Reviews
Adam Sweeting
There has always been an air of incipient doom hovering over Ripper Street, since the show is more of a laboratory of lost souls than a mere detective drama. Now, as it embarks on its fifth and final season, there’s every reason to suppose that the going will get seriously apocalyptic, not least because the unspeakably evil DI Jedediah Shine has been brought in to helm the Leman Street police station in Whitechapel.Studious viewers will recall that Shine, the godfather of all bent coppers, was not only the murderer of the Elephant Man but also the arch enemy of Matthew Macfadyen’s Edmund Reid Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many times. They are in my bloodstream, as it were, since they provided me with an explanation for my experience as a young woman in the world. The 1972 television series and accompanying book Ways of Seeing from which they came also changed the way people looked at and thought about art. The clarity and conviction of Berger’s observations about how we Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Hampstead Theatre Downstairs' habit of sending shows southward to Trafalgar Studios continues with Richard Bean's Kiss Me. A character study set in post-World War One London, it's a two-hander concerning the attempts of a war widow to conceive a child via an arranged liaison with a younger man. As slight as it is smart, it is grounded by two astonishing performances from Claire Lams and Ben Lloyd-Hughes, returning to roles they originated in Hampstead last year.Bean, of course, is best known for grander comedies like One Man, Two Guvnors. This is cut from very different cloth. A period Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual gathering of the sonically weird and wonderful pitched at “curious audiences” happy to lend their ears to sounds that would ordinarily be difficult to discover without a lot of effort. An urban event, spread over a weekend and a number of indoor venues, is usually the way to go in the UK before summer festivals take hold. In years past, revellers have been glad of the protection from the elements. This year, however, fierce heat and humidity gave the proceedings a Mediterranean sheen and turned some of the gigs into saunas. But with plenty of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Heaven alone knows we've pressing anxieties enough to preoccupy us, but if you have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate more, the iPlayer can oblige. Available now on BBC Three is the latest in what now becomes a trilogy of heartrending dramas with Murdered in the title. Murdered by My Boyfriend and Murdered by My Father, both of which won Baftas for actors in leading roles, is now followed by Murdered For Being Different.As expected of this immensely impressive strand, it doesn't get any less unbearable to watch an innocent young woman fall victim to inexplicable violence. And yet this Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In a voice of distinctive, high-pitched nasal whimsy, comic essayist and memoirist David Sedaris finds humour with the precision of a mosquito after blood. British readers will likely have first encountered him through his Radio 4 series Introducing David Sedaris, and may know the voice, and the author’s ability to extract comedy from the everyday. This collection of diaries gives us the first draft of his experiences, before they are crafted into the exquisitely timed and phrased pieces that made his name.Sedaris is most often encountered today in the rarefied pages of The New Yorker; Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.The Washington Post had no interest in her other life as a songwriter. Her song “Teeny Tiny Gnome” (originally titled “Kicking Stones”) was recorded by The Monkees but wasn’t issued until 1987. In Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Imagine that you come across a story by a journalist who, writing for the Daily Mail or The Sun, steals the identity of a real young man from a poor neighbourhood of south-east London. He had died of an overdose, aged 20, in 1984. Not knowing whether this kid’s immediate family still lived, the sleuth hi-jacks the name of an actual individual – just as, notoriously, undercover officers of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad did when they infiltrated protest groups. First, the reporter buttresses this purloined identity with a sheaf of forged documents and an active Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It had been a perfect summer's day and around the stadium denim-clad punters sipped ice-cool beer and discussed how this reunion would sound. Everyone knew how Axl had aced it, right here, a year ago, filling in as AC/DC's lead singer. Many hoped it would be just like when the classic line-up last played London in 1992. Except this time the sound quality would be better.Unfortunately, for many, the latter wasn't to be. As the band launched into "It's So Easy" smiles of anticipation turned into looks of disbelief - the acoustic at the back of the venue felt like sludge. The culprit seemed to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Midway through Hamlet a troupe of actors arrives at Elsinore. Coaching them for his own ends, the prince turns director, delivering an impassioned critique: “O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters…it out-herods Herod: I pray you avoid it.” It’s a philosophy director Robert Icke takes as his own watchword. Out goes declaiming, along with anything demonstrative or self-consciously dramatic, and in its place we get a conversational Hamlet that allows its audience to eavesdrop, forces us to turn voyeur in a contemporary palace of CCTV Read more ...
stephen.walsh
A drama of passion for essentially passive characters, Debussy’s one and only completed opera is a masterpiece of paradox. How do you stage a work whose dramatis personae hardly seem aware of their own destructive feelings, and who inhabit their island world like the blind who, according to Pelléas, used to visit the curative fountain but stopped doing so when the king himself went blind?Michael Boyd, in his beautiful but occasionally frustrating production for Garsington Opera, approaches - if he doesn’t wholly solve – this problem by treating each of the 15 scenes as a kind of static Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This show feels like an end-of-the-exams party, and in a way that’s exactly what it is. If the fruits of Emma Rice’s short tenure as Artistic Director at the Globe were a series of tests that she is deemed to have failed, then Tristan & Yseult, a revival of an early hit devised for the company Kneehigh, is her parting two-fingered salute. For here writ-large are the rowdiness and irreverence and – heavens above – microphones and electric guitar that so offended a certain faction of the board that it was persuaded to terminate Rice’s contract, despite having hired her precisely because of Read more ...