Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
“Why is everyone from your school a criminal crackhead?” “Why is everyone from yours a Tory minister?” These questions lie at the heart of Zadie Smith’s NW. Keisha (the wonderful Nikki Amuka-Bird), aka Natalie, is married to wealthy Frank (Jake Fairbrother), who’s asking the crackhead question. Leah (Phoebe Fox), who answers back, is her best friend – though that’s no longer a given.Keisha and Leah went to school together and grew up on Caldwell, a Willesden estate; they still live nearby. Keisha is a success story, a perfectionist black barrister – “Life was a problem that could be solved by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Tate's television sketch shows - apart from a couple of specials devoted to her character Nan Taylor - were last screened in 2007, and she hasn't performed comedy live since her early days at the Edinburgh Fringe. So it was particularly good news for fans when she announced her first live UK tour.Ably abetted on stage by long-time collaborators Niky Wardley and Mathew Horne and co-writer Brett Goldstein, she brings back all the TV series' favourite characters in new sketches. She may have a raft of catchphrases - schoolgirl (“am I bovvered?”) Lauren; gay (“how Read more ...
Helen Wallace
“Not as a pleasurable play, but…an urgent message…” So composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann described his caustic chamber opera Simplicius Simplicissimus, receiving its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells 81 years late. Five years before Brecht used the Thirty Years War for Mother Courage, Hartmann found in its orgy of brutality a resonance with the rise of National Socialism. His libretto sets part of Grimmelshausen’s 17th-century picaresque tale of a holy fool whose innocence protects him in a world of mercenary violence. Polly Graham’s explosively physical production for Independent Opera harnesses Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you thought that a contemporary drama about forcible repatriation, set in an Immigration removal centre, would be about the plight of those confined in places like the infamous Yarl’s Wood, in Removal Men writers MJ Harding and Jay Miller give us something unexpected.Instead of the place's inmates, their play concentrates on what it might be like to work in such an environment. Its origins came when Harding – a founder of the band Fat White Family, sharing composer credits with Jonah Brody – became involved with an intervention to prevent the deportation of a detainee at Yarl’s Wood. He Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Lest we forget. On Flanders’ Fields. For the Fallen. No one does stiff-upper-lip, buttoned-up remembrance quite like the English. Since its composition only a little over half a century ago, the War Requiem has become our national anthem for the departed. When Britten’s hastily greasepainted collage of Wilfrid Owen and the best bits of Mozart and Verdi (not to mention Berlioz) is retired every so often, something more muted is generally preferred for chilly November evenings: Fauré, or at a stretch Duruflé, Requiems as sympathetic to sing as they are to listen to, with melodies as sweet as a Read more ...
peter.quinn
There are singers who can dazzle with their technical mastery, those who welcome you into their musical world through a special communicative gift, and those who can traverse genres with absolutely no artifice. Rarest of all are those singers who combine all of the above with a timbral quality that can touch your very soul. Lizz Wright is one such singer.From the very opening song, an unaccompanied take on Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You”, the stunning beauty and emotive power of Wright’s voice carried all before it, and immediately set up an electrifying charge between singer and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.The mother is Mrs Rose Coyne Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In his lovely memoir My Father’s Fortune, Michael Frayn dubs the Holloway and Caledonian Roads the “Tigris and Euphrates” of his family history. In that case, just a few pages west in the London A-Z (the mystic scripture that baffles an American celebrity-minder in this novel), the course of the Kilburn High Road and its flanking suburbs must count as Zadie Smith’s grungy, gridlocked Nile. Her ever-fertile source, it floods into a rich silt of fictions - from her debut novel White Teeth (2000) to NW (2012, with a BBC2 dramatisation due next week) - where this urban microcosm focuses change Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Australian drama has come on in leaps and bounds since Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, The Sullivans and Prisoner: Cell Block H. While Neighbours and Home and Away continue to play in the sand, other shows – The Secret Life of Us, The Dr Blake Mysteries and Cloud Street – display more ambition. Their reach may sometimes exceed their grasp but that’s what TV is for. Do check out the five-star metrosexual comedy drama Please Like Me on Amazon Prime. You’ll like it.Deep Water starts as it means to go on: two male swimmers writhe in the South Pacific Ocean. They are making out, not drowning. However, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to buy CDs, and a time when it was still possible for bands to sustain slow-growing careers which built steadily from the ground upwards. Having been one of the trailblazers of America's mid-Eighties alternative rock movement, growing a faithful following through college radio and endless touring, REM had had it moderately large with their Read more ...
Matthew Wright
This rambunctious German-Swiss trio is used to selling out much larger venues at home. Their overdue EFG London Jazz Festival debut, in an enthusiastic but not full Kings Place, introduced British audiences to an exhilarating take on the acoustic jazz trio. This is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a brilliantly, brutally eclectic ensemble that pushes the language of jazz to new limits of originality, and does so with irresistible energy, and a refreshing sense of fun.One of Wollny’s trademarks is his choice of inspiration, which extends far beyond the usual jazz canon, in both directions, from the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Following the seismic events across the pond earlier this week, an outcome which has left the rest of the world blinking in disbelief, Guy Barker’s brilliant arrangements for this year’s Jazz Voice offered much needed balm for the soul. Creativity, collective endeavour, community: humanity’s finest qualities were in evidence.Relocating to the Royal Festival Hall this year and hosted by Jay Rayner, this celebration of song announced the opening of the 2016 EFG London Jazz Festival and featured the customary jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2016.Known Read more ...