Reviews
The Good Person of Szechwan, Lyric Hammersmith review - wild ride in hyperreality slides byMonday, 24 April 2023
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London... Read more... |
Pacifiction review - portending hell in paradiseMonday, 24 April 2023
Paranoia seeps into paradise in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, a scathing critique of French colonialism on the Polynesian island of Tahiti. Acting on rumours that his overlords are about to resume nuclear testing in the region and fearing his... Read more... |
Sick of Myself review - queasy black comedy about self-obsessed youthSunday, 23 April 2023
Sick of Myself is being marketed as one of those oh so clever satirical comedies about privileged but fucked-up people. Think Worst Person in the World, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and you’ll get the genre.... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Joe Meek And The Blue Men - I Hear A New World SessionsSunday, 23 April 2023
March 1960’s I Hear A New World EP was British pop at its most extraordinary. As its liner notes put it, it was “a strange record”: one seeking to aurally reflect life on the moon and in outer space. Musique concrète, pop and studio-only sonic... Read more... |
Pamfir review - a retired Ukrainian smuggler is forced to do one last jobSunday, 23 April 2023
It's fair to say that Pamfir, Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk's first feature, has been slightly overtaken by events.Set in the Carpathian mountains, on Ukraine's border with Romania, and filmed in the days and weeks leading up to the... Read more... |
Ain't Too Proud, Prince Edward Theatre review - Temptations musical is none too temptingSaturday, 22 April 2023
Ain’t Too Proud? Ain’t too good either, I’m afraid. Which is a shame as there’s plenty of the raw material here that powers juggernaut jukebox musicals around the world, but this production has the feel of a cruise ship show with a much tighter band... Read more... |
Arminio, Royal Opera review - Handel does Homeland, and it worksSaturday, 22 April 2023
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes... Read more... |
The Meaning of Zong, Barbican review - didactic tale based on the 1781 massacre of 132 slavesSaturday, 22 April 2023
There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. Music will indeed be a strong presence in... Read more... |
A Thousand and One review - fighting the system in 1990s New YorkSaturday, 22 April 2023
AV Rockwell well deserved the Grand Jury award at Sundance in January for her debut feature film, A Thousand and One.It’s hard to believe that this subtle portrait of a troubled young woman trying to raise a child is the work of a first time... Read more... |
Kim, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Bancroft, St.David's Hall, Cardiff review - finding a style in the EightiesFriday, 21 April 2023
We hear a lot about political and economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s, winters of discontent and all the rest of it, the predictable if not predicted remote outcome of what Jacques Maritain called the “immense intellectual disarray inherited from... Read more... |
How To Blow Up a Pipeline review - can eco-terrorism be justified?Friday, 21 April 2023
“This was an act of self defence,” is the last message we hear as How To Blow Up a Pipeline approaches the end of its 104-minute span. The speaker, a revolutionary environmental activist called Xochitl, has been arrested for her involvement in the... Read more... |
Private Lives, Donmar Warehouse review - Coward revival cuts to the quickFriday, 21 April 2023
It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that... Read more... |
