Reviews
Tom Birchenough
Was it just my bewilderment, or were there even more criss-crossing narratives than usual in this third series of The Bridge? As in, unusually expanded levels of human traffic, in various forms of distress, flowing under said structure.The Bridge, along with other Nordic noir that we’ve come to love, has long adopted the position that the best way to get from a to d is via x, y and z. It’s gripping in its ability to interconnect stories, but occasionally everyting gets a bit much. Somewhere early in episode nine we had Saga (whom we should really call Séga?) and new partner Hendrik (much more Read more ...
Dylan Moore
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, psychedelic theatre-gig at the Sophia Gardens cricket ground in Cardiff. Based on an idea originally conceived by Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys, artist Pete Fowler and graphic designer Mark James that has already spawned Rhys’s 2007 solo album Candylion, the "insatiable, inflatable" and very much larger-than-life version sees the musical polymath reteam with writer Tim Price and director Wils Wilson Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The news that Lush have reformed didn’t come as surprise. Their comparable contemporaries Ride and Slowdive had also done so over the past couple of years, and My Bloody Valentine – an influence looming over all three – returned in 2007 after over a decade’s abscence. Unlike the others, Lush, who were on 4AD rather than Creation, have reissued their complete catalogue as a box set during the run-up to re-hitting stages next May. Chorus has the potential to eclipse the reappearance as it doesn’t edit history like a one-or-so hour live concert.With Lush, editing is probably necessary to make a Read more ...
David Nice
Searing emotional truth has to be at the core of any attempt to stage Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes after Pushkin”. I was among the minority who thought Kasper Holten got it right, with deep knowledge of the original verse-novel, in his first production as Covent Garden’s Director of Opera back in February 2013. Then he had total commitment from Simon Keenlyside and Krasimira Stoyanova as an Onegin and Tatyana looking back in anguish on their youthful selves, and Pavol Breslik to the manner born as doomed, callow poet Lensky. This time only one of the three principals is about much more than Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Contemporary jazz is a world full of magpies – artists who flit between genres and build glittering nests of disparate musical influences. Rock up to a so-called jazz night today and the repertoire can come from anywhere, you’re as likely to hear Jimi Hendrix or J. Dilla as Jerome Kern, and pianist Brad Mehldau has played a role in making that happen.Over the course of the past twenty years, Mehldau has established himself as one of the most distinctive and influential pianists of his generation, a musician with a healthy lack of respect for musical boundaries. Cast an eye over the tracklist Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. So what better idea than to turn this unforgettable tale into an opera: an opera for a single singer, dramatizing the story, impersonating all the main characters, being, as it were, Dickens himself with added music?Iain Bell’s opera, new last year but performed Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is, depending on who you listen to, either a work of unparalleled theatrical daring and creative genius or an unlistenable descent into ludicrously self-indulgent toss. Of course, these are not necessarily contradictory positions... Me? Well, I’m revisiting Queen now that I have an eight-year-old fan living in my house, and it’s been quite the eye-opener, as was BBC Four’s documentary. Queen: From Rags to Rhapsody, along with Days of Our Lives and Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender, completed a trilogy of documentaries. It used the band’s sonic triptych as a reframing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“It's true,” Harrison Ford’s Han Solo explains with wonder. “All of it.” The original Star Wars trilogy, its heroes and the Force have become fading folk tales for the new trilogy’s young tyros. 1977 is itself a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away and Star Wars: The Force Awakens has arrived to save a saga which has had nothing to replenish its deep reserves of generational goodwill since the decent bits of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Everyone who needs to be is still around and able to lift a light sabre. It’s possible for JJ Abrams to properly resume the tale abandoned then, and to Read more ...
David Nice
The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close’s lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discrepancy between seeming and being. Which is the theme, too, of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ peerless epistolary novel. Close was unforgettable as the manipulative Marquise de Merteuil in the film version, so it’s good to report that McTeer, back in the West End after too long an absence, equals her achievement and has a Valmont as charismatic in his way as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too. The rest is a palimpsest of story treatments, costume designs, and questionable psychoanalytic interpretations, presenting many Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Minimalist sculpture has, for decades, been making gallery visitors self-conscious. How should you react to a metallic piece by Donald Judd which has evidently been machined rather than modelled? Can you really walk all over an arrangement of lead floor tiles by Carl Andre? And how do you look at a Robert Morris mirrored cube without seeing yourself gazing back?If you’ve ever worried about questions like these, the show at Fruitmarket could offer some relief. It promises an alternative minimalism, not from intellectual, uptight New York, but from America’s laid back West Coast. And it invites Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I habitually skipped over Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl in my childhood fairy tale compendium because I couldn't bear the sadness (see also: The Happy Prince *sob*). Parents of sensitive children will therefore be relieved to know that in Arthur Pita's 2014 dance version, which is back at the Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler's Wells this Christmas season, any tears at the titular waif's lonely demise will be vastly outnumbered by smiles at the fun and fantastical world Pita and his imaginative collaborators have conjured up for her to inhabit before and after death.Pita sets the Read more ...