Reviews
The Brits Who Designed the Modern World, BBC TwoSunday, 27 November 2016
The Kenwood Chef! Intercity 125! Kodak Instamatic! Wilkinson Sword disposable razors! Bus shelters! Parking meters! They were all designed by a British genius, Sir Kenneth Grange, who appeared here as the subject of a short and disarmingly confident... Read more... |
Nice Fish, Harold Pinter TheatreSaturday, 26 November 2016
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation,... Read more... |
Portrait of the Artist, The Queen's GallerySaturday, 26 November 2016
Born in Rome and taught by her artist father, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) led a colourfully energetic life. As an adolescent she was raped by her father’s assistant – an episode which unusually, then as now, actually came to public trial... Read more... |
Walliams & Friend, BBC OneSaturday, 26 November 2016
The sketch format goes in and out of favour. It was huge in the 1970s, crawled under a rock when alternative comedians found other means of expression, and was reinvigorated 20 years ago by genuinely inventive shows like Big Train and The Fast Show... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Elgar, Mahler, Georges PrêtreSaturday, 26 November 2016
Elgar Remastered (Somm)Elgar’s compositional career took a bit of a nosedive in his final decades but his sharpness as a practical musician never left him, as is witnessed by the superb series of acoustic and early electrical recordings he conducted... Read more... |
Autechre, Royal Festival HallSaturday, 26 November 2016
At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in... Read more... |
The Damned, Brighton Dome, 2016Friday, 25 November 2016
The Damned peak early tonight. They never really top a tribalistic crowd sing-along to the song “Ignite” about two-thirds of the way through the evening. Dressed, as ever, like a cool rockabilly undertaker, in aviators with a black glove clutching... Read more... |
The Children, Royal Court TheatreFriday, 25 November 2016
Over the past decade, one new theme in particular has emerged in contemporary British new writing: generational conflict. In several bright new offerings – such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster (2010) and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2012... Read more... |
PatersonFriday, 25 November 2016
Back in the 1980s Jim Jarmusch was a breath of fresh air. He made quiet, quirky films about young urban Americans that dispensed with the prevailing neon-bright high school romances, jocks and suburbia. He was about as far removed from the John... Read more... |
Shakespeare Trilogy, Donmar at King's CrossThursday, 24 November 2016
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their... Read more... |
The Nutcracker, Royal BalletThursday, 24 November 2016
Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through... Read more... |
AlliedThursday, 24 November 2016
While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad). Stars... Read more... |
