Reviews
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the National Theatre has specialised in trilogies. End is the final play in both playwright David Eldridge’s outstanding trilogy and in this venue’s former director Rufus Norris’s Dorfman programme. Like Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England trilogy, Eldridge’s cycle – Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022) – says as much about the state of the nation as it does about the personal lives of its characters. Starring Saskia Reeves (familiar from Slow Horses) and Clive Owen, this two-hander explores the emotional landscape of a couple making plays for a final parting Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The ballet world will soon run out of titles signifying a renaissance. After ENB’s recent Re:evolution comes London City Ballet’s Rebirth, following its debut programme last year called Resurgence. In LCB’s case, the term is quite literal.The company resurfaced, after a nearly 30-year hiatus, under the directorship of Christopher Marney, whose formula for the new-look group is a winning one. Bring together fine dancers from all corners of the globe and send them out to perform in smaller venues, where they can explore rich, sometimes under-explored seams in the modern ballet repertoire. Add Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This week, UK electronica originals Cabaret Voltaire hit Birmingham on their penultimate tour before they finally put their synthesizers into storage and call it quits this time next year. For a band that have been going (on and off) since 1973, however, they were seriously on fire – with no suggestion that they should be considering permanent retirement any time soon.Richard H Kirk may have passed away in 2021, but Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, who had both left the fold more than 30 years ago, put on a fine show and paid tribute to their fallen comrade early in the proceedings. Read more ...
Claudia Bull
Strictly speaking, an epistolary novel tells more than one story. You could say, for example, that Dracula is “about” a collection of letters and diary entries and in the same vein, that Claire-Louise Bennett’s new book is “about” a woman’s writing. Really, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye follows the end of a single relationship, but the framing – a journal of sorts, containing various letters and emails – allows Bennett to chart a woman’s shifting, lifelong attitudes to intimacy.Bennett’s narrator begins by recalling her time with Xavier, a man whom she loved for many years. In fact, she still loves him, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tim Key, besuited and wearing a baseball cap, stands on stage as the audience files in, smiling sweetly as people take their seats. He’s on stage but, in keeping with many of the acting roles that non-comedy fans may know him from – Alan Partridge’s Side Kick Simon and the lazy office manager Ken in The Paper, to mention just two – he’s unobtrusive. Many don’t clock his presence at all.
But then – show time! – the baseball cap’s flung off, he’s stamping his foot and demanding our attention. We give it easily for the next 70 minutes of Loganberry, in which Key - more a storyteller than Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Leisure Process issued four singles between March 1982 and May 1983. Signed to Epic Records, the electropop-inclined duo was primed for success. Debut 45 “Love Cascade” was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell’s record of the week. At the other end of the coolness spectrum, John Peel also played the single. A Leisure Process Peel session was recorded on 10 March 1982.Another factor feeding into the perception Leisure Process was ready for take off was the identity of their producer: Martin Rushent. He was integral to shaping British pop of the period. His work with Altered Images, The Human League and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Did you know that women watch porn? That they wank? Shock. Horror. Dismay. If you really are surprised by this non-revelation then maybe you need to get a ticket to see Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play at the Royal Court’s studio space. But, wait a minute, it’s sold out already. Maybe because it stars Ambika Mod (remember her from Every Brilliant Thing @Sohoplace, or Netflix’s One Day?). Anyway, this show is West End bound so you’ll definitely get a chance to see it – its in-the-round staging would work well @Sohoplace. But while Mod is the draw, what’s the play about?
Mod plays Ani Read more ...
Justine Elias
It's hard to criticise a movie that opens with a shot of an Allied G.I. spitting and urinating on a Nazi insignia, but that moment of smug satisfaction (Nazi punks must die!) is fleeting. Nuremberg, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, has more on its mind than self-congratulation.
Drawing on Jack El-Hai's book "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist" and other biographies and autobiographies, Nuremberg focuses on the complex prosecution of Hitler's second in command, Herman Goering, and 21 other top Nazi officials.
Where its esteemed predecessor, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New writing for the theatre is good at taking us into the darkest of places – and there are few more painful environments than prisons and mental institutions. Places where agony radiates off the walls, and anguish is in the air we breathe. So it’s a real challenge for Sophia Griffin, in her debut play, After Sunday, at the Bush theatre, to takes us on just such a journey into an unforgiving world of distress, disappointment and despair. If the result is not completely successful, it does have an excellent cast who deliver some powerfully moving moments.
Set in a secure unit, basically a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s unfinished C Minor mass lacks a canonical completion of the sort that Süssmayr so famously – and still contentiously – imposed on the Requiem. Even without its Agnus Dei and chunks of the Credo, however, the showpiece mass planned for the Salzburg abbey in 1783 remains a mighty and stirring piece whose choral and solo peaks more than match the later work. At St Martin’s, David Bates, his group La Nuova Musica, and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, brought to it not just passages of period-sensitive refinement but a full-bodied, big-boned weight and depth of sound.
With almost 30 Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The title of Joy Gregory’s Whitechapel exhibition is inspired by a proverb her mother used to quote – “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and her aim is to seduce rather than harangue the viewer.
It’s a good stratagem, especially if you are pointing to things your audience may prefer not to consider. And Gregory’s images can be beautiful (the seduction); but in order to avoid a diatribe, she often approaches her subject obliquely and quietens her voice to a whisper, requiring the viewer to pay close attention and hone in on the message.
If most photographers use the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hamilton may have helped the West End recover from The Covid Years, but it carries its share of blame too. Perhaps that’s not strictly fair on some of its spawn, but do we get Coven without that musical behemoth? If not, this one’s on you Lin-Manuel.
We’re back in the early 1600s, though not in music and speech, natch. Shakespeare had written the (literally) bewitching A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15 years earlier and The Tempest, with a necromancer as its protagonist, two years prior, but, in 1612 and again in 1633, children were denouncing their families for witchcraft. Of course, as is the Read more ...