Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
Mathieu Amalric's Hold me Tight (Serre moi fort) keeps springing surprises. Perhaps the first is the title. It sounds like an invitation to settle down with the popcorn to enjoy a light French film dealing with intimacy. Not even close. It's a quote from a song by Étienne Daho. Apparently, Amalric could just as well have called it the opposite: “Serre moins fort” (hug less tight). He has also said the ideal title (“if it hadn’t already been taken” by Douglas Sirk) would have been Imitation of Life.That is telling. The film is a melodrama, a constant Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The fascinating story of the silent twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who were incarcerated in Broadmoor for 12 years for minor crimes, has been told before, several times. There’s a 1986 BBC film by Jon Amiel based on Marjorie Wallace’s book about them; a documentary by Olivia Lichtenstein in 1994; a French rock opera; a classical opera, and a play.You might think enough has been said – their parents, who stopped giving interviews, would probably agree – but their story remains elusive. In her hazy, hallucinatory version of events, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure; Fugue) Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The American author of The Sarah Book, on which the monologue Sarah is based, is called Scott McClanahan, as is his main character, so it’s no stretch to assume the novel is at least semi-autobiographical. And indeed Scott the author was married to a woman called Sarah, as is his fictional counterpart. He seemingly did not make her happy, though he seems to have loved her with an all-consuming passion.Out of this 2017 book, Oliver Reese of the Berliner Ensemble has created a bravura vehicle for the British actor Jonathan Slinger (pictured below right and main picture), an outstanding Richard Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some may consider country music to be corny, sentimental and a relic of a forgotten era. If so, this six-part dramatisation of the lives of Tammy Wynette and George Jones is a reminder of how powerful and soulful the best country music can be, fuelled by raw emotions and personal turmoil.The tumultuous and frequently agonising progress of Jones and Wynette’s relationship was so traumatic that nobody could have dared to make it up, but the series is based on the factual recollections of the couple’s daughter Georgette in her book The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George. It’s a bone- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hovering way, way above us, three aptly named high fairies, in voluminous chiffon, open a show that may not be airy in the metaphorical sense, but invites us to cast our eyes upwards continually – no bad thing to do in the bleak midwinter of 2022. But does the show, delayed after one Covid cancellation after another on its spluttering debut 12 months ago, soar as a new show should? Give or take the odd clunky landing, it does.A fourth fairy, more Cindi Lauper on Top of the Pops back in the day than Diana at Westminster Abbey, is, like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, hampered by an absence Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
At a time when every other theatre is offering an alternative Christmas show, what to make of the Royal Opera House’s first collaboration with Lost Dog, aka director-choreographer Ben Duke, who has come up with the most un-merry topic imaginable? Meet Medea, the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth, who butchered her brother, nobbled her ex’s new bride and murdered her own children. The Wind in the Willows this is not.Remarkably, though, Ruination (what a downer of a title!) succeeds in navigating its tortuous path between violent deeds and lacerating regrets by way of verbal comedy as well as Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Identity is thorny business. This was the parting thought of Anna X, the play that marked Emma Corrin’s West End debut in the summer of 2021. The same credo governs Corrin’s return to London theatre with Orlando, in Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel about a larger-than-life character hellbent on defying time, sex, and convention.Once again, Corrin blazes on stage – and across the centuries – with a central performance that is both lucid and layered. It’s a shame, then, that Michael Grandage’s breezy production doesn’t quite make the most of that great asset, not to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Apple TV+ is using the arrival of season two of Slow Horses to offer a generous three-month free trial to its streamer service. Ample time to catch up with season one and watch it multiple times before all of season two is available at the end of December. Go for it.Mick Herron is now preparing the ninth Slough House novel for publication in 2023 (there have also been three related novellas in the sequence), while the TV series is just embarking on volume two, Dead Lions. Predictably, the literary critical backlash has already begun: the books are formulaic, the magic doesn’t last, Read more ...
David Nice
This greatest of symphonies starts with what’s plausibly described as arrhythmia of the heart, so it shouldn’t have been surprising to find my own racing as Vladimir Jurowski drove a line through the peaks, troughs and convalescences of its massive first movement. There were more shocks to the system throughout, but all of them came from an interpretation so staggeringly well prepared that every texture sounded newly conceived.More of the personal, if you don’t mind. The most extraordinary concert I’ve ever attended was Claudio Abbado’s interpretation of the Ninth with the Lucerne Festival Read more ...
Saskia Baron
We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.They smile, wave, and jostle each other. One or two of the kids pull faces. It could be any old amateur footage by a holidaymaker visiting a distant town where the locals are unused to cameras. But this is Poland in 1938 and what we are seeing is a community that was about to be destroyed. These precious few minutes of celluloid were found in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is Noah Baumbach’s most capacious, overreaching work, corralling Don De Lillo’s novel of catastrophising, neurotic academia into a film jazzily dependent on rhythm, hooked on language and wildly diverse in tone.Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a paunchy, middle-aged professor of Hitler Studies in a small Midwestern city in 1985, married to Babette (Greta Gerwig), with three kids who act as a hyper-articulate Greek chorus. He dreads death, suffering nightmares of a foreign figure in his bedroom, and closer still, beneath the suffocatingly stretched bedsheet where his wife should be, scenes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When Trevor Beales’s band Havana Lake released their only album in 1977, it was on a label which also issued records by The Ryman Country Band, The Saddleworth Male Voice Choir, The Slaithwaite Brass Band, The Thurlstone Bell Orchestra and a version of Sixties beat band The Merseybeats. Look was the offshoot of West Yorkshire studio September Sound Studios – anyone booked there could have a record pressed as part of the deal.Havana Lake’s CSNY-ish, Lindisfarne-leaning album Concrete Valley had more sympathetic Look Records bedfellows in the country/folk-slanted duo Harmony & Slyde, and Read more ...