Reviews
Sarah Kent
Modern Art Oxford and Spike Island, Bristol have joined forces to create a retrospective of Lubaina Himid’s work that spans some 30 years, includes paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and assemblages and proves what a highly original and complex artist she is. Himid was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement in the Eighties and Nineties, organising numerous mixed shows that brought attention to the work of black artists. She has been working ever since and exhibiting outside London, but although she has been included in various mixed shows in the capital, it is 25 years since she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedy fans will be familiar with "New York neurotic" – performed mostly by Jewish writers and comics, with Woody Allen being the exemplar. Chris Gethard, however, is from New Jersey, was raised as a Catholic and is not neurotic at all. Rather, this guy has been suffering from actual, pain-in-the-head, clinically diagnosed and heavily medicated depression for most of his life, and has now written a show about it.Career Suicide (which Gethard has performed in New York and at the Edinburgh Fringe last year) is certainly a frank account. He takes us through the low points - the suicidal thoughts Read more ...
David Nice
Readers might be wondering how often the spectre of Trump is destined to loom in reviews. Well, Vladimir Jurowski's daring (and undersold) second concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the loose aegis of the Belief and Beyond Belief series teemed with timely, if disconcerting, heavy grotesquerie, above all in the 85-year-old Vaughan Williams's Ninth and last Symphony. In a week beyond belief in a sense that the Southbank didn't intend, the monster in the Oval Office was bound to be conjured in the mind's eye.There were only glimmers of transcendence in a programme which put Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Science has yet to determine whether thespians are the product of genetic predetermination. We all know about the Foxes and Redgraves, myriad self-spawning dynasties of actors bred of actors wed to actors, while there are plenty of others who go about their fathers’ and mothers’ business. But we also know that there will never be another McKellen. Sir Ian is the last in the line, while he has always supposed that he was also the first in the family to act. Then he was persuaded to hop aboard BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are?The programme is a two-trick pony. One trick is to show a celebrity Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.Not that Gibson, as director, is doing anything very different to what he's always done. Hacksaw Ridge is a story of religious faith under pressure, and of imperturbable heroism in the face of extreme violence. Gibson's telling of the real-life story of Desmond Doss, who refused to handle firearms but served heroically as a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the only inhabitant of Planet Earth who wasn’t knocked completely senseless by La La Land, it does occur to me that I might not be the most sympathetic reviewer of a rom-com. Still, I’m willing to give it a try. So here goes: written and originally performed by Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna, Dirty Great Love Story is a 95-minute romp that tells a story about how boy-meets-girl, boy-shags-girl, girl-leaves-boy, boy-keeps-bumping-into-girl and – after two years – girl-realises-she-loves-boy. It sounds charmless, but actually its chief virtue is its bright LOL and drink-fuelled charm.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another night, another woman battered/strangled/raped/murdered. On Sunday a pregnant woman was brutally slapped about by her husband in Call the Midwife, while Emily Watson’s character in Apple Tree Yard was the victim of a punishment rape. And so it continues in Case, the latest Nordic noir to make its way here, this time from Iceland. It opened with two police officers making their way to the stage of a theatre. A glimpse through a doorway revealed what had brought them: the bottom half of a young woman’s body, dangling six feet above the ground.Lara is roughly the same age as Nanna Birk Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visions de l’Amen was a shoo-in for Belief and Beyond Belief, the year-long festival of art inspired by religious faith. The festival’s goals seem dangerously nebulous – almost anything could fit its remit – but it is hard to imagine a work that better encapsulates "The Search for the Meaning of Life" than Messiaen’s transcendental masterpiece. And the inspired, authoritative reading the work received from pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich silenced any doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise.Brahms, however, was less lucky, and had the odds stacked against him Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Unimaginable tragedy is given poignant, piquant form in Us/Them. The hour-long performance piece from Belgian theatre company BRONKS has arrived at the National after a much-acclaimed Edinburgh Festival premiere last year. In its intricate weave of frontline semi-reportage and slyly subversive comedy, Dutch-born writer-director Carly Wijs allows a sense of play to inform at every turn this highly physical account of the Beslan school siege in September, 2004. The terrorist act propelled a little-known town in the Russian Caucasus into grievous front-page news. The conceit here is that Read more ...
David Nice
To catch the searing desolation of a lover scorned, you need to be the complete artist, with temperament and technique in perfect equilibrium. Mezzo Christine Rice has taken us from Berlioz's Marguerite and Mozart's Donna Elvira at English National Opera via Birtwistle's Ariadne to Haydn's, and - most taxing of all - the end of an affair by telephone in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. The abandoned heroines of Haydn and Poulenc found themselves in the most exposed surroundings possible, the intimacy of a song recital in the giving acoustics of Middle Temple Hall, with only a superlative pianist, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“I’m Death.” “And you’re on holiday?” Well, there’s really no way to disguise the preposterousness of this musical’s premise, nor to reconcile its winking humour and self-serious grand romance. Thus, Thom Southerland’s London premiere wisely diverts attention to its seductive qualities as a stylish period piece – come for the flappers, champers, saucy maids and misty Italian arches.Alberto Casella’s 1924 play, adapted into a 2011 chamber musical by Maury Yeston, Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone, is perhaps best known in another incarnation: the interminable 1998 Brad Pitt/Anthony Read more ...