Reviews
gerard.gilbert
“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of sitcom pilots. For once, the handy nut-shell description is spot on. Campus is precisely that: Green Wing, but set in a university – and as a fan of Green Wing I should feel that that is good thing. However I’m not sure the formula has survived the relocation from hospital to campus.For one thing, they are such different – almost opposite - Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does a winning photograph jump out at you? Sure, we can talk earnestly of composition, an interesting subject, a telling juxtaposition, or the abstract interplay of colour, texture and light. But perhaps more than any other visual art form, what strikes us most about a photographic image remains somehow more elusive. And the hand of the artist who presses the shutter, rather than wields the brush, is not so easily perceived.Which brings us to this year’s winning entry for the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize. The standard for this annual award and exhibition remains Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Shostakovich’s Festive Overture marked the 30th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution with earnest fanfares and jolly tunes. 62 years on it smacks more of “Looney Tunes” and a cheesy kind of newsreel patriotism and you can’t help wondering if, behind all the laughter and frenetic flag-waving, the disillusionment had already set in. Mikhail Pletnev’s face suggested it had.He’s a decidedly cool customer is Pletnev, whether at the keyboard or, where we’re more likely to find him these days, on the podium. He has the air of containment and you don’t always see what you hear – not in terms of Read more ...
howard.male
Many hip-hop artists go on about “respect” ad nauseam, but perhaps you need to be outside the Western consumerist bubble before such language can be turned from mere solipsistic hot air into a heartfelt plea on behalf of a continent. May I point you in the direction of a YouTube clip in which a surprisingly camera-shy Nneka shares a Nigerian proverb with the interviewer: “One day the bushmeat go catch the hunter,” she says in pidgin English. In other words, one day the prey of the hunter will catch the hunter. This proverb’s specific resonance to Nneka is only hinted at by the twinkle in her Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Extraordinary lives dancers lead at Covent Garden - in a single day rushing between studios to rehearse the tortured, introspective Mayerling, the pristine classicism of The Sleeping Beauty, the off-centre acrobatics of Balanchine’s Agon and the static wriggles and hip-snaps of Wayne McGregor. All of these works are currently in Royal Ballet repertory, and you can see Ed Watson, Yuhui Choe, Johan Kobborg and an array of others on stage at the moment in all or any of these. But at what cost to communicating hugely different styles of choreography?Last night the Royal Ballet fielded its latest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of series seven, our tight-lipped MI5 squad risked designer shoe leather and impeccable coiffure to defuse a Russian atom bomb in London, and their boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) was kidnapped by dubious Russian agent Viktor Sarkisian. Hence series eight began with the hunt for Harry, whisked (unbeknown to his underlings, who expressed their concern by smiling even less than usual) by helicopter to a mansion in “Moscow on Thames”.One assumed that Harry would in due course be restored to his futuristic glass-panelled office, where he likes to drink whisky and reflect on the deaths Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Oh dear, poor Pearl is in a bit of pickle. She's 17, and her mum wants to know what she's doing talkin' to Joe, a young lad from the local estate. After all, Pearl is meant to be engaged to Clive, her childhood sweetheart. And he'd come running if only Pearl would whistle. But she ain't interest'd. Anyhow, Pearl's mum knows what's what, and she reckons that mixed marriages never work. You see, Pearl is a Romany Gypsy and Joe is just a "Gorger" boy - that's Romany for anyone who isn't "one of us". Set a couple of years ago in East London, Shraddha - which is Romany for "You are what's in your Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The irony won’t have been lost on many in the audience that the South Bank’s International Voices series began with Ballet. A whole first half of it, actually. Just as well the diva-in-waiting – the almost indecently glamorous Renée Fleming – knows the value of expectation and anticipation. Her very first album was entitled The Beautiful Voice and if that isn’t pressure for a burgeoning career I don’t know what is.But Fleming has certainly fulfilled that side of the promise and she is now in a place where voice, temperament, and technique are one and the singing radiates a combination of ease Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At its best (ie when it’s not trying to be gimmicky and snare so-called “new audiences”), Rambert is unique in Britain in providing music and dance as theatre. No other company matches it in commitment to this, not even the Royal Ballet, which long ago adopted cloth ears when it comes to new ballet music. Last night at Sadler’s Wells Rambert’s newest triple bill was a fine sample of this kind of evening, a delight to anyone with musical interests, and parading three unbeatable British choreographic talents.Long ago Henri Oguike shone out among the younger generation of choreographers as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When a film shoot is in trouble, with actors dying on set, the heavens opening and other acts of God putting a spanner in the works, it’s usually a gigantic directorial ego which hauls the troubled production over the line. You think of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and above all Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, all films characterised by epic folie de grandeur and flirtation with insanity. But no film, surely, has ever been quite so divorced from reality, in almost every sense, as L'Enfer. For a start it was never made. You can’t get a lot less real than that. Forty-five Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Christmas movies, like seasonal in-store promotions, really are arriving earlier every year. But despite being released before this month’s Catherine wheels have even started spinning, the new Disney version of A Christmas Carol has about it the desperate whiff of an end-of-line knock-off grabbed from a depleted branch of Argos just as the shutters are falling on Christmas Eve.With its motion-capture animation and state-of-the-art 3-D, as well as a simultaneous release in the eye-popping IMAX format, the film proves that it is possible to be both high-tech and superannuated. Because the Read more ...
kat.brown
Firstly, no, Tom Wrigglesworth's Open Return Letter to Richard Branson isn’t that letter. His epistle is not to be confused with Oliver Beale’s, whose email to the Virgin boss complaining about the food on a Virgin flight went viral last year. The Sheffield-born comic, currently appearing at the Soho Theatre in London, set about an altogether more decent-hearted campaign after witnessing some gross unfairness meted out to an elderly passenger on a Virgin train journey last autumn.Wrigglesworth was nearly arrested when he organised a train-wide whip-round after a grandmother was fined £115 by Read more ...