Reviews
Veronica Lee
How to describe a show that by Robin Ince’s own admission doesn’t have a narrative strand, and for which he has written several pages of notes that he gets through only a small section of? Well here goes: he calls the show a mash-up of the two cultures of art and science in a celebration of the human mind, and Chaos of Delight is very well named.Ince races through an almost embarrassing richness of material, going down highways and byways as he talks about whatever comes into his head or is prompted by a selection of photographs that he clicks on to the onstage screen.As anyone Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It’s a rare thing that musicians sound better live than they do on Spotify. But Florence Welch sings a note perfect set – even when jumping up and down like a pogo stick, whirling and spinning, or sprinting along the front of the stage to meet fans.Shining with androgynous, enigmatic beauty, she opens with the dramatic “June”, the line “hold on to each other” sung with gravitas as she stands on a tree-cloaked stage beneath the open sky. It’s a message that resonates from the onset – you can feel it, the connection with her hometown audience – the same way Flo seems to be feeling the crowd Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As in other countries born out of 19th-century uprisings against imperial power, the literary roots of the Philippines run deep. Executed by the Spanish in 1896, the novelist, poet and physician José Rizal remains the adored hero of his archipelago’s struggle for independence. Yet this legacy of authored nationhood has not helped Filipino writers much in their quest to have their stories heard abroad. Later subjection to the United States – overtly colonial rule from 1901 to 1946, followed by military, economic and cultural hegemony – has meant that the few works that do reach an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although British folk-jazz stylists Pentangle played their first official concert in May 1967, their name is borrowed for the title of Unpentangled, a box set of their guitarist John Renbourn’s work on album which kicks off two years earlier. It’s not the disconnect it might seem from the billing as the set includes his 1966 collaborative album Bert and John, made with Pentangle's other guitarist Bert Jansch. The band’s singer Jacqui McShee is heard on Renbourn’s Another Monday album, issued later that year. Their bassist Danny Thompson appears on early 1967’s Watch the Stars, which Dorris Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At their best, Olafur Eliasson’s installations change the way you see, think and feel. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Londoners would take off their togs to bask in the glow of an artificial sun at Tate Modern. That was in 2003, when The weather project transformed the Turbine Hall into an indoor park suffused with yellow light.Then last winter, Eliasson brought us Ice Watch. Fished from a fjord in Greenland, blocks of 10,000 year old ice were left to melt on Tate Modern’s lawn. Not only were the effects of global warming made horrifyingly apparent, but the euphoria induced by The Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Donald Trump’s former strategist, alt-right propagandist and all-round provocateur Steve Bannon comes under the spotlight of a smart, dynamic, behind-closed-doors documentary, as he attempts to turn his brand of far-right populism into a global movement. Adroitly mixing fly-on-the-wall material with news archive, director Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) follows Bannon as he campaigns behind the scenes of the 2018 US mid-terms and casts his beady eye on the EU elections. In so doing, she offers a chilling glimpse into the reactionary forces that are seeking to exploit Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Since 2005 Londinium has carved out a niche in the London choral scene as a purveyor of creative programming, exploring often neglected musical byways or making surprising connections and juxtapositions. Last night the idea was a musical Grand Tour of Europe, as taken by aristocratic young men in the 18th century, and a well-crafted and very satisfying concert resulted.As conductor Andrew Griffiths explained, since there is a dearth of a cappella choral music from the relevant period, they had permitted their imaginary traveller a Tardis, so that although the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Cheeky and broad and (for the most part) as entertaining as seems humanly possible, this embryonic entry from the collaborative pen of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber is back at its onetime London home, the Palladium. It's a production far surpassing any of the various London and Broadway Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoats I have come across over the last 30 years or more. For that, credit a director, Laurence Connor, busy riding the buoyancy he generated in a contemporary Lloyd Webber entry, School of Rock, alongside the canny pairing of a name star in a livewire Sheridan Read more ...
Owen Richards
You wait 50 years for a moon landing documentary, then two come along at once! With Apollo 11 still showing in cinemas, along comes Armstrong. But while the former focuses solely on the lunar mission through archive footage, the latter is the wider story of the man behind those famous first words. Told with support from modern interviews and his own writings (voiced by the irrepresible Harrison Ford), we follow Neil Armstrong's journey from Wapakoneta, Ohio to the moon and back again.Though he will always be remembered as one of the greatest humans to have lived, Armstrong is something of a Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ivo van Hove’s reputation precedes his work as a rumble of thunder goes before a storm. The Manchester International Festival, intensely proud to have on board the man some see as the most original theatre director around, has presented the UK premiere of his 2014 show The Fountainhead, even as memories are fresh in the mind of Van Hove's West End All About Eve and The Damned at the Barbican and he gears up for a major new Broadway revival at the end of the year of West Side Story.First seen at Van Hove's home base on the continent just over five years ago, this is a marathon of a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Half organic, half high-tech, a bank of magnet-flowers sways not in response to a breeze, but to a magnetic field. Their uncannily naturalistic movements are coupled with a form that is blatantly functional: an unseen, elemental force masquerades as nature at its most benignly pastoral (Pictured below right: Magnetic Fields, l969). For Takis (real name: Panayiotis Vassilakis), magnetism introduces an extra dimension to sculpture, providing an active component that serves both as material and means. No longer restricted to the mere representation of action, for Takis, sculptures are action.In Read more ...
Tom Baily
Deadpan humour is given new meaning in Jim Jarmusch’s 13th film, a zombie comedy animated by his typical oddball style. Jarmusch has assembled a grand cast comprising recent collaborators Adam Driver and Bill Murray, long-term musician pals Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA, and a swathe of newbies that includes Selena Gomez. It is an orchestrated confusion, lurching somewhere between a joyfully zany tribute and an over-intelligent, at times dark, social critique.Things get weird from scene one in the fictional middle America town of Centerville. Polar fracking has tilted the earth’s axis and this Read more ...