Reviews
joe.muggs
We Out Here Festival, now in its fifth year (and fourth edition, as 2020 was of course cancelled for Covid), has become an institution. Curated by jazz-centric veteran DJ Gilles Peterson and actualised by Noah Ball – best known for his role in creating Outlook Festival in Croatia which has served as UK bass music’s metting point in the sun since 2008 – it joins the dots culturally through generations of music both strange and hedonistic and attracts a faithful crowd that reflects that.The diversity of the crowd is the first thing you’ll notice about the festival. Though it has grown a lot Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But for the pre-World War One era, they are not young, educated or attractive enough to acquire a gentleman for a husband, their only route out of a long, slow future of the same day repeating for decades. Things might change if the flirtations of man-on-the-make, Mr Smythe, can be converted into something more substantive.Staged in London for the first Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
György Kurtág is 97 and the last man standing of the post-war generation of avant-garde composers. Last night the Proms staged the UK premiere of his first opera, started in his eighties and premiered in 2018, a setting of Samuel Beckett’s typically mystifying play Endgame. Sadly, for all the brilliant passages of orchestral writing, and top-notch singing and playing, as an opera it’s a bit of a damp squib in which some minutes hung heavy.Kurtág is one of the great miniaturists – his life’s work is about 10 hours of music – but this opera is two solid hours without an interval (and it is Read more ...
David Kettle
PLEASE LEAVE (a message), Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★★One of (brilliantly named) London-based theatre collective Clusterflux’s actors sent me a Twitter DM to request a review of their new show: here that review is, a few days later. Yucca Mountain in New Mexico also required a message, this time aimed at generations far into the future, to warn about the radioactive waste buried beneath it. Even Eighties pop icons Berlin and MC Hammer sent out messages into the future, tracks that we can now listen to as cultural artefacts from particular times and places.There’s a lot going on in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Introducing the fifth number in this evening’s set, Erin Birgy speaks to the audience for the first time. “This is our last song, thank you,” she says. Thoughts of early Jesus and Mary Chain shows instantly surface. Is this going to be a 20-minute wonder? A five-song digest of where Birgy – who records and writes as Mega Bog – is now, playing her first UK dates since the release of her seventh album The End of Everything? Is it the end of the show?Despite the announcement, it isn’t. Ten songs are played over 50 minutes. But the proclamation is emblematic of the issues and questions inherent Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The English title of Olivier Peyon’s new movie is a rather hackneyed pun that not only doesn’t work in the original language but also manages to convey exactly the wrong meaning. Arrête avec tes Mensonges is a faintly Almodóvarian love story about the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of facing up to the truth about yourself. However, instead of Stop With Your Lies, we get Lie With Me.The faux pas, if that’s what it is, is hardly the movie’s fault, although a movie star, Molly Ringwald, is to blame. She isn’t in the film, which has an all-male cast except for two walk-on roles, but it was Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival’s focus on Korea moves to the Queen’s Hall in the festival’s middle week, with performances from two Korean soloists playing alone.Yeol Eum Son has already made waves in Scotland, and she chose some meaty repertoire for her EIF debut, culminating in Beethoven’s mighty Hammerklavier Sonata (★★★★). For the first half of her Tuesday morning programme, however, she played Liszt’s Ninth Transcendental Étude alongside three set of variations by Bizet, Czerny and Alkan. Variations are a neat choice for an artist because the variety intrinsic to the form gives Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Olga Koch Monkey Barrel ★★★★Olga Koch's opening segment deals with bisexuality and her first threesome in some decidedly evocative language. That's what turning 30 does for you, she suggests – allowing her to engage in a more adventurous attitude to life and a more sex-positive one to relationships.Prawn Cocktail is her vivid account of her sort-of adult gap year during which she not only pushed her sexual boundaries but also gained a master's degree in parasocial relationships – or the “reply guys” who hilariously think they have a real connection with the famous women they engage with Read more ...
David Nice
Chopin’s piano concertos and Strauss “symphonic fantasia” Aus Italien are young men’s music, bursting with inspired ideas, but baggy at times, hard to steer. Elgar’s In the South is up there with the mature Strauss tone poems – even if it couldn’t have taken the shape it did without them – but here the steering itself was the problem: missing the exuberance, the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali stretched it on the rack.It was an odd Prom to win a packed house. Many audience members were Korean, come to see and hear Seong-Jin Cho, winner of the 2015 International Chopin Read more ...
Jack Barron
“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into English by Penny Hueston. The sentence, suspended against the page’s whiteness, a clause unto itself, is simple, short, and grammatically reasonable.What follows is not simple, nor is it short (257 pages), and nor is it always reasonable, but it constitutes a profound attempt at a recuperation, and possibly redemption, of that initial loss. Darrieussecq is a prolific and much-lauded novelist, psychoanalyst, and translator; she has also, for a significant portion of her life, been Read more ...
David Kettle
With its throbbing crowds and its performers baying for attention (and for audiences), the Edinburgh Fringe can be a hectic, raucous place. But for anyone who needs a break from the crammed-full, in-your-face stand-up gigs, thankfully three shows provide far calmer, more intimate experiences – involving just you and one other.At Summerhall, Without Sin (★★★★, until 27 August), created by Dublin-based Unqualified Design Studio, takes the explicit form of a confessional – quite literally, with a specially constructed, two-alcove wooden box nestling on one side of the venue’s courtyard. Enter it Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Forty years ago, the world was very different for gay men. AIDS was devastating their communities, especially in the big cities where hard-won enclaves of acceptance were being hollowed out, one sunken-eyed friend after another. Media screamed “Gay Plague” and some politicians barely suppressed their glee at the “perverts’” comeuppance. Allies were thin on the ground, the redtop press with their finger on the outing trigger never happier than when destroying lives for circulation.Into such a hostile, fearful, vicious world, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman launched La Cage Aux Folles on Read more ...