Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
This isn’t an opera review, because Current, Rising is not an opera. What it is, however, is the most convincing example yet that Virtual Reality arts might not just be possible, but desirable – an experience that glances beyond gimmick towards genuinely new territory.Billed as “the world’s first hyper reality opera”, Current, Rising is a 15-minute, walk-through installation housed in the what the makers have nicknamed the “opera tardis” in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre. The credits give some sense of the scope of a project that brings together a university, software developers, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Fern (a luminous Frances McDormand) used to work in HR. Now, aged 62, she’s harvesting sugarbeets, hauling rocks, cleaning toilets in a trailer park and doing shifts in an Amazon warehouse. And she’s living out of her camper van, a shabby, lovingly restored RV she calls Vanguard. “I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,” she says, driving through vast Western landscapes under spectacular skies.Chloé Zhao’s hypnotically beautiful, multi-award-winning third feature builds on the same docu-fiction MO as her extraordinary The Rider (2017) and Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) where she used non- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An attractive and likeable cast remains the principal drawing card of Trying, the Apple TV+ romcom centred around the efforts of a 30something couple to adopt a child. Following on from the first season aired last spring, Andy Wolton's creation gives pride of place to a terrific assemblage of actors, who carry the day even when the piece itself seems to tread faintly overfamiliar ground.You feel, for instance, as if you've already heard the sort of badinage that bonds Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall), the affectionately sparring duo who may debate the age your shoulders drop (not Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Emotions don't come in half-measures in Rare Beasts, with which Billie Piper makes a commendably edgy debut as writer-director onscreen while affording herself a stonking star part. Dedicated., we're informed, to "all my friends and all their woes", this self-described "anti-romcom" may be too stylistically indulgent for some.But see out its excesses and you emerge with a potent look at three very different relationships amidst our rancorous, chaotic times. And Piper, back in our midst for the first time since I Hate Suzie, here confirms herself as a huge talent who never chooses the easy Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Opera House wasn't taking any chances when it welcomed its first ballet audience since December this week. There was no printed programme on offer, nor even a cast sheet. “Not till October” said the uniformed man on the door. Some ballet companies have learnt the hard way not to trust that newly lifted lockdowns (lockups?) will stay that way for long. They’re in no hurry to spend time and money on printed material that might end up having to be pulped.The programming felt confident though. The soft option for the Royal Ballet’s comeback would have been a comforting classic, but Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eileen Agar was the only woman included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which introduced London to artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The Surrealists were exploring the creative potential of chance, chaos and the irrational which they saw as the feminine principle, yet they didn’t welcome women artists into their group.Agar wasn’t easily discouraged, though. At the tender age of six, she’d been sent away to boarding school, an experience that made her fiercely independent. Later she studied at the Slade, but rebelled against the art school’s academic approach. A Read more ...
David Nice
Last time I was in a Wigmore audience for a Sean Shibe recital, his electric-guitar second half had many regulars fleeing the hall (he later said that the amplification had been meddled with – it was too loud, though the work in question, Georges Lentz’s Ingwe, was always going to be a stunner). No softLOUD this time, only mostly soft, a meditative journey from the relative simplicity of 16th century lute music to the mid-20th century, every modest harmonic twist in the later stages striking fresh on the ear.You wanted to be out in the country on a summer night listening to this programmeThis Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Zack Snyder’s CV includes such fantastic fare as Watchmen, 300, Man of Steel and his career-launching zombie-fest Dawn of the Dead, so who better to helm a zombies-in-Vegas heist movie? Army of the Dead has suffered an interminable gestation, spending years in limbo with Warner Bros before being picked up by Netflix, but it’s a riotous ride and was well worth waiting for. Even at two and half hours long.It all kicks off when a US Army convoy ferrying a high-security cargo from the notorious Area 51 is involved in a road accident in Nevada. The cargo, a ferocious zombie, escapes, and infects a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
London's weather – a day of huge downpours – underlined the point that we should be rushing inside as entertainment venues (in parts of the UK, at least) reopened. It was lovely to be back at 21Soho, a welcoming and well run venue, particularly as its opening night was for anti-violence charity Reclaim These Streets. Proceeds will be distributed by the charity Rosa.Sarah Keyworth was on terrific form as the host, grateful to be finally working to a crowd who appeared in real-life form rather than on the other side of a Zoom screen. Although, as she wrily pointed out, even on Zoom there can be Read more ...
David Nice
It began with a sense of wonder, not just from the Barbican's socially distanced audience but also from the stage, at “that sound you make with your hands”, as Simon Rattle put it in what he said was a novelty speech before a performance. What followed was a celebration – reacquaintance with the instruments of the orchestra in Britten’s brilliant set of variations and a fugue on a Purcell theme, wistful beauty from Fauré, rumbustiousness with a dash of poignancy from Dvořák.Perhaps The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra should be renamed Everyone’s Guide to Orchestral Delights, which come Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I wonder how many relationships have foundered during lockdown and how many have suffered the humiliation of being dumped over the phone or via social media? Filmed during the pandemic, Pedro Almodovar’s intense, half-hour short The Human Voice may not be a direct response to Covid-19, yet it captures the aching loneliness of enforced separation and the longing for intimacy. The film was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s eponymous play. First performed in Paris in 1930, it features a woman saying goodbye on the phone to her lover, who is about to marry someone Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You could hardly call this back to normal at London’s premier dance house. For a start, there was too much red plush visible in the stalls, not all of it the result of COVID-safe spacing. There were prefatory onstage speeches and a filmed thank you from Tamaro Rojo, the artistic director who must have suffered a thousand deaths over the past year – at least up to the point English National Ballet was singled out to receive £3 million from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund. Applause and cheers erupted at every mention of dancers or musicians or those more often under-thanked technicians, Read more ...