Reviews
Graham Fuller
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco. A mecca for refugees from Europe seeking transit papers that will enable them to fly to neutral Lisbon and thence sail for America, the café is a hotbed of shady deals to which Rick, cynical and aloof, turns a blind eye.He Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This must be the most depressing exhibition I have ever seen. Dedicated to the leaders of the Russian Revolution, the first room features official portraits by Isaak Brodsky of Lenin and Stalin plus drawings and models of Lenin’s vast mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. Surely, I thought, this dreary stuff must be a preamble to more exciting things to come, especially as the Russian avant-garde included some of the most innovative artists of the 20th century who not only pioneered abstraction, but in the first few years after the Revolution, devoted their energies to promoting the Bolshevik Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mention the name “Barbara Dickson” and everyone remembers “I Know Him so Well”, the duet with Elaine Paige which hit the top spot in 1985, the era of big hair, shoulders pads and dry ice. That song didn’t feature in Dickson’s concert at Union Chapel, but those who came to hear her other top 20 hits – “Answer Me”, “Caravans” and “January February” – weren’t disappointed. The last was the appropriate opener on a frigid February eve, but like everything she played, it was totally reinvented.Quite deservedly, Dickson has enjoyed considerable commercial success and won awards for her acting (“Tell Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The art dealers of today must be thanking their lucky stars that Philip Hook’s remarkable history of their trade stops where it does. For while it serves as an eminently useful if rather specialised reference book, it’s a history pushed along by a ferocious analysis of the art dealing fraternity, the general thrust of which is encapsulated in its no-nonsense title. From unsophisticated third party to plutocrats’ lifestyle consultant, the evolving persona of the art dealer has taken guises ranging from merchant, scholar, connoisseur and ultimately, "purveyor of fantasy". A few notable figures Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”One musician who swiftly treated his synthesiser to the Powertran 1024 was Bernard Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite having been a rock star since the late Seventies, Chrissie Hynde seems to be an introverted, elusive sort of person. If this Arena profile was anything to go by, she lives as a virtual recluse, positively revelling in solitariness. Like the film, her last album was called Alone.“I spend all my time alone,” we saw her telling Sandra Bernhard, evidently a close friend. “I have nothing else to do. It’s my choice, I like it.” Well good for her, and it does mean she has plenty of time to pursue her recently-found passion for painting (which she’s pretty good at, too). But it didn’t really Read more ...
David Kettle
What’s love all about anyway? That’s the almost certainly unanswerable question that Israeli-American director Alma Har’el sets out to tackle in her strange, feverish, at times downright hallucinatory documentary LoveTrue. The problem is, by the end of its alternately entertaining and disconcerting 80 minutes, you’ll almost certainly be none the wiser. And you may even have forgotten what the original question was anyway.Har’el’s previous documentary Bombay Beach, on a ruined ghost town in southern California, earned high praise for its fantastical visuals and its blurring of reality and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch are at an interesting juncture. Eight years after their eponymous founder died, and over 40 since she took over at Wuppertal, the troupe is reaching a point when, even if Bausch were alive, it would be facing change, as the older dancers in the company - many of whom have been there since the beginning - enter their late 60s.Bausch, of course, was not in the slightest bit reluctant to put older dancers on stage - one of the most wonderful and distinctive things about her choreography is the sheer variety of ages, body shapes, nationalities on display - and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and Line of Duty, to name merely three recent examples.It gradually emerged again, like a monster from the deep, as the dominant theme of this second series of Unforgotten (★★★★) and writer Chris Lang had been skilful enough to thread it through the very different lives of his protagonists and deliver a finale that lived up to all that had Read more ...
David Nice
Prolific, fitfully great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's two biggest popular biographies, Marie Antoinette: The Story of an Average Woman and Mary Stuart, would be a gift for any screenwriter, given their fully realised dramatic scenes. His best-known and most substantial novel, Beware of Pity (its German title translates as "The Heart's Impatience"), seems less adaptable, given the revealing consciousness of its first-person narrator, an officer describing his disastrous relationship with a crippled girl brought to an end by the First World War. It did in fact become a 1946 movie, and now Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Jonas Kaufmann’s legion of admirers could rest content. A well-received Lieder evening last week demonstrated that the world’s hottest tenor property had returned, both to London for a three-concert residency at the Barbican, and indeed to singing after burst blood vessels had forced several months of rest and cancelled concerts.A welcoming party duly cheered away before he had sung a note of the Wesendonck-Lieder. They had to wait until two lines of the fourth song before savouring the peculiar joys of Kaufmann’s voice at full throttle – appropriately enough, on the phrase "Glory of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fences is one of the best-known works by playwright August Wilson, part of his Century Cycle of plays exploring 100 years of black American history, and it won him a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987. Wilson died in 2005, but further gongs greeted the play’s 2010 Broadway revival, including Tonys for its stars Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Alongside the bulk of the 2010 cast, they reprise their roles of Troy and Rose Maxson in this film version, and both are Oscar-nominated. Washington also directed.The story is set in 1950s Pittsburgh, where an ageing Troy is eking out a Read more ...