Reviews
joe.muggs
If there's one festival in Britain where people are ready for the rain, it's the Green Man. After all, nobody goes to the Brecon Beacons to sunbathe, right? The weekend, which began the spate of boutique and specialist festivals that dominate the summer season now, remains one of the most spirited in the UK, and its crowd seems to be one of the hardiest even when, as this year, the deluge is near-continuous. It helps that the site is both beautiful and sloping, so it wasn't able to turn into a grim waist-deep mudbath; the real saviour of the festival, though, is that attention to detail in Read more ...
theartsdesk
When Sarah Millican won the If.comedy newcomer award two years ago, it was with one of the most accomplished shows I had ever seen at the Fringe - by newbie or veteran - and now the South Shields stand-up has made critics reach for the superlatives again with another hour of superbly crafted comedy.Sarah Millican, The Stand ***** Entitled Chatterbox (a name she was given at school but a quality that, she slyly tells, she is now making a living from), is on the face of it Millican talking away to the audience about the everyday concerns of her life. But it’s much more than that as makes Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art dedicated to Mozart, Shakespeare and Britten. Ambitious indeed of a bunch of Cambridge undergrads and alumni to mount The Magic Flute and the operatic Midsummer Night’s Dream side by side. Did they pull it off? Just, in the case of the Britten, which is saying something given a score which is... well, again, intricate and mysterious are the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?Whatever the reason, the point in such intriguing programmes is not to come out cursing at being served minor-league Read more ...
howard.male
There is a lot of talk about the contestants' experience of Big Brother but little about the viewer’s experience. During its decade on air there was a drop-off of both the red tops' shock-horror coverage and the intellectualised justifications put forward by the quality press, and inevitably this resulted in viewing figures also declining with each passing year. But I confess I remained an avid viewer. It’s not what you watch, it’s how you watch it, I would say to baffled friends to justify my addiction.But however much I spoke of how BB was an education in not taking people at face value, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comic Greg Davies has made us wait for his solo debut - he’s in his early forties, appeared at the Fringe as part of sketch group We Are Klang for a few years and more latterly has been starring in The Inbetweeners on Channel 4 as Mr Gilbert. Before that he was a drama teacher in a secondary school for 13 years. But boy, was it worth the wait.Greg Davies, Pleasance *****Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog is a run-through of his life so far, done as a sort of classroom lecture, complete with blackboard and chalk, and a book with short stories he dips into from time to time, including one about how Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Director Bong Joon-ho watched Psycho as he prepared his latest film, one of the most discomfiting visions of mother-love since Norman Bates last ran a motel. There is Hitchcockian perversity, too, in Bong’s casting of Kim Hye-ja, an iconic Korean actress specialising in benign mothers, as a far more troubled maternal spirit. This nameless mother will do anything for her son, which feels like a threat as much as a promise, as Bong’s gothically atmospheric melodrama plays out.Hye-ja is the elderly single mother of Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin), a 27-year-old who has a child’s mental age, and is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“The curse of Schumann,” remarked Prom director Roger Wright to me before Monday’s concert, bemoaning the fact that only (only!) 2,000 seats had been sold for the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s concert under Thomas Dausgaard - whereas Dausgaard's earlier Tchaikovsky/ Sibelius Prom had been jam-packed. But he was right: the Albert Hall is more than half empty with those numbers, and looks it. A pity. I can’t recall a better, more spirited, or indeed more interesting performance of any Schumann symphony than Dausgaard’s of the C major, No 2, and it absolutely deserved a full house.
Schumann was Read more ...
theartsdesk
Rob Rouse is one of those hugely likeable comedians guaranteed to make you laugh and so it proves with The Great Escape, prompted by his family’s recent move to the Peak District, an expertly crafted autobiographical narrative with lots of fresh observational comedy thrown in for good measure.Rob Rouse, Underbelly ****
Although the Peak District has a slightly lower crime rate than south London, Rouse tells us drily, there’s still plenty going on that would shock their previous neighbours, including dirty dancing by septuagenarians at weddings and a bit of dogging in the local layby. Rouse Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have been the glossy, Labrador-like abandon of John Wilson and his fabulous orchestra, but barely two bars of the Oklahoma! overture had passed before I caught myself grinning and drifting into critical neutral. Richard Rodgers’ scores are built for a symphony orchestra, and the massed forces of over 50 strings, swollen brass and percussion sections, brought out their sweeping, sparkling best. There have been major international orchestras this season that have failed to muster half the energy and commitment Wilson drew from his players; the overtures and instrumental interludes (in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the case of mountain gorillas and Martin Clunes.Horsepower with Martin Clunes (ITV1) should on paper have been dumber than BBC Two’s Mountain Gorillas, two one-hour series that launched last night in thickets of clichés. After all, he doesn’t want to make any claim to be an expert, just to be allowed to be a big soft dad with a horse (well, a dozen maybe Read more ...