Reviews
Owen Richards
Despite horror’s omnipresence in cinema, British television has been somewhat deprived of jump scares. Every couple of years there’s an anomaly, such as Sky’s The Enfield Haunting or ITV’s Marchlands, but nothing has caught the public’s imagination – not since the innovative but controversial one-off Ghostwatch. Enter the BBC and Netflix with their new six-part series Requiem, promising to be the most terrifying show ever broadcast on the Beeb.Either the worst is yet to come, or the terror bar has been set very low; episode one brought little innovation and even less tension. There were the Read more ...
Owen Richards
We follow Kabwita Kasongo on his morning routine, lingering over the shoulder as he treks through the village. A pastel sunrise greets vast landscapes, the morning breeze visible for miles around. He heads to a tree at the edge of a mountain, and begins a day’s work chopping it down. It’s a stunning opening sequence which prepares you for the visceral journey ahead.Kabwita is a charcoal salesman; a gruelling job which consists of chopping down a large tree, cutting it to pieces, burying the pieces, burning them, and then travelling 50 km on foot to sell at them at anywhere between 2,500 to 5, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay and Newlyn. Out here are fishing villages, tin mines, granite churches, wide seas, surfers, pixies, low mental health indicators, and a great deal of unemployment.Henry Darke’s Booby’s Bay takes on the half-twee half-spavined world of the Cornish fishing village in its oddball glory while bringing up the salty issue of regional deprivation. The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A perfectionist says goodbye to an art form he has done so much to nourish by playing – you guessed it – a perfectionist. From the minute Daniel Day-Lewis first appears in Phantom Thread, looking sartorially splendid and more aquiline than ever, there's no doubt that the thrice Oscar-winning actor (and a nominee again this year) owns this movie as he has so many previous ones. Playing the wonderfully named Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock, a 1950s fashion designer possessed of killer charm and something darker and more unknown as well, the actor cuts a presence at once alluring and Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
All hail! Shakespeare’s Roman drama may be enjoying something of a resurgence at present, but it rarely proves as vital and arresting in performance as this. Last summer in the US, a staging at the Public Theater caused a furore and frightened away sponsors by killing off a Caesar who was unequivocally the pussy-grabbing Dayglo President himself. There were also productions in Sheffield and at the RSC. This one, though, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a splendidly many-headed hydra.It’s a slick, pacey, interval-free two hours that sees the Bridge Theatre transformed into something between a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
No doubt McMafia has its strengths, but it’s like a mug of Horlicks compared to the grappa-with-aviation-fuel blast of Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic). The Naples-set organised crime drama takes no prisoners. It gives no quarter, and expects none.As a latecomer to Gomorrah, I needed to do a bit of homework before I began to get the hang of what’s going in series three. However, if you’re au fait with the first two seasons, you’ll know that the piece hinges on the tumultuous history of the Savastano dynasty, a powerful Camorra family accustomed to lording it over the unlovely streets of Naples’s Read more ...
David Nice
You can't have too much Dvořák in a single evening, at least not when the works in question operate at the highest level of volatility and melodic abundance like last night's overture, concerto and symphony. "Febrile centrists" might look like an oxymoron, but that just about sums up conductor Paavo Järvi and cellist Gautier Capuçon: superlative techniques, feet firmly planted only so that the music can fly, moving dexterously through the turbulence but never pushing too hard. With the Philharmonia burning for both, this was an incandescent event.Rarely did we encounter the Dvořák of sunlit Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The advertising for La Nuova Musica’s Orlando billed it as “Handel’s most psychologically complex opera”. Whether or not you agree (and there are plenty of heavyweight rivals – Alcina, Giulio Cesare and Agrippina just for starters) there’s also the issue that it’s only half the story. Orlando may be a complicated portrait of mental instability and madness, but it’s also a magical pastoral comedy peopled with lovelorn shepherdesses and wizards, featuring quite the silliest ending of all Handel (although this too, admittedly, is a much-contested category). This performance did little to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After a mysterious mid-season break which seemed to catch everyone by surprise, Strike Back’s sixth season belatedly bounces noisily back. So far the story has ricocheted around the Middle East before detouring to Hungary, where our indestructible Section 20 operatives just managed to save “Mac” McAllister (Warren Brown) from being hanged by the fanatical Magyar Ultra extremist group.Now, though, they’re in Belarus, still on the trail of Warrington’s jihadi queen Jane Lowry (Katherine Kelly), who looks as though she’d be more at home managing a branch of Morrisons than plotting to wreak Read more ...
Robert Beale
It began in semi-darkness. Appropriate for Arvo Pärt, perhaps – after all, Manchester Camerata have played his music in Manchester Cathedral to great atmospheric effect in the past. But the Choir of Clare College Cambridge, conducted by Graham Ross, delivered his Da pacem Domine in a hall where it seemed as if the lights had failed … not quite the same thing.They sang the brief, four-part, a cappella piece fairly accurately and, for the most part, confidently, but the 26 young singers could not create the spark, or the richness of tone, that might have brought its holy minimalism to real life Read more ...
David Nice
Make Arvo Pärt the bulwark of any concert and you can surprise as well as delight the full house he’s likely to win you with the rest of your chosen programme. This was a beautifully planned showcase for the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under its Latvian conductor Kaspars Putniņš, poised between the introspective and the extrovert both within the all-Pärt first half and what followed after the interval, where Estonian composers no less precious than Pärt to their compatriots framed the late Jonathan Harvey’s mesmerising seraphics. And this Estonia 100 concert represented not just Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Fresh from Celtic Connections in Glasgow, I’m With Her stepped out at Bush Hall in west London for their only England date before embarking on a major US tour. Sarah Jarosz, who plays guitar, banjo and mandolin, Aoife O’Donovan, guitar, and Sara Watkins, a mean fiddler, are being described as “a folk supergroup” – and seeing, and hearing, is indeed believing. It’s no hype: these three thirtysomething women, each with their own successful solo career, make a beautiful noise.The concert was sadly short, little more than an hour, and served as a showcase for I’m With Her’s debut album, See You Read more ...