Reviews
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Complicité, Barbican review - murder in the forestFriday, 31 March 2023
Complicité, the adventurous theatre company led today by Simon McBurney, one of its founders, is now 40. Over the last four decades, McBurney and his collaborators have changed the face of theatre.Rooted in the training of Jacques Lecoq, along with... Read more... |
Berlusconi, Southwark Playhouse Elephant review - curious new musical satireFriday, 31 March 2023
One wonders if Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan pondered long over their debut musical’s title. Silvio might invite hubristic comparisons with Evita (another unlikely political leader), but Berlusconi feels a little Hamilton – too soon?... Read more... |
God's Creatures review - Irish drama with a touch of Greek tragedyFriday, 31 March 2023
There’s something about the Irish coastal village that makes filmmakers see it as a perfect locale for tales of human emotion in extremis, from David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter to Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. Perhaps it’s the... Read more... |
Theodora, Arcangelo, Cohen, Barbican review - gloriously dark and soberThursday, 30 March 2023
Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall,... Read more... |
Riotsville USA review - a training scheme with a tragic legacyThursday, 30 March 2023
Sierra Pettengill has made the politest angry film I have seen. It has an incendiary quality that comes precisely from its calm stance towards its material. This is a polemic, but one that burns steadily under the surface and asks the viewer to take... Read more... |
Tom Dale Company, The Place review - immersive and genre-bustingWednesday, 29 March 2023
With all the talk – and, frankly, fear – around AI and the increasing dominance of the digital world, it’s fascinating to see what dance has to say about it.Although choreographers have been playing with avatars and movement sensors for a couple of... Read more... |
Mansfield Park, RNCM, Manchester review - bringing out the bestWednesday, 29 March 2023
Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that kind where you have a smallish number of performers, no chorus, and the “set” is simply the rooms and furnishings of a gracious residence from an age gone by.Accompaniment was originally... Read more... |
Succession, Season Four, Sky Atlantic review - powerful beginning for the endgameTuesday, 28 March 2023
How much more is there left to be said about the excellence of Succession? It’s back for a final season, and devotees will pore over every detail, every conversational ploy from robust to downright crude, every chess move on this volatile board. As... Read more... |
Inspiral Carpets, Concorde 2, Brighton review - a raucous catalogue of Madchester-era hitsTuesday, 28 March 2023
As Inspiral Carpets play “She Comes in the Fall”, a great song and one of their signature tunes, its martial drumming drags me into my own past. Seeing them play it at a 600-capacity venue makes me recall seeing them, over three decades ago,... Read more... |
Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save usTuesday, 28 March 2023
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat.Lecturing a teenage coven on the art of sorcery and how to tap into the powers of the “Unseen... Read more... |
Great Expectations, BBC One review - modernised, muddied and muddledMonday, 27 March 2023
There’s no point in being upset with the writer Steven Knight for doing what he usually does; even so, many viewers will find what he has done with Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations far too Peaky for their tastes. Knight’s role is described... Read more... |
The Dead City, English National Opera review - strong dream world, weak love storyMonday, 27 March 2023
Is Korngold a second-rank composer with some first-rate ideas? Most performances of the 23-year-old Viennese prodigy's Die tote Stadt make it seem so. Nearly smothered in glitter and craft, the story can compel – an oblique, promising stance on... Read more... |
