Reviews
Katherine Waters
“Pussy is pussy” and “bitches are bitches” but Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage at Southwark Playhouse smashes tautologies with roguish comedy in a tight five-hander smartly directed by Charlie Parham.The play is set in New York and follows the ad hoc and long-standing relationships that develop between five women (two of whom are queer) called Betty over the course of a series of rehearsals for a skew-whiff rendition of the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Betty 3 (Beatriz Romilly) decides to put on after going on a date to “The Thea-tah” with a posh Read more ...
Jansen/Maisky/Argerich Trio, Barbican review - three classical titans give chamber music masterclass
alexandra.coghlan
They were billed as a Trio, but when the classical super-group of Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich came together at the Barbican last night it was in a sequence of different combinations, each with their own musical identity. The centre of gravity, however, remained constant. Martha Argerich, the only performer present throughout, may have reinvented herself and her sound fifty times in the course of the evening, now asserting, now effacing, but it was she who rooted the whole, who provided the fixed compass point around which her colleagues roamed so freely.The alchemy of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Let the light in” has been the fundraising slogan for the two-year project to revamp and modernise the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, and adjacent Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. And that is just what has happened, with two triumphs at the Hayward.The first is the building itself. It has long been a marmite, love it or hate it, sample of fashionable 1960s brutalism: it opened in 1968, followed less than a decade later by the National Theatre and the Barbican, to mention more examples. Yet from the beginning the Hayward, named after a chairman of the London County Council, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sometimes it pays to come in under the radar. By way of proof consider two simultaneous Hampstead Theatre premieres, one boasting star wattage courtesy Hayley Atwell fresh off TV's Howards End, the other a debut play from a young writer set entirely in a bathroom. (Yes, really.) And not for the first time, the less-heralded title, Georgia Christou's Yous Two ( ★★★★), knocks the English bow of Sarah Burgess's Off Broadway hit Dry Powder (★★) for six. Thank heavens this playhouse now allows critical coverage of their downstairs entries: Christou is too significant a talent, and Read more ...
David Nice
"You have to start somewhere," Debussy is reported to have said at the 1910 premiere of The Firebird. Which, at least, is a very good "somewhere" for Stravinsky, shot through with flashes of the personality to come. The Symphony in E flat of two years earlier, however, is little more than a theme park of all the ingredients amassed in Russian music since Glinka forged its identity less than a century earlier. It's fun to have on CD - and to play the opening in a "guess the composer" quiz (the reasonable answer would be Glazunov). To work in concert, it needs companions with more than the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hype is a dangerous thing. It often raises expectations beyond the reasonable, and disappointment inevitably follows. It also prioritises PR over artistic activity, putting the publicity cart before the creative horse, sucking energy away from plays to feed the marketing machine. Take the example of Paines Plough, a new writing touring company led by James Grieve and George Perrin, which – in a co-production with Theatr Clwyd and Orange Tree Theatre – have brought a trio of new work in repertory to this Richmond venue. Hyped as the product of the “de facto national theatre of new writing”, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Happily, there’s hope for Spiral junkies – as series six ends, we bring you news that series seven has just gone into production. This is just as well, because these last dozen episodes have been an object lesson in how to make TV drama for the mind and body, nimbly evading cop show genre-pitfalls to bring us carefully-shaded characters operating within a Venn diagram of overlapping grey areas. Big kudos, yet again, to showrunner Anne Landois.Looking back at publicity photos from previous series of Spiral (the first one was shown on BBC Four in 2006), it’s shocking to see how much the cast Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Joe Dunthorne's debut novel Submarine (2008) burrowed plausibly inside the head of a teenager worrying about sex and his parents’ marriage. Richard Ayaode latched onto its quizzical appeal in his film adaptation. Dunthorne’s longer and more ambitious second novel Wild Abandon (2011) set up camp in a hippy commune in which social conventions were quirkily upended. It was a happy setting for an author intrigued by the perpetual weirdness of human behaviour. There has been quite a wait for The Adulterants, a contemporary tour of several of the deadly sins, but it's been worth it.The first two Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Usually extracts in newspapers should stimulate the appetite of the reader to get with it; this is a rare moment when the glimpses afforded to Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging have peculiarly maligned a complex and amply researched investigation into questions of race, identity, politics, geography and history.First impressions were of a personal and rather self-indulgent memoir by a mixed-race young woman. Afua Hirsch, now in her mid-30s, was brought up in comfortable circumstances in Wimbledon. There are plenty of mentions of strawberry and cream, of tennis and leafy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1976, when his first solo album Slippin’ Away was released, Chris Hillman could look back on being a founder member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, two of America’s most important bands. He had also played alongside former members of Buffalo Springfield in Manassas and The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. Before any of this, Hillman was in the bluegrass-inclined Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and The Hillmen. Issuing an album under his own name was new. Slippin’ Away was issued when he was only 32.Slippin’ Away was followed-up in 1977 by Clear Sailin’. Both were issued by Asylum Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Kings of the South Seas first set sail back in 2014, with their debut album drawing on songs about South Pacific whalers. They are Ben Nicholls on concertina, banjo and fine, sonorous vocals, Spiritualized guitarist Richard Warren and drummer with the Neil Cowley Trio, Evan Jenkins. On a polar vortex of a midwinter night they launched their second album in the theatre aboard the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, where endurance and engulfment took centre stage as the harsh Victorian tale of maritime derring-do unfolded with the story of John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to discover the North West Read more ...
stephen.walsh
David Pountney’s tenure at WNO has been an almost unqualified success, despite some eccentricities of repertoire and a certain obstinacy in the matter of new commissions. His own productions have included at least three of unforgettable quality. He has vigorously promoted money-saving co-productions like this one with Theater Bonn. But there is not much, for my money, that even he can do with La forza del destino, Verdi’s ramshackle response to an early 1860s commission from the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg.Did Verdi have in mind some vague idea of what would go down well in barbaric Read more ...