Reviews
Matt Wolf
Ralph Fiennes has long felt at home in the Russian repertoire, whether onstage in Fathers and Sons near the start of his career or, in 1997, taking the Almeida's Ivanov to Moscow as the first UK company to bring Chekhov home, as it were.Add in screen credits that include starring in the Alexander Pushkin novel-turned-film Onegin, directed by his sister Martha, and it begins to makes sense that here Fiennes is speaking what sounds to this untutored ear as very decent Russian in a film adaptation from the director Vera Glagoleva of Turgenev's A Month in the Country that appears to minimise Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We’re living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it's John O’Donovan’s gloriously titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You at the Old Red Lion or the equally gloriously acted Counting Stars by Atiha Sen Gupta at Theatre Royal Stratford East. And, sure enough, the latest new play at the ever-enterprising Orange Tree, Zoe Cooper’s Jess and Joe Forever, is small and short. But it is also a hugely enjoyable romcom.Cooper’s choice of theatrical form Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Australian stand-up Tom Ballard was nominated for best newcomer in last year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Taxis & Rainbows & Hatred; last month he went one better with The World Keeps Happening, which gained him a nomination for the main award.It's a loose follow-up to the 2015 show – more political observational comedy with a strong social conscience, but with rather less about him being gay. The blokey-looking 26-year-old mentions it early on with a gag about Grindr, but it's a minor element among the political and social comment.He starts with some easygoing gags about his Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had never been to the Last Night of the Proms until last night, nor really paid much attention to it in recent years. To the extent I did, I have been resentful of the fact that to many people it represents the Proms as a whole, with its flag waving and fancy dress, although in fact it is utterly atypical. But I went in the spirit of trying anything once and I’m glad I did, although once is probably enough.In a way, critiquing the Last Night of the Proms makes as much sense as critiquing a children’s birthday party, and is as likely to end in tears. The Last Night does not function like a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these days but eyebrows are no longer raised when it happens. Pere Ubu have played along with Carnival of Souls and It Came From Outer Space. Mogwai have done the same for the documentary Atomic. Of course, this was no surprise in the silent era and in the early Eighties Bill Nelson echoed the past by playing his soundtrack for Das Kabinett as the film Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tradition – a choral spectacular for the penultimate night of the Proms – but with a twist – a youth choir and period instruments. Marin Alsop this evening led a spectacular Verdi Requiem, not least for the sheer scale of the chorus, the BBC Proms Youth Choir some 200 strong. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment provided chacterful accompaniment, though sometimes struggled to compete, and the four soloists all delivered, particularly Tamara Wilson, here confirming her reputation as one of today’s leading Verdi sopranos.The BBC Proms Youth Choir brings together four youth choruses from Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lead singer and frontman Ed Robertson launches into a BNL-in-London rap, extolling the Roundhouse, “where they used to turn trains”, as well as the glories of Camden Market’s liquid-nitrogen ice-cream bar. The crowd, with its distinctly Cold Feet demographic, goes wild for the Ladies – if you’re not familiar with them, there are no women in this Canadian band – and their new album, Silverball, named in honour of Robertson’s pinball obsession, has been hailed as a buoyant return to form.The BNLs, who've been going for 27 years, are known for their melodic tunes and quirky, caustic lyrics, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Symphony No. 1, In the South Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano(ICA Classics)Antonio Pappano’s multi-national background might suggest that he’s the latest in a long line of foreign musicians to succeed with Elgar, though he’s actually British. He does a wonderful job with Elgar 1 in this live recording, though much of the credit rests with Rome’s Santa Cecilia orchestra – the strings’ heft and the weighty brass sonorities make most other performances sound distinctly anaemic. Not that Pappano goes crudely over the top; his unapologetically Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
You know what they say about men with big hands. Christian Thielemann has them, that’s for sure. Massive, meat-cleaving clappers, carving through the air. They give a pretty heavy upbeat too, and a generalissimo’s point and jab for a cue. If you’re a back-desk violinist in the Dresden Staatskapelle, you know when you’ve been Thielemanned.Those hands were also joined in a sweaty fanboy’s applause for Nikolaj Znaider at the end of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The violinist returned the love by dedicating his Bach encore to the conductor and orchestra. Such a concerto does not play itself, he Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it’s hard to see how John Wolfson’s wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda graduated from a rehearsed reading last season to a full-blown production. Director Andy Jordan does what he can with this historical mishmash, but there’s no disguising the fundamental flaws in the play’s construction.Wolfson, curator of rare books at the Globe, has taken the New Testament Apocrypha as a starting point for a Classical counter-factual fantasy. The dying emperor Tiberius Caesar (he of “Render Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Documentary film-maker Richard Macer, who has only just bought his first copy of Vogue, is embedded in the magazine in its centenary year. “The office here is a very polite and guarded world,” he murmurs nervously. “Over the next few months I’m hoping to get under the skin of the place, find out what the rules are.”Over nine months of filming a few certainties emerge: Vogue is rather like school (you hand in your work and wait for your marks: a tick is good, a nice is great); fashion shows are chaotic; and memorable covers don’t sell. Editor-in-chief Alexandra Shulman, who has been at the Read more ...
David Nice
She gave us the most moving King Lear years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Richard III. Now Kathryn Hunter spellbinds in a very Shakespearean downfall drama about the court of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie – but this time the Elect of God doesn’t actually appear in person, not literally at any rate, and the triumph is shared by everybody involved, lighting and soundscape designers included.Hunter plays 12 parts, the voices of the ruler’s courtiers as reported in Ryszard Kapuściński’s Read more ...