Reviews
Tim Cumming
Now in its 35 year, Womad is embedded into British festival culture, flying the flags of a musical multiculturalism that is about breaking down barriers and building new relationships. It’s not something you want to lose.Aside from pleasurable headliners – the likes of Oumou Sangare, Toots and the Maytals and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – it’s the names you don’t know who often leave the deepest impression. The BBC Radio 3 Charlie Gillett Stage hosted numerous full-flavoured festival debuts – the London-Greek sound of Kourelou, for instance, or Italian acoustic trio Vesevo’s folk tunes from Read more ...
Helen Wallace
"Everyone suddenly burst out singing"’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his paean to humanity amidst the horror of war, "Everyone Sang". And sing they did, all 180 of them, crammed onto Garsington’s modest stage for its new community opera Silver Birch by Roxanna Panufnik to a libretto by Jessica Duchen. Here were primary school children, teenagers, professional singers, members of a women’s refuge, ex-military personnel, and a waggy-tailed dog. Even Sassoon’s own great-nephew lent voice to a chorus of roof-raising passion and purpose.And though the poet’s ghost (an expressive Bradley Travis) Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. Opposite a shot of scaffolding, ladders and shadows – all favourite motifs – on the island of Bali, he writes a sort-of manifesto for the method of this book. “I do not love the travel pages,” he, somewhat superfluously, declares. Rather, he turns his lens (he uses manual cameras, which carry the old-fashioned risk of a ruined roll of film) on the margins, the edges, the corners, especially of urban life: “the substratum of the visible Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season, here was a programme fulfilling what it said on the tin: prominent LGBTQ (when will all these expanding acronyms cease to confuse us all) figures narrating, examining, discussing, analysing, letting it all hang out about LGBTQ folk and the arts during the past half-century. The usual suspects were interviewed, from Maggi Hambling – her smoking more shocking than anything else on the programme – to Stephen Fry, Sandy Toksvig and David Hockney, although there was no Alan Bennett or Grayson Perry.In the 1960s before the act that partially Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On a dreary evening in what passes for summer, the news unutterably grim, an evening in the company of South Africa’s greatest export can’t help but lift the spirits. The nine singers that comprise Ladysmith Black Mambazo are mostly blood family, sons of Joseph Shabalala - who founded the group in 1960 following a series of dreams in which he heard traditional Zulu isicathamiya - their cousins and two friends, and what an amazing stage act they are.It’s not just their sound – instantly recognisable, fixed in the mind’s ear – but their look and their athleticism: leaping, high-kicking, dancing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between them, Marylebone Beat Girls and Milk of the Tree cover the years 1964 to 1973. Each collects tracks recorded by female singers: whether credited as solo acts, fronting a band or singer-songwriters performing self-penned material. That the two compilations dovetail is coincidental – they were released by different labels on the same day – but they embrace the period when the singer-songwriter was codified and when, as the liner notes of Milk of the Tree put it, “female voices began to be widely heard in the [music] industry.”As that quote suggests, Milk of the Tree: An Anthology Of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This year’s Førdefestivalen was gabled by an opening Nordic Sound Folk Orchestra showcase and a spectacular closing gala, live-streamed and broadcast Europe-wide. It featured a dizzyingly eclectic range of world and Nordic folk bands, as well as the speediest stage turn-arounds I’ve ever seen.Førdefestivalen is a unique musical gathering in a small Norwegian town on Norway’s west coast, deep in fjord country, the landscape painter Nikolai Astrup’s habitat. Skydiving from the nearby Hafstadfjellet mountain (alas, sometimes fatally) is a popular pastime. Jumpers launch themselves from the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It's a Cinderella story: Xander Parish was plucked from obscurity in the Royal Ballet corps and trained by the Mariinsky to dance the greatest roles in the repertoire. Now, not only is he the first Briton to join the historic Russian company, he has also just been promoted to Principal after last night's performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House.To make the move on his home turf like this seems like the crowning move in a canny publicity campaign that has seen Parish in newspaper interviews and on the Today Programme in recent weeks. The hype around him has been carefully built over a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read Sue Townsend’s chronicles of Adrian Mole, hopeless lovestruck bard of Leicester. And each year he grew up with me, as experience uncovered the texture of Mole’s life. "Phoned Auntie Susan but she is on duty in Holloway." A line like that was simply information at first. A year or two later, it brought a smile, then a conspiratorial laugh.Laughter Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the riveting first series of Top of the Lake, it was personal for Down Under detective Robin Griffin. She headed to a hilly corner of New Zealand to be around for the death of her mother while looking into the disappearance of a young girl. There she fell in love with the estranged son of a local villain but had to pull out upon learning that he was in fact her half-brother. A last-minute denial of paternity by the villain left her with something to smile about, especially as she also exposed a paedophile ring and shot its facilitator.Spool forward to the second series on BBC Two, and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Movies which essentially consist of a central character trapped in a difficult predicament can be great (Tom Hardy in Locke), or more likely not so great (Colin Farrell in Phone Booth or Ryan Reynolds in Buried). In any event it’s not a challenge to be undertaken lightly, since the viewer is always wondering what brilliant or absurd trick is coming next to keep boredom at bay and the show on the road.In The Wall, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) has teamed up with debut screenwriter Dwain Worrell to create a 90-minute thriller about snipers divided by the eponymous Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's enough plot for a dozen plays buzzing its way through Mosquitoes, Lucy Kirkwood's play that uses the backdrop of the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) to chronicle the multiple collisions within a family. Veering off now and then into discussion of particle physics, Rufus Norris's furiously busy production is anchored by Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams as largely fractious siblings enmeshed in a spiralling landscape of sexting, career sabotage, incipient senility, and a helluva lot more.Any one of these topics might have made a play all its own, and the accomplished creative team here on Read more ...