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... |
