proms. Looking back on it, last night felt implausibly rich yet gloriously digestible, too, at least in retrospect. I couldn't have predicted that I would be so swept away by the jam-packed wonders that came from Jean-Christophe Spinosi's Ensemble Matheus and their soloists. But I did know that Denève was fairly certain to deliver the goods, on the strength not only of a spectacular Philharmonia concert earlier this year but also from an RSNO Prom two seasons back which sagged a bit with Stephen Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy pastoral, pitting town and country against one another in the dirtiest and most gleefully anarchic of fist-fights. Heaving bosoms, brooding farm-hands and a herd of murderous cows all await you in this rural idyll of a comedy, which proves that bucolic nastiness is not always confined to the woodshed.The opening sequence of Tamara Drewe might as well have “A Read more ...
howard.male
Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because of the radio airplay and unanimous critical praise she has received for her debut album Own Side Now from everyone from the Daily Mail to the Independent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if by this time next year she’s performing at the Union Chapel or even the Barbican.I’ve never seen a Windmill crowd so attentive to an act before. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is it an example of our cultural insularity that no one I know has ever heard of Wajdi Mouawad? Born in Lebanon, he’s the most performed contemporary French-language playwright and his 2003 masterpiece, Scorched, has been staged all over the world. You’d think that the National Theatre would be begging to produce it, but no, that honour has fallen to Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic. Not for the first time, a state-funded venue has been trumped by a commercial one. In a bold production by Dialogue theatre company, which opened last night at the Old Vic Tunnels, a performance space under Waterloo Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now the heroically worldly Sunday Morning Live. General Synod noticed it earlier this year when complaints were made about the lack of religious programming. And the secular society noticed it when they rushed to the Beeb’s defence commending its secular and rationalist output. From last night it seems that the secular agenda is even at work in the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The difficulty with fashioning real-life events as drama lies in the temptation to turn the central players into characters that an audience will naturally warm to. But real life isn’t like that. Bad things can happen to people you wouldn’t necessarily feel much warmth towards, or sympathy for. But a drama, especially a prime-time television thriller, requires us to root for the protagonist. It’s not enough to simply know that a just outcome has been achieved. We have to be on emotional tenterhooks, even if we know the outcome in advance. And that’s the trouble with U Be Dead, a thriller Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Here we go again. Art takes on capitalism, round 4,598,756. The blissful life of Harry Joy, ad exec extraordinaire, beloved father of two, is (surprise, surprise) not quite what it seems. His wife is having an affair, his daughter is fellating his son for drugs and his business clients are spreading cancer. He thinks he's in hell. But this ain't hell; it's the greedy, bourgeois reality of a capitalist West. Stalin would have been mighty proud of Australian Brett Dean's new opera, Bliss, which was receiving its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival. Having said that, Stalin Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling of being at a party where everyone knows everyone, and the party’s held nightly at the same house. It surely is not the misleading title that accounts for the wildly enthusiastic flow of fans - there’s nothing dirty about this squeaky-clean story, and there’s not that much dancing either. No, it must be that eternal celluloid magic, the girlish fantasy of entering a favourite movie and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So much of this London theatre year has been spent watching American work that it's doubly bracing to find some genuine English dramatic rediscoveries interspersed amongst The Prisoner of Second Avenue and La Bête one month, Clybourne Park and (still to open) Deathtrap another.The high point of the 2010 National Theatre repertoire to date has been After the Dance, Terence Rattigan's extraordinarily wounding yet also funny look at a community on the verge of self-immolation. And now comes the chamber-sized Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond with a production that is scarcely less rewarding: The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We should lie down to listen to music much more often. Gravity pulls away the thought and frown lines, smoothes the intellectual tracks and folds on the face, while you feel the blood in your head pumping lushly to dreamier parts of your brain. Joanna MacGregor’s If-A-Tree festival at the Royal Opera House this weekend may well be hitting some fey bases along its way, but Earthrise: The Lying Down Concert - was a spectacularly enjoyable opening event.The Floral Hall became, aurally and visually, something more of an Arboricultural Hall, dark-lit, a black carpet throughout on which hundreds of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Few artists can creep you out like Gregor Schneider. His work is scary and it’s absurd. But even as you giggle nervously when confronted with its less than subtle deployment of shock-horror tactics, a more profound disquiet creeps up on you. Schneider knows how to tap into our visceral fears.You may recall his Artangel project a few years back, Die Familie Schneider. Two adjacent terraced houses in Whitechapel, east London, were identically kitted out. In each of these drably furnished, impoverished residences an “identical” family – twins - had been installed: Mother could be found Read more ...
stephen.walsh
My abiding memory of the Berlin Philharmonic’s second Prom under Sir Simon Rattle on Saturday will be of 6,000 people listening with rapt, or at any rate silent, concentration to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. Has it ever happened before? Perhaps in Boulez’s day, though I’m not sure even he ever filled this hall for these particular composers. And what does it signify? That we were the stragglers who failed to get tickets for the previous evening’s Beethoven and Mahler? That we would put up with anything to hear Karita Mattila sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs? Or possibly that, after a Read more ...