Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
Meg Wolitzer’s 10th novel has been hailed as a breakthrough, a feminist blockbuster, an embodiment of the zeitgeist. (Nicole Kidman has bought the film rights, which goes to show.) But in all her fiction, she deftly explores motherhood, career, misogyny, feminism, the domestic detail within the bigger picture, with a very American, affectionate wit – she’s particularly good at awkward teenagers – though sometimes there’s a feeling of skill at the expense of substance. Wolitzer's previous (too long) book The Interestings deals with the successes and failures over decades of a group of New York Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although a minimalist approach informed John Foxx’s first solo album, the new “Deluxe Edition” reissue of Metamatic expands what was two sides of vinyl to a three-CD, 49-track box set. After leaving Ultravox following their early 1979 American tour, he quickly signed with Virgin Records and began recording with a couple of synthesisers and a rhythm machine. A bass guitar cropped up intermittently. The album’s lead-off single “Underpass” used only six of the recording studio’s available eight tracks. Despite the pared-down sensibility, Metamatic was organic and imbued with a human sensitivity. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The journalist Frank Gardner has turned to fiction to illuminate with imagination the world that he knows inside out from years of reporting. His biographical trajectory, from scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world, through BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – has given rise to a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand, as well as a previous thriller, Crisis.We inhabit his fictional world on the basis that he will portray a riff on reality with nuance and understanding, all the better to escort us through the Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity as well as luxury saw to it that the night after Simon Rattle gave his farewell Festival Hall performance as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, his imminent successor appeared over at the Barbican with another excellent German orchestra. We've only rarely encountered Kirill (not to be confused with honorary Liverpudlian Vasily) Petrenko in the UK up to now, so the contrast was instructive. While one shouldn't compare incomparables, it's tempting on this evidence to suggest that Rattle is more earth, Petrenko airier, with a shared fire when the Englishman's at his best. But Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde is a verbatim drama made up of interviews with men, which the trio conducted in their home towns of Stockport, Corby and Kidderminster. The overall theme is fatherhood, men’s relationships with their Dads. Given that this is such well-trodden ground, does Fatherland, which was first seen as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2017, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You don’t see a lot of German drama imported to British television. France, Italy, Scandinavia, yes. But the biggest country in Europe is less of a player. The great exception – and it really was great - was Deutschland 83, a thrilling hit when shown on Channel 4. It was considered a flop in Germany, where it lost half its audience, but don’t let that put you off if you haven’t yet had the pleasure: it’s still on All 4. Now the Walter Presents strand brings us Line of Separation, also on All 4, and you could be forgiven for thinking of it as Deutschland 45.The overlap is partly one of casting Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A proper production of Così fan tutte should make you feel as if the script for a barrel-scraping Carry On film has been hi-jacked by Shakespeare and Chekhov – working as a team. The story is so silly (even nasty), the music so sublime. When, in Oliver Platt’s production for Opera Holland Park, Eleanor Dennis’s Fiordiligi jumps on the furniture to proclaim her devotion to her absent betrothed as a visiting “Albanian” tries to woo her, we stand, as usual, just a hair’s breadth away from utter farce. Then she sings “Come scoglio”, a hymn to steadfastness and constancy that soars above its Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Songlines Encounters festival is in its eighth year, and opened its doors on Thursday night at Kings Place in London with 3MA, (TroisMa in French), comprising Malian kora player Ballake Sissoko, Moroccan oud player Driss El Maloumi and Madagascan valihah player (that’s a member of the zither family) Rajery. Between them they share a few strings and 3MA expertly and deftly used them to conjure up a pungent pan-African world of complementary musical flavours, extending from north to west Africa, with each member taking solo turns, as well as merging together as one to create some marvellous Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel? You can sense the commissioners feeling with this new series they have now done their bit for African music for the next few years. In general, the BBC, unlike counterparts in places like France, have been ridiculously Anglocentric in their music coverage – like having a cooking channel that leaves out Indian, Chinese and Japanese food.The main difficulty, in the first episode, is that the idea of “doing” Nigerian music in an hour Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Something is afoot at Garsington this season. Walking past the lake you might just catch sight of three strange figures in the distance – white-clad pawns engaged in a solemn game of human chess. Continue towards the auditorium and, somewhere among the topiary, there’s a splash of colour. A man with the cap and long red robes of an Inquisitor stands silently and contemplates the statuary. Opera, once again it seems, has fallen through the looking glass.Like so many directors before her, Netia Jones turns her gaze back on itself for the new production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflote that opens Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literary allusions and aspirations come thick and fast in this roomy, novelistic, most French of films from Arnaud Desplechin. Naming its characters after Joyce and Melville, interpolating passages from Philip Roth and Bernard Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Marnie, it’s a fictional film à clef within a partially real one about a neurotic director from Roubaix (which is also Desplechin’s hometown).Its opening scenes grip and intrigue, as middle-aged spies in Paris contemplate the misadventures of their strangest recruit, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel), with his “unlikely face” and enigmatic Read more ...
Richard Bratby
How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly. The result is unlike anything else that was being written during the First World War: music with all the invention, fire and vaulting ambition of youth, underpinned by an awareness of mortality that’s less like a creeping terror than some mighty, towering presence on the horizon – Read more ...