Reviews
David Benedict
The thing almost no one remembers about the great Nora Ephron/Rob Reiner 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally is that the love story is intercut with real couples talking to camera about the mechanics and longevity of their true-life loves. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Remarkably, Fergus O’Brien’s deeply moving BBC film Against the Law, armed with far darker material, pulls off the self-same trick. Surprising though that may sound – this is a drama about fear and loathing in 1950s Britain – it is also highly appropriate since it is, in so many ways, a story about love.Unless you’re up to speed Read more ...
David Nice
So much light in the Glyndebourne production of Brett Dean's Hamlet; so much darkness in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito according to director Claus Guth. Something is irredeemably rotten in the state of ancient Rome, at odds with the fundamental enlightenment and radiance of Mozart's last complete opera. And yet the basis is a sentimental one: two little boys playing around a lake not dissimilar to Glyndebourne's grow up for one – the fundamentally loving Sesto – to betray the other, Emperor Titus. Is the shooting of a wild magpie which betrayed the idyll to be replayed in adult human terms? I Read more ...
bella.todd
Plays with songs in, or more precisely plays with famous songs in, can feel like the uncanny valley of theatre. They’re not quite musicals and not quite tribute shows. They deliver on familiar tunes and disconcert with fresh narrative. You’re constantly wrongfooted by the rush of recognition.Lazarus was good-weird – a mash-up of David Bowie and Enda Walsh with a vision so unique and uncompromising it didn’t matter if anyone else could quite see it. Girl from the North Country, the new play by Conor McPherson for the Old Vic with songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, is also very weird. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Expectations ran high for this first performance of Julian Anderson’s piano concerto, and they weren’t disappointed. Taking its title from a book of the same name by Andre Malraux, The Imaginary Museum goes on a journey around the world over the course of its six movements. Malraux’s idea was that a coherent collection – of art, artefacts, the stuff of culture – can only be assembled in our heads, when their physical manifestations are scattered to the four winds in the galleries and palaces of the globe.Coherence is the key word here. Ever since his Thebans opera – long in the making, first Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A packed Royal Albert Hall on a Tuesday night for a programme of 20th-century English music. Have the nation’s concert-goers come over all prematurely patriotic? Is Holst’s The Planets really that much of a draw? Or could the crowds have more to do with John Wilson – the straight-backed, schoolmasterly figure at the centre of the musical maelstrom? Whatever their motivation, the capacity crowd surely got what they came for in the scope and drama of this compact Prom.If the Holst was the headliner here, then Vaughan Williams’ Ninth Symphony was a thoughtful opener, sneaked in under the cover Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Big Sick is an enchanting film from the Judd Apatow comedy production line. Don’t be put off by the terrible title. There are two forms of sickness on display in the story of Kumail Nanjiani, a Pakistani American who plays himself in his own autobiographical romantic comedy.The overt sickness is the one which afflicts Emily (Zoe Kazan). She and Kumail, a stand-up comedian/Uber driver, start dating after she heckles him at a gig. She spends half the movie in a coma, flirting with death, while Kumail loiters around the hospital, willing her to recover even though they have in fact broken up Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the most Russian things you can do in ballet is dance Don Quixote, which is 100 percent set in Spain. Don't think too hard about it, and definitely don't think too hard about the plot (which is barely there). The point is, the Mariinsky - perhaps the most pedigree ballet company in the world - are back on the Royal Opera House stage, and all ready for Britain's balletomanes to marvel at Russian training and tradition, and to perform the perennial comparison: who is best, Bolshoi or Mariinsky?Viktoria Tereshkina (pictured below right) is a very Mariinsky choice for Kitri: she is trained Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Maggie the cat is alive: I am alive," or so remarks the feline, eternally frustrated heroine of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That self-assessment has rarely been truer than as spoken by Sienna Miller in the terrific West End production directed by Benedict Andrews, in which the actress finally lands the stage role in which she can let rip.Casually updated to a contemporary landscape of mobile phones and luxury black satin sheets, Williams's portrait of pain, deception and death in the American south emerges with its potency intact, Miller and co-star Jack O'Connell the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The death of Princess Diana 20 years ago had an extraordinary emotional effect on millions of people who had never met her, so what on earth must it have felt like for her two young sons? Prince Harry, aged 12 when his mother died, reflected on that in this much-anticipated programme. He recalled how, as he watched the mourning crowds outside Kensington Palace, he’d wondered: “How are these people showing more emotion than I am feeling?”Harry and his older brother William decided that the 20th anniversary of that shocking event would be the moment for them do once-and-for-all interviews about Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Ten days ago I reviewed the First Night of the 2017 Proms. Last night I was back at the Royal Albert Hall to hear the First Night of the 1966 Proms. This time-capsule experience was courtesy of a re-enactment of Sir Malcolm Sargent’s 500th Prom, in what turned out to be his final season. It gave an idea of Sargent’s musical tastes – middle-of-the-road classics and English music – and, in places, of his famously audience-pleasing conducting style.Andrew Davis was in energetic and animated form on the podium, belying his years with a physical engagement with the music. There was something of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When a trail-blazing orchestra takes on a world-transforming work, it would be pointless to leave the staid old rules of concert etiquette intact. Not only did the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon stretch their repertoire of symphonies performed from memory to cover the epic expansiveness and ear-bending innovations of Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. For half an hour, as this Prom began, Collon and presenter Tom Service also turned the Royal Albert Hall into Britain’s biggest classroom as they sought to scrub the crust of over-familiarity from Beethoven’s breakthrough monster from 1803, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago Brighton band 12 Stone Toddler burst onto the scene with two off-the-wall albums of madly inventive pop-rock. They then vamoosed back out of existence. Now they’re back, preparing a third album for the Freshly Squeezed label, and playing a packed home town gig. The second song they do is a new one, “Piranha” and it shows they’re no nearer normal. It’s a jagged, shouty thing with a catchy chorus about there being piranhas in the water, half football chant, half King Crimson. It’s edgy, deliberately bizarre, and oddly approachable, fun by way of musical obtuseness, just like the Read more ...