Reviews
aleks.sierz
It’s an elementary fact that Dickens sells at this time of year — look at all the perennial Christmas Carols sprouting up everywhere. But if grumpy old Scrouge is an instantly recognizable literary icon then so is the super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Bringing them both together has been the inspired idea of actor, director and playwright Mark Shanahan, whose A Sherlock Carol, which first opened at this venue and on Off-Broadway last year, now returns to Marylebone Theatre, which is located just around the corner from Baker Street, where number 221B has been the residence of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Fallen Leaves is Aki Kaurismäki’s 20th film, the one the Finnish director made after he said he’d retired from cinema in 2017 and frankly, if you didn’t like his earlier films, you shouldn’t bother with this one. But if you’re a fan (and I am and so was the Cannes jury which gave it the Fipresci prize), Fallen Leaves is an utter pleasure from beginning to end. There’s nothing hugely original here – you could probably play Kaurismäki Bingo spotting the familiar tropes. There’s a winsome dog, dour Finns drinking in drab bars watching laconic musicians and lonely souls Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical forms have winding structures which don’t end up where they seem to be heading. Similarly, the lyrics are tough to parse.Take “Problem Child.” Beginning in a vaguely Rickie Lee Jones manner, its jazzy undertone is bolstered by minimal, shuffling drums. Then, there’s some equally muted and unexpected “Do you Know the Way to San Jose” trumpet-like Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Next door to the beautiful Art Deco Littlewoods Pools Building, nearly 30 years standing derelict, a set of grey sheds stand, a seat of potential for Liverpool’s nascent film industry. Nearly a century ago, the long, white, towered construction in which the next "Spend! Spend! Spend!" millionaires were plucked from the old terraces and new housing estates of post-war Britain, spoke to the confidence that still suffused a great city in the 1930s. The drab utility of today's metal monoliths speaks to the accountants and administrators whose funding bids must squeeze every penny out of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy the scenery without maiming themselves.More crucially, they have to pull off the Janus-faced trick of playing the amateur actors of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, indicated below in quotation marks, while getting the audience to applaud their brilliance. Mostly they succeed.Peter Pan Goes Wrong, their second show, was a West End hit in 2014, followed by transfers to Broadway and Los Angeles with guest stars on board` (Neil Patrick Harris joined the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It takes a brave or a foolhardy person to walk the streets wearing almost nothing but barbed wire and platform shoes, especially when the occasion is an anti-war demo in Moscow and the penalty for joining the march is up to 15 years in jail.It’s February 2022, Russia has invaded Ukraine and large numbers of protestors are chanting “No to War”; then as the police start pouncing, the chant switches to “shame on you”. Gena Marvin (whose pronoun is she) is among those bundled into a police van; the barbed wire outfit made her an obvious target.It’s not the first time the androgynous, LGBTQ+ Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida; she ends it with another startlingly vigorous adaptation, again of a play in which women are abused by men both physically and psychologically. Meanwhile, Cabaret, her West End revival of which is now entering its third year and is also headed for Broadway, is set in Nazi Germany. Frecknall is becoming a supreme exponent of dazzling darkness. Ultimately, her National Theatre debut with The House of Bernarda Alba doesn’t hit the solar plexus in the same way Read more ...
David Nice
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and greeted with joyful groans. To say it’s no epic is a compliment: Charles Court Opera’s boutique pantos rely upon perfect focus in small spaces, and this is a tight little craft, with five brilliant women firing up director/writer John Savournin’s script and David Eaton’s musical arrangements.The gods aren’t happy with stagnation in Ithaca and Odysseus so far from home. The delivery service from Tamoy Phipps’ easily dispirited Hermes/Mercury has a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made a lot of sense to programme it alongside the first piano quartets of those other composers. A “supergroup” of brilliant young soloists came together as an ensemble as tight as any that plays together every day, and made a committed case for each piece.All three were written by composers around their thirtieth birthdays – and the players at the Wigmore Hall last night were of a similar vintage. They put their all into the Bridge, even if this 12-minute Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at this point seems a seasonal imperative, and in a wild-haired Christopher Eccleston, Jack Thorne's adaptation of Dickens's 1843 call to empathic arms has its most emotionally piercing and resonant leading man yet. I've seen all the various Scrooges, from Rhys Ifans in 2017 onwards, including a memorable Covid-era turn from Andrew Lincoln Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was as long ago as January last year that the prolific Williams brothers, Jack and Harry, delivered their absorbing Australian Outback thriller The Tourist. Hitherto, product seemed to have been pouring out of them almost hourly, whether it was Liar, The Missing and Baptiste or The Widow, Rellik and Angela Black.Anyway, after this little sabbatical, here they are again with this six-part mystery, a whimsical fable about luck (or the absence of it), fate, memory and delusion. It also contains a little more than its fair share of violence, and the cold-blooded massacre of a whole police Read more ...
Robert Beale
John Storgårds found himself literally facing both ways for the third item on the BBC Philharmonic’s programme on Saturday: towards the audience, with one music stand in front of him, as he played the solo violin role in Sebastian Fagerlund’s Helena’s Song, and frequently turning 180 degrees, with the full score in view, to conduct at the same time.It was one of two BBC commissioned works (in this case co-commissioned with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra) receiving their UK premieres in the concert – the other was the rather longer Shades of Unbroken Dreams by James Lee III, a piano Read more ...