Reviews
Saskia Baron
There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and bewilderment of their parents. The myth taps into parental anxieties that rear up when their offspring doesn’t resemble them. Harsh rejection of this seemingly alien being, who has usurped the place of a beloved child and threatens family harmony, is traumatic. We don’t see the moment when Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) told one of her two sons that she can no longer be their mother. That denunciation happened long before the film begins, when Monica ( Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been a winner: a charismatic star soprano of great emotional and interpretative intelligence, a top pianist given a little space to shine on his own, a programme that looked good on paper, of distinguished German/Austro-German women composers in the first half, French dark versus light in the second. But Milton Court is an unwelcoming venue, like being inside a dark-wood coffin, and the singer seemed uneasy between numbers to begin with.The voice itself, that bright but far from light soprano, had settled by the time we reached three songs by Clara Schumann; the first group, by Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
A decade has passed since Paul Lewis concluded an endeavour of a kind never previously undertaken: to perform, over two and a half years and across four continents, every work Schubert wrote for piano between 1822, the year he was diagnosed with syphilis – ergo, knew he was dying – and his death in 1828.It was quite an odyssey for those of us who followed those concerts (in my case, across two of those continents), and apparently for Lewis too, as he revisits selections from that programme, adding other, earlier, Schubert sonatas for a scaled-down version of those tours, this time across Read more ...
Heather Neill
As the audience enters, thick mist envelopes the thrust stage and jazz music fills the theatre. The set, designed by Moi Tran, consists of a sparsely furnished but spacious room, backed by a staircase. It is a place in the past but also anywhere and any time, both naturalistic and imaginary.The outline of this work – shocking when first seen in 1965 but soon recognised as a gripping, enigmatic examination of the power struggle between the sexes – is by now familiar. Teddy, Max's eldest son, has brought Ruth, his wife of six years, to meet his father and brothers, Lenny who is a pimp, and Joey Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’s not what we find in Kin. This is a chilly, menacing Dublin, full of modern but charmless architecture and gripped by organised crime.Written by Peter McKenna and co-created by Ciaran Donnelly, Kin is the story of the Kinsella family and their fractious partnership with ominous crime lord Eamon Cunningham (Ciaran Hinds). The Kinsellas make their living by selling drugs supplied by Cunningham, so they’re at his beck and call. It’s a master-and- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s a game called Whamageddon, where people see how deep into December they can go without hearing “Last Christmas”. I’m like that, but with the Bach Christmas Oratorio, and this year I made it four days. And who would want to wait any longer? Last night I was at the Voces8 Centre in London as part of a live audience for a concert also streamed in the ongoing Live from London series, started during the Covid summer of 2020 and continuing to flourish.The programme was titled “Christmas with JS Bach” but could equally have been called “Blackadder Goes Forth” for the determination to get Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.Nineteen-year-old gay Malachi (Tienne Simon) has gained a place at university in Bristol to study English Literature. He adores reading, especially books by Black authors and, above all, sci-fi and fantasy. But his arrival at uni is blighted by a recurring dream that intensifies with each iteration: his room is at the bottom of the ocean, and a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from American playwright Annie Baker to people in her inimitable way. In her hands this banal space is as dramatically charged as any windowless Beckett cell. The set is lit to depict different stages of the day, from bright golden sunlight to crepuscular gloom. Time elapsing is announced by one of the characters: “22 minutes”, “25 hours”, and so on. Over five days, the chairs will be occupied by groupings of five women and a solitary man, the women in an assortment of Read more ...
David Nice
If ever a marriage was made in heaven, it would have to be the one between Lucy Crowe’s beleaguered Queen Rodelinda and Iestyn Davies’ King Bertarido, the husband she believes dead and almost loses a second time. The duet at the end of Handel’s gem-packed Act Two where they’re reunited and then separated again was peerlessly moving as they performed it last night in Saffron Hall with the vibrant English Concert under Harry Bicket (more about the circumstances later).Concert performance never hampers the Handel operas of Bicket's team, and the countertenor may well have suggested what happened Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Myriam Gendron's debut album Not So Deep As A Well was originally released in 2014 by Feeding Tube, a US label run by the prominent music writer Byron Coley. When it came out, he wrote that she was a “wonderful if spectral guitarist and singer, whose signature sound was as light as it was intoxicating. This album glows with holism and is one of the most beautiful evocations of times past and present and future you will hear this year.”Coley found out about Canada's Gendron when she played a concert dedicated to the songs of Michael Hurley, the Greenwich Village-associated singer-songwriter Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As the title character in Eileen, set in a miserable Massachusetts backwater in the days before Christmas 1964, Thomasin McKenzie plays a depressed hybrid of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty who’s awakened by a patently fake Princess Charming-cum-Hitchcock blonde.The new psychologist at a correctional facility for youths, Anne Hathaway’s mysterious Rebecca is equipped with above-it-all insouciance, a Marilyn hairdo, and a Harvard degree (she claims). Drab Eileen is smitten by this martini-drinking sophisticate and comes alive when Rebecca takes her under her wing. Hathaway and McKenzie make Read more ...