Reviews
Gavin Dixon
Cendrillon is Jules Massenet’s operatic version of Cinderella, based on the Charles Perrault story of 1698. It is a fairly faithful to the story we know, although it includes a dark third act, the scene after the ball, where Cendrillon attempts suicide. But, of course, the spirits intervene, and all ends happily. This production, directed by Fiona Shaw, was first staged by Glyndebourne on Tour in October 2018, and now joins the main Festival programme, the revival directed by Fiona Dunn.It is a grand affair for touring opera, though the origins are clear from the reflective surround used to Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
At the end of the first series, MI6 spy Eve (Sandra Oh) stabs psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in the stomach as they’re together on the bed in Villanelle’s gorgeous Paris flat ("chic as shit" according to Eve). “I really liked you! It hurts!” cries Villanelle. Series two doesn't mess about. It starts 30 seconds later, as Eve rushes down the spiral staircase, gasping, distraught, carrying a bloody knife.“I think I might have killed her,” Eve tells her crisp boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), who's on the phone from London. A couple in love, the man with an engagement ring at the ready, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Five years ago, when the world was still reeling from 2008 and Britain from the swinging axe of George Osborne, Thomas Piketty’s Capital was an unlikely bestseller. It was a book probably more bought than read, but it contained an important and highly topical message: that wealth was once again concentrated in the hands of few people, just as had been the case before World War One.That book, now poised to become a documentary, was hailed as “one of the watershed books in economic thinking,” and its publisher, Harvard University Press, published a sort-of companion volume. Inequality by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Marty Wilde will forever be inextricably linked with the late 1950s British rock ‘n’ roll wave he rode, his career did not peter out as musical styles transformed. While he didn’t have the high-profile mutability of Cliff Richard or claim a niche like the moody Billy Fury, he was enviably chameleonic. Wilde adroitly embraced folk-rock, wrote late-Sixties hits for The Casuals and The Status Quo – “Jesamine” and “Ice in the Sun” are his – and even tackled glam rock in the Seventies with his Zappo alter-ego. With his son Ricky, he co-wrote daughter Kim’s 1981 hit “Kids in America”.The Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It might seem odd to laud the entrances and exits of a ballet, but when it comes to stagecraft Christopher Wheeldon is second to none. You lose count of the ingenious ways he finds to shift up to 130 dancers in and out of view at the Albert Hall. Wheeldon created his three-act Cinderella in 2012 for a conventional stage, but for English National Ballet he has reworked it for this vast, non-theatrical O. For once, the wheels of Cinders’ carriage have space to roll.The down side is that the narrative feels overstretched and thin in spite of the pyrotechnics that have been thrown at it – massive Read more ...
Owen Richards
With the continued prevalence of acid attacks in the UK, it was only a matter of time before they became the subject of a film. Thank goodness, then, it's handled with such unflinching care as it is in Dirty God. Director and writer Sacha Polak makes her English-language debut in this deliberate and well-paced drama.Jade (Vicky Knight) is trying to settle back into life after being attacked by her ex-partner. Much of her face and torso have been scarred, but she’s ready to move on. Sadly, the public is not as ready as she is; strangers call her names, eyes constantly stare, and even her own Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What is the perfect country house opera? A Midsummer Night’s Dream? L’elisir? Cenerentola? Figaro? All are strong contenders, but in the absence of anyone brave enough to stage Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest the winner – surely – must be Falstaff.Verdi’s late, great comedy ticks all the essential boxes – charming love story, outrageous comedy, a hero we love to hate (and hate to love), and a plot that gives everyone their just deserts – but also has something few other operas enjoy so fully. Falstaff is a comedy of wealth and success. Nothing is ever really at risk, beyond a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eating Animals begins as a David and Goliath tale of independent farmers versus industrial farming. Frank Reese specialises in rare-breed turkeys and chickens. He calls his farm the "Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch" because, for him, his traditional way of farming is akin to a religious experience. And when asked which of his birds matters most, the thought of having to choose almost reduces him to tears.Paul Willis has a similarly passionate commitment to the pigs roaming freely on his ranch; his pork is delicious, but while he sends 3,000 pigs a week for slaughter, a factory farm can produce 4, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A hushed expectation filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday night in advance of the return on stage of the legendary Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (now rebranded as The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices), who graced Kate Bush’s 1989 classic The Sensual World with their astonishing style of throat singing, combining drones, quarter tones and complex rhythms, harmonies combining in marvellous permutations, seemingly colliding into each other from different planes. It’s an otherworldly vocal sound, and very earthy at the same time, impressionistic and fantastical, the chosen lead vocalists Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Productions of The Marriage of Figaro tend to press their thumbs on the comic or tragic side of the scales that hover so evenly throughout Mozart’s inexhaustible work. Director Martin Lloyd-Evans mostly favoured a darker interpretation at The Grange Festival, despite long stretches of niftily managed funny business. In this perspective, we have to gaze hard at the abuse of power – by men over women, the rich over the poor, even the smart over the simple – as it shows its brutal as well as its seductive face. And it wasn’t only the presence in the row behind of Sir John Major – whose political Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It helps to be of a certain vintage to appreciate the first impact of Tales of the City. Armistead Maupin’s column, begun in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 as a frank and joyous portrayal of gay culture, became a series of half a dozen cult novels. These started appearing in the UK from the mid-1980s. It was a British broadcaster, Channel 4, which began the project of adapting them as dramas in 1993, joined for the second series by Showtime who did the third on their own in 2001.The next three novels, which culminated in the departure from San Francisco of its female protagonist Mary Ann Read more ...
Nick Hasted
One day, when superhero films are as rare as westerns, we will appreciate the brilliant talent applied to the best of them. X-Men: Dark Phoenix moves with a classic’s smooth conviction from its very first scenes. The simple changing of a family’s car radio station on a sunny Seventies day gives mutant Jean Grey a taste of her power’s tragic potential, then we slam into the film’s Nineties present, where the adult Grey (Sophie Turner) is part of the X-Men’s rescue of a space shuttle crew, a desperate mission of seat-clenching excitement which ends with her absorbing a cosmic storm. The queasy Read more ...