Reviews
Marina Vaizey
What a charmer! An irresistible combination of diffidence and confidence, Michael Caine is so much more than Alfie, and this surprising book, his second after a delightful autobiography, is multi-layered, filled with tips for acting, on stage and screen. The title comes, of course, from the memorable cock-up in The Italian Job: as the little white van explodes totally, Caine with impeccable timing – and a delightful scowl – reminds his hapless colleague that, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”Subtly it reminds the reader that too much can be, well, too much. That is, in some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Think of Cocteau Twins. Their label 4AD will inevitably be high on the list of markers coming to mind. Whatever they were like as people, mysterious, oblique, shadowy and other similar adjectives were conjured for the band – and label alike. Despite interpretations of them as something other, their 1990 album 4AD Heaven or Las Vegas went Top Ten in the UK, entered the American Top 100 and sold quarter of a million copies.Yet Cocteau Twins’ final two albums came out on Fontana, an adjunct of the major label Phonogram which, in time, was absorbed into the multi-national conglomerate Universal. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
What a scrumptious spread of musical virtuosity the Barbican has laid on with the aid of its international guests this week. A couple of days after the Australian Chamber Orchestra conquered Milton Court, the ace Baroque ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro stormed the main hall with this concert performance of Handel’s farewell opera, Serse. Yes, it sounds deplorably old-fashioned to treat Handel’s musical dramas – Georgian-style – merely as the showground for vocal pyrotechnics. But the high-wire artistry of Argentinian counter-tenor Franco Fagioli, in the title role, could never count as simply some Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took 24 days to sell off the 4,000 items which Horace Walpole had amassed during 50 years of avid collecting. He bought a modest property beside the Thames in Twickenham in 1749 and, by 1790, had extended and transformed it into a fairy tale summer palace where he could throw lavish parties and show off his collection to friends and visitors.With its towers, slender turrets and decorative chimneys, Strawberry Hill is a Gothic revival fantasy. The design was cobbled together by Walpole with the help of the artist Richard Bentley and the amateur architect John Chute. Ideas were gleaned from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rock critic Greil Marcus observed that John Fogerty’s songs are “about as contrived as the weather”, and there can surely never have been such an easy and instinctive songwriter in rock’n’roll. After his glory years with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fogerty endured a painful period of career-threatening lawsuits, but has successfully re-emerged as one of the grand icons of rock’s golden age.His live band is now a family affair, since for this show at the O2 he was flanked by his son Shane on guitar, with whom he frequently indulges in bouts of twin-guitar arm-wrestling, and was sometimes Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder’s first concert in the Hallé Thursday series for 2018-19 was on clearly mapped Hallé territory – Richard Strauss and Elgar. They have a reputation, and a tradition, of playing these composers’ music very well. They’ve already recorded Elgar's Second Symphony and, judging by the microphones around the platform, they’re doing the same right now with Strauss’s Don Quixote.The soloists were their own principals, cellist Nicholas Trygstad (pictured below) and viola player Timothy Pooley. Though it won’t be discernible in any purely audio document of the occasion, they and their Read more ...
Owen Richards
If a Queen biopic called for drama, scandal and outrage, then Bohemian Rhapsody spent its fill in production. Several Freddies had been and gone, rumours swirling about meddling band members, and then director Bryan Singer’s assault accusations caught up with him. In a way, it’s impressive the film came out so coherent. However, coherence does not mean it's good. Is the film as bad as some are making out? Well, yes and no.We meet Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek, completely at one with the great one) working at Heathrow Airport, all buck teeth and flamboyant outfits. But he’s not yet the confident Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s eight years since Richard Armitage’s character Lucas North died in Spooks, but now Armitage is back undercover as CIA agent Daniel Miller in Berlin Station. Mind you, it’s already been touch and go – Miller was shot in in Berlin’s Potzdamer Platz in a flash-forward opening sequence, but apparently not fatally.Miller has arrived in Berlin from his previous job in Panama, where his assiduous online detective work had unearthed telltale clues about the activities of Thomas Shaw, a Snowden-style whistle-blower who’s been leaking CIA secrets to the German press. Miller reckoned he’d Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the photographer previously known as Hjalmar, Hogg disarms you from the outset with a bonhomie just waiting to snap. By the play's end, there's precious little evidence of mirth given the cumulative wreckage on view: building upon his forays into Shakespeare, Schiller, Chekhov, and the Greeks, Icke propels Ibsen's 1884 text straight into the heart of Read more ...
David Nice
Presenting the last Mozart symphonies as a three-act opera for orchestra, as Richard Tognetti and his febrile fellow Australians did on Monday, was always going to be a supreme challenge. It worked, as Boyd Tonkin reported here. Since then, the Barbican's grandiosely-named "International Associate Ensemble" has opened up the repertoire, synchronising with film (on Tuesday) and ending its mini-residency with the kind of vibrant rattlebag for which it's rightly celebrated. How it all added up remains to gel in the mind, but the bonuses were splendid: world-class Australian soprano Nicole Car Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story. And, talking of repetition, the show's cast — in its premiere at the Bridge Theatre — is led by Jim Broadbent, who has form with this playwright. He was also in McDonagh's The Pillowman at the National in 2003 — and that was also a dark tale that was bleaker than bleak. Hot on the heels of the hilarious massacres of the recent revival of his The Read more ...
David Kettle
Matthew Holness clearly knows a thing or two about low-budget British horror from the early 1970s. In TV comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace he was as merciless as he was affectionate in ripping the genre apart. His debut feature as writer-director is an odd, woozy creation that pays just as overt homage, but Possum is in another tonal world altogether – one that’s brooding, clammy and unremittingly grim.Former children’s entertainer Philip – disgraced, though we’re left to guess precisely how – makes a physical and psychological return to the charred, crooked remains of his boyhood home, Read more ...