Reviews
Veronica Lee
What to make of Jimmy Carr? He’s a fantastic gag writer and experienced stand-up who has made a hugely successful career on television. And yet... as Terribly Funny makes clear, you have to share what he calls his dark and edgy humour - or, as he has it: “Cunts are a key demographic for me” - to find it mirth-making.His gags tend to be one-liners of the set-up, payoff variety, with a few set-up, misdirect, reveal to vary the pace. But when the vast majority are about how women nag, or how unattractive they are beyond a certain age, or are there just for men’s sexual pleasure, or about ghastly Read more ...
Robert Beale
Tabita Berglund is that rare species, an up-and-coming orchestral conductor attracting enough attention to secure repeated international bookings in even these straitened times. She also happens to be female and young, which until relatively recently would have been seen as another major handicap to success. But this was her return to the Hallé, having conducted a set of concerts in late 2019 with them - and she’s no stranger to the north west of England, either, since she took part as a young cellist in Lake District Summer Music’s masterclasses 10 years ago.Berglund is a more mature, but Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The general uptick of late in film versions of stage musical hits continues apace with In the Heights, which, to my mind anyway, is far more emotionally satisfying and visually robust onscreen than it was on Broadway, where it won the 2008 Tony for Best Musical. (An Off West End version had multiple iterations, as well.) Already mired in controversy about the alleged "colourism" of its creators and the fact that its opening weekend underperformed at the box office, Jon M Chu's adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's pre-Hamilton vehicle for himself survives such discussion and transcends it, too. Read more ...
David Nice
Just when you thought you couldn’t take any more one- or two-handers, online or in the theatre, along comes the supreme masterpiece to jolt you out of any fatigue. Every line counts as Winnie, buried up to her waist and then up to her neck, determines that words will never fail her. And what poetry there is in even the most banal observation, the endless repetition. I could probably watch a different actor in the role every month, and still find riches and unexpected insights in Beckett’s great play, which hasn’t dated in any way. Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic gave us a quirky Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever else happens on the country opera scene this summer, the golden rose award for sheer chutzpah goes to the ever-ambitious Garsington team in pulling this off in no small style. Planning any production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s intricate 1911 “comedy for music” is daring at the best of times; in the still-shaky Covid era, the decision to go ahead might have seemed foolhardy. The life-saver would seem to have been Eberhard Kloke’s reduced orchestration of the 100-plus-players original, briefly annoying in places where a piano substitutes for instruments still Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2017, a non-speaking autistic teen, Naoki Higashida wrote and published The Reason I Jump. He hoped it would offer some insight into the minds of people with autism. The book was subsequently translated by Keiko Yoshida and her husband, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell. The book was a publishing sensation featured on US talk shows, and seemed to herald a new day for how we understand neurodiversity. In the simplest terms it argues that, trapped beneath an autistic exterior, lies a rich, emotionally complex interior that can be unlocked. As much as it drew praise, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After appearing in six of Marvel’s Avengers movies, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki (the God of Mischief) gets his own TV series. Never quite enjoying the high profile of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man or Chris Evans’s Captain America, Loki has remained a somewhat enigmatic and ambiguous character, which has given him plenty of potential room for manoeuvre in this small(er)-screen incarnation. Hiddleston evidently relished the prospect of exploring further his shapeshifting attributes and gender-fluidity.While the production values here are reminiscent of the uber-budget appurtenances lavished on the Read more ...
David Nice
Why travel to Glyndebourne for a concert? Well, for a start, none of us has heard a Mahler symphony live in full orchestral garb for at least 15 months, and though the Fourth is smaller-scale than some, its innocent beginnings belie the cosmic adventures ahead. Only a handful of us got to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall during the semi-lockdown period; its departing music director Vladimir Jurowski had to make do with overwrought film presentation only when he bowed out with Tchaikovsky’s complete Swan Lake ballet score. And any programme which segues from Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
There’s something refreshing about fiction you can easily trace back to the question “what if?” What if this or that existed? What would happen? What could? That question doesn’t have to send you down memory lane, wondering about roads not taken, or into the future, into space. You can stay right here, more or less in the present, in charted territory. And arguably, to adventure there (here) takes as much, if not more of what you might need elsewhere: bravery, imagination, wit, honesty. Better yet, fidelity – to the way things are: not only what could happen but does. It requires a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Not long after the Nazis came to power, Eberhard Arnold sent a manifesto to Adolf Hitler. The Protestant preacher urged the dictator to “embrace universal love”. With his wife Emmy, Eberhard had founded a radical, egalitarian Christian community in the mountains of central Germany. Now the SS and Gestapo had begun to harass them. Unsurprisingly, the Führer was unmoved. The persecution intensified, and the communards of the Bruderhof fled first to Liechtenstein, then England, Paraguay and the US. Eberhard’s innocent idealism may sound pitiable: a flower beneath a tank. Within a decade, however Read more ...
Gaby Frost
To this day, if you take a stroll down Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital, you’ll come across an imposing building: the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière. It’s one of Europe’s foremost hospitals. It’s the place where 20th-century icons Josephine Baker and Michel Foucault departed this world, and its halls buzz with budding young medical students from La Sorbonne. But this is only the most recent chapter in the Salpêtrière’s long history. Dig a little deeper, and it doesn’t take long to discover the building’s violently troubled past. In the 19th century, it served as an institution for mentally ill women Read more ...
Dora Neill
Drawing is the cornerstone of artistic practice, but is often overshadowed by "higher" forms of visual art, such as painting and sculpture. When we walk into an art gallery, we find ourselves gravitating towards the large, impressive oil paintings. They are considered the "main event", the best representation of art and its history – but is this really the case? Drawing is more than just a preliminary step to painting; it can show us an artist’s thought process and ideas, depict deep emotion, expose intimate relationships and be innovative and timeless. A remarkable example of this is Read more ...