Reviews
Veronica Lee
Mark Thomas comes on stage unannounced. It's not a show of humility – rather, he told us, amused at his own mistake, that his hearing isn't what it used to be and he had misheard his music cue. It was a modest start to his new show 50 Things About Us, which he is giving a runout at Soho Theatre before touring with it later in the year.It has been 18 months since he last gigged, but there were few signs of rustiness as Thomas described what has been happening to him during his enforced layoff from live performance. He developed Type 2 diabetes, for a start – “the kind you have to overeat for Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A fun film about finance – really? From the very first frame I was hooked on this can-do documentary; it’s that good. A young family – parents, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, two kids and two dogs – gather at the front door of their Victorian terraced house in Walthamstow and grin sheepishly to camera. “This is what acting is”, Dan tells his daughter Esme, “it’s cold, it’s embarrassing… Hello, we’re the Edelstyn family.”Esme might not get the hang of it, but her parents are naturals. Wearing a cricket jumper and deerstalker hat, Dan looks like an ad for the local charity shop. He’s a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
People often ask why it is that in ballet there are different casts on different nights, a practice alien to opera, musicals and theatre. The most obvious reason is practical. Ballet companies keep a number of principal dancers on salary who need regularly to strut their stuff. Another reason is that dancers develop distinct individual qualities – technical, musical and dramatic – which imprint on the works they dance. Add to that the mysterious chemistry of partnering, the capacity of one dancer to bring out the best in another, and you begin to understand why hardcore balletomanes beggar Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
By chance, I started watching this streamed concert shortly after hearing a live BBC broadcast of the Philharmonia playing in front of an audience for the first time in over a year. Much though I love the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, steadfast companion over many Edinburgh winters, from student standby to bus pass, there is no doubt where I would have rather been. A link, a click and a screen in my office do not even approach the palpable excitement in the Royal Festival Hall that evening (David Nice was there and confirmed that in his review). Orchestral music needs an audience, and it Read more ...
Robert Beale
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again. Manchester Collective, true to their pioneering and resourceful nature, went one step further. They made films, in collaboration with others, whose viewing could happen in a venue as a kind of event in itself. The result is Dark Days, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Loudly and painfully, the consumptive Violetta wheezes before we hear a single note. Her pitiful gasping for the breath that deserts her precedes the prelude to Opera Holland Park’s La traviata; the same effect ushers in Act Three. At first I assumed that director Rodula Gaitanou had tweaked her 2018 production for its post-lockdown comeback but, no – the original staging featured this device. That uncannily prescient stroke apart, Gaitanou lays a light but skilful hand on a work that, even in non-pandemic times, needs no fancy manipulation from concept merchants impatient of its power and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jimmy McGovern’s new three-part drama about prison life is about as far as you could travel from Ronnie Barker’s Seventies sitcom Porridge, even if they are both on the same TV channel. Having said that, McGovern’s fictional HM Prison Craigmore doesn’t look as if it’s had a facelift in 50 years, and its cramped cells and brutishly ugly corridors are enough to trigger panic attacks in the hardiest viewer. And that’s before you’ve met the inmates.Into this living nightmare comes Mark Cobden (Sean Bean), a teacher from a comprehensive school who’s been handed a four-year sentence after killing a Read more ...
David Nice
Peasant harvesters enter from the facsimile of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington garden to the right (stage left) of the state-of-the-art pavilion and, splendidly led by a solo tenor (Dominick Felix), burst into song. The temptation is to burst into tears, for this is the first time, surely, any of us has heard a rich, full chorus live for over a year. From the pit, the Philharmonia players, a day after their Festival Hall triumph with Esa-Pekka Salonen, sound as lush as you could possibly want in Tchaikovsky’s glorious score, and if all bar one of the principals aren’t quite ideal, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Early last month, Donovan issued his extraordinary new single “I am the Shaman”. Recorded at David Lynch’s Los Angeles studio, it was produced by the polymath director and fellow transcendental meditation devotee. The accompanying video was also directed by Lynch. The powerful “I am the Shaman” haunts. It also confirms that Donovan remains an active force.He first entered the public consciousness on 22 January 1965. On that date, Donovan Leitch wasn’t yet signed to a record label but the producers of the weekly pop show Ready, Steady, Go! put him in front of the cameras in the first of three Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This blistering, fearless play about an 18-year-old black entrepreneur on the King’s Road raises a myriad of uncomfortable questions that resonate profoundly with the Black Lives Matter debate. It’s just one remarkable aspect of The Death of a Black Man that it was written 46 years ago, and another that such a radical work was first staged not at the Royal Court but at the Hampstead Theatre, to which it now makes its return.The playwright Alfred Fagon is currently best known for the award for black writers which bears his name: past winners include Roy Williams and Michaela Coel. Fagon died Read more ...
David Nice
One of the many things we’ll miss when Esa-Pekka Salonen moves on from his 13 years as the Philharmonia’s principal conductor will be his programming. For this first of his farewell concerts, he’s not only chosen what he loves but made sure it all fits. No two symphonies could be more different than Beethoven’s First and Sibelius’s Seventh (his last), yet they both hover – Beethoven playfully, Sibelius enigmatically – around the key of C major. The multi-part string hymn near the beginning of the Seventh was more than prefaced by the wind and brass of a Stravinsky masterpiece. And if Liszt’s Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Undoubtedly the strangest thing in this exhibition dedicated to Rodin’s works in plaster is a rendition of Balzac’s dressing gown, visibly hollow, but filled out nevertheless by the ghostly contours of an ample male form. Not surprisingly, the phantom dressing gown is sometimes given as evidence of Rodin’s modernist credentials – were it not 39 years too early, it would surely have qualified for the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936.The question of Rodin’s modernist intentions is the central one posed by this exceptionally beautiful show, which is also, by Tate standards, Read more ...