Reviews
Matt Wolf
It's the people who are problematic, not the play. That's one take-away sentiment afforded by Caroline Byrne's sparky and provocative take on All's Well That Ends Well, that ever-peculiar Shakespeare "comedy" (really?) whose title is in ironic contrast to its emotional terrain. Making her debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, having previously directed The Taming of the Shrew on the Globe's main stage, Byrne widens the abyss between the sexes that has always marked out this troublesome late play. Not for the first time, its supposedly tidy resolution makes one wonder what further Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In the dark days of January, white cube galleries are luminous spaces. This is especially true of Pi Artworks right now: the Fitzrovia gallery is showing an incandescent array of 23 paintings by Selma Parlour. Taken in at once and at first sight, her abstract works arrest the eye with unlikely chords of colour and angular planes that suggest competing vanishing points. This is a show that releases both dopamine and mild anxiety, thanks to the pleasure of the warm hues, and the stress caused by an indeterminate focal point.The London-based painter has laid claim to a palette of lively yet soft Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Say what you like about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s partnership with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – and plenty has already been written – but sometimes the facts speak for themselves. At the end of this midweek matinee concert, an audience that had presumably been lured by the promise of Haydn and Max Bruch exploded in laughter and cheers at the end of a piece by György Ligeti.True, it was an unadvertised encore: the final movement of his Concert românesc (1951). But as Ligeti’s Transylvanian hoe-down hurtled onwards, with leader Vesselin Gellev’s solo violin spiralling ever more Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Art fairs are vaguely promiscuous. So much art, so many galleries, so very many curators. They’re a glut for the eye yet curiously anodyne — the ranks of white cubicles could belong to a jobs fair, except there’s a Miró round the corner. And it’s impossible not to price-perv, that sly flick of the eye down to the label just happens.Not so at Art UK. They’re the London Art Fair’s museum partner this year, and this is their first ever exhibition. Nothing’s on sale because they hold none of the works themselves. Instead, all the pieces on display are publicly owned, if seldom seen. They’re on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nobody is more sensitive about the notion of becoming a geriatric action hero than Liam Neeson (“guys, I’m sixty-fucking-five,” as he points out), but he can still punch bad guys and leap off moving trains with the best of ‘em. In this latest battle against the odds while the clock ticks down, Neeson is insurance salesman Michael McCauley, who commutes into Manhattan every day. Except he won’t any more, because he just got sacked.Before this calamity befalls him, director Jaume Collet-Sera (who also collaborated with Neeson on Run All Night, Unknown and Non-Stop) has some fun with the daily Read more ...
Owen Richards
The new import is the latest procedural from Scandinavia, this time focusing on Stockholm’s biker gangs. The first episode aired Tuesday night, with the rest of the series available on All4 now. In the age of the boxset binge, this availability is usually a gift - but Before We Die’s forgettable first episode might struggle to convince viewers to log on and continue.We first met killjoy cop Hanna Svensson on a drugs bust – more specifically, arresting her own son Christian for dealing at a house party. After a rather low-key confrontation, he was taken away and she was left crying in the car Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Henry VIII had a troubled marital history and Charles I lost his head, but both have also gone down in history as original, innovative and obsessive collectors of art, founders in different ways of what is now one of the world’s greatest accumulations in all media. The tale of this particular royal occupation is being brought up to date in four weekly episodes led by the enthusiastic Andrew Graham-Dixon, our go-to serial art presenter. Episode one was subtitled Dangerous Magic. And in this iteration, Graham-Dixon’s own script is loaded down with exclamatory clichés. What is it about even long Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the early 1990s, a group of students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) staged an end-of-year comedy project. Three of them – Claire Walker, Abi Palmer and Geoff Rowe – developed the idea into what in 1994 became the first Leicester Comedy Festival; Walker and Palmer have gone on to other great things in the arts and Rowe remained as the festival's director. Under his leadership it has gone from strength to strength – second only to the Edinburgh Fringe in its stature in the industry. So drum-roll for the 25th incarnation of the Leicester Comedy Festival, with Ed Byrne Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy memoir will be irresistible. It is almost a day-by-day account of 15 years of the family and professional life of one of the anglophone world’s leading academics, critics and authors, who now has some 30 volumes of novels, literary criticism, and plays for stage and television behind him.It is the narrative of a somebody, but at times almost risibly reminiscent of George Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody. We are treated to a rundown Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The critic Simon Reynolds characterised Butterfly Child’s debut album Onomatopoeia as the sound of “vitrified everglades in J.G. Ballard’s The Illuminated Man, where some kind of entropy has slowed down time, so that living creatures are literally petrified, encrusted and crystal.”Such circumlocution was unsurprising as Onomatopoeia was originally issued by Rough Trade in August 1993 during a between-time moment for independently minded pop. Britpop hadn’t yet taken off, grunge was a clichéd bandwagon and the first flush of shoegazing had run its course. It hit shops around the same Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist: deafness, a problem (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss) which began in 2007, had improved somewhat by 2010, declined catastrophically, then partially returned in his “good ear” before a severe sinus infection in 2015 wreaked further havoc.In the period when he was granted some respite, Coleman binged - he calls it harvesting - listening obsessively to particular singers and songs, “frantically stashing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The revival that almost didn't make it into town has got the Royal Court's 2018 mainstage offerings off to a rousing start. For a while, it looked as if this fresh appraisal of a benchmark 1982 Court title would close on the road, a casualty of the "metoo" campaign and charges of inappropriate behaviour that were brought against its original director, Max Stafford-Clark (himself a former Court artistic director). All praise then to current Court supremo, Vicky Featherstone, for reversing her initial cancellation and allowing Kate Wasserberg's terrific production to get the London run it Read more ...