Reviews
Ismene Brown
A Saudi princess in her white wedding dress digs her own grave as men pile up stones to hurl at her head — next, an Isis fighter is stabbing a knife at her neck to decapitate her. Ah, the fate of the heroine of the average baroque opera about the appalling ways of men and gods. Add in the bearded lady in a burqa, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry on the opening day of the new Glyndebourne season. Graham Vick’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s 359-year-old opera Hipermestra is certainly extremist opera.Yet what an extreme opera this is. Here is a Read more ...
bella.todd
Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow. In the opening moments of her new song-cycle, inspired by the theatre’s half-remembered and misreported past, she clambers through the stalls trailing yards of historical costume, retrieves a page of script from her cleavage, and pinches an EXIT sign to use in the absence of stage lights.With “ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The news that Colm Tóibín has written a novel about Orestes, Clytemnestra, Electra and the whole accursed House of Atreus might prompt two instant responses. One could run: where does your man find the brass neck to compete with the titans of the past, from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides down to Richard Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, old Eugene O’Neill et al? The other, scanning the Irish writer’s subtle but remorseless interrogation of family matters in times of fraying belief - specifically, the knotted bonds of mother and son - might simply ask: what has taken him so long?In Tóibín’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the producer of the early Kinks and Who, Shel Talmy’s status as one of British pop’s most important figures is assured. He is, though, American. Despite being integral to the mid-Sixties boom years when the Limeys took over, he was born in Chicago in 1937.It didn’t stop with his two most successful clients. As the new collection Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production more-than amply demonstrates, his ears were always to the ground and the lesser knowns he worked with were as striking as the Top Ten acts. Pitch The First Gear’s sandpaper-rough version of “A Certain Girl” against The Kinks at Read more ...
Bill Knight
At heart, Photo London is a selling fair for expensive photographic prints. You wander through the steamy labyrinth of Somerset House from gallery show to gallery show surrounded by black-clad snapperati, assaulted on all sides by images until lost in photography. This year the show is said to be the subject of a "rigorous curatorial process" designed to show rare historical treasures, new work by established masters, and work by the brightest new stars. But surely I saw that print here last year? And didn’t I see that Karsh portrait of Winston Churchill on a five-pound note?There are great Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There may never have been a time when Shakespeare’s Richard III did not have contemporary relevance, but surely never more than it does right now. And it’s to the credit of director Mehmet Ergen that this production doesn’t go to town on it, but instead leaves the audience to make its own connections. From the start, Richard of York is shown to be a misogynist and a sociopath who is prepared to say anything, do anything to attain the seat of power. To borrow the words of a New Yorker profile of a certain presidential hopeful, his is “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul”.Greg Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inversion may not be the catchiest of titles, but in the case of Iranian director Behnam Behzadi’s film its associations are multifarious. On the immediate level it refers to the “thermal inversion” that generates the smogs that engulf his location, Tehran, and also direct his story. Meteorologically, the phenomenon happens when a layer of warm air sits over one of cold, preventing it from rising, and trapping pollutants in the atmosphere.But there’s surely a deeper relevance in this story of family conflict – in particular sibling antagonism – that relates to the position of women in Iranian Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Until yesterday my only experience of the Welsh language in the opera house was a few isolated passages in Iain Bell’s In Parenthesis last year and the surtitles WNO routinely put up alongside the English in the Millennium Centre. Now Guto Puw, a 46-year-old composer from north Wales, has written an entire opera for Music Theatre Wales and the Carmarthen-based Theatr Genedlaethol in this beautiful language of which I’m ashamed to say I know not a single word apart from a handful of road signs and the unexpected pepperings of English (“Electric – Price – Bloody Job” was one whole phrase I Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Watching tango dancers Gisela Galeassi and Nikito Cornejo own the apron of the stage during the second half of m¡longa, the brain finds it difficult to process what the eyes are seeing. The pair seem to be one writhing, dark-toned dervish of jutting, sensual, passionate movement. Back and forth they go, he spinning her round his body like a silk scarf, fluid as mercury; her feet attacking the stage, staccato, kicking out, kicking down, so fast it really is the proverbial blur. Nigh on two hours of tango with a 20-minute interval might sound like too much, but with only the smallest of lulls Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yasmine Hamdan has gone from being an indie star in Beirut a decade ago with her adventurous band Soapkills to being a bona fide solo star with a couple of sophisticated albums behind her, the latest Al Jamilat recently released.She sings in Arabic, is based in Paris, has a Belgian label and has a multi-cultural band and treads an inventive cultural tightrope between orient and occident. The melody of “Douss” sounds almost Chinese and could be sung in a Hong Kong karaoke bar but is actually about the let-down of the Arab Spring “feeding us lies, deceit and slogans”.The packed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television dramas about catastrophic events in broken Britain are meant to be cathartic. They knead the collated facts into the shape of drama for millions to absorb and understand. Then we all somehow move on, sadder but slightly wiser. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Hillsborough. The Government Inspector. And still they flow onto the screen: only recently there’s been Damilola: Our Loved Boy, The Moorside and Little Boy Blue.Now Three Girls, in which over three nights on BBC One redemption was dealt out with extreme parsimony. You knew it was going to end complicatedly when the guilty Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House. A one-acter, but at 45 minutes a substantial one, set to the work of the same name by Rachmaninov, this premiere was an important moment for Scarlett, whose last two new works for the company, Frankenstein and Age of Anxiety, received at best mixed reviews. Symphonic Dances is not a masterpiece, but it's the best Scarlett I've seen Read more ...