Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Remember back when David Hare was left-wing? I’m not sure that he does. Between the affectionate, bittersweet nostalgia of South Downs and now The Moderate Soprano – a stroll through the verdant history of England’s most exclusive opera company – we’re suddenly a long way from the school of Slag or the urban anger of Racing Demon. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when – as here, in the programme interview – Hare claims that “heritage theatre is not my thing” it’s getting harder and harder to believe him.The anger has drained out of this theatre Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was the fifth and last in a series of hour-long programmes amounting to a vivid, varied and extraordinarily lively history of Britain. Although ostensibly a history of portraiture, the images have been hooks for Simon Schama, that most ubiquitous historian who bears a rather charming resemblance to Tigger – very bouncy, very chatty, very enthusiastic, a little self-regarding – to subtly engage us in a journey through the political and social landmarks of British history. In this one, titled “The Face in the Mirror”, we did indeed bounce through nearly eight centuries of British artists Read more ...
theartsdesk
Guitar Hero Live ★★★★My first encounter with the Guitar Hero music rhythm games stretches back to 2008. It involved British Sea Power, the Mercury Prize-nominated indie band, trooping into my living room to put an array of plastic guitars and drums through the musical motions. More bemused than amused, the professional musicians, renowned for intricately arranged guitar pop, struggled to hit the correct colour-coded notes in the right sequence as they appeared on the TV.“It’s great fun, but nothing like making music,” conceded Jan Scott Wilkinson, the front man, as he fumbled his way down a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On record, Cat aka Chan Marshall is the quintessence of hip. From art-rock to blues, her vocals are cool and effortless. Live, however, things have been notoriously inconsistent. Google “Cat Power live”, and you will find a catalogue of stage meltdowns. Even her Wikipedia entry tells tales of drunken rants and abuse of fans. And yet for every gig disaster, there’s another rave review. When it comes to a Chan Marshall gig, it seems you pays your money and you takes your chances. As I queue up outside the huge Victorian St John-at-Hackney Church the moon is shining and fans are chatting in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If the thought of three hours of DH Lawrence fills you with dread, fear not. Ben Powers’ inspired melding of Lawrence’s trio of mining plays births a spellbindingly intimate epic with atmosphere thick as the coal dust engulfing this cloistered 1911 East Midlands village. The community is powered and oppressed by the industrial machine swallowing up the menfolk, but our focus is on the women’s claustrophobic domestic sphere. In Bunny Christie’s effective design, houses are both contained spaces and bleeding into one another, with no walls but rooms marked out: somewhere between Our Town Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Carlos Acosta is that rare 21st-century phenomenon – a performer who has become a household name without the help of reality TV. Even people who run a mile from ballet know the story of the Havana slum boy made good through perseverance and pure talent, from countless primetime documentaries as well as a self-penned book and stage show. The Royal Ballet cannot have imagined how things would turn out when it signed its first (and, to date, only) black principal 17 years ago. For the past decade or more Acosta has been a powerful magnet for new audiences and widely adored.All this has Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a baby boom in sitcom. This week two of last year’s best comedies return for second helpings, each with a child in tow. In Detectorists (BBC Two on Thursday) Andy is out in the field panning for gold with a small sweet addition. But first Catastrophe is back – and the title holds good. For Sharon and Rob (played by series creators Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney) parenthood is just as much of a disaster zone as the unplanned pregnancy which threw them together in the first series. And the jokes still come at you like rapid machine-gun fire.In fact, it’s possibly even funnier now. In the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“No courtier or lady’s champion would dream of fighting a duel anywhere else…” The setting for duels, liaisons, champagne and love, Paris’s Pré aux Clercs gives its name to Ferdinand Herold’s almost-comic 1832 opera – a welcome mood-lightener in this season’s otherwise tragic fare at the Wexford Festival. But though the piece does end in marriages rather than deaths (at least, for those who matter), it’s not quite the uncomplicated piece of silliness we might expect, or hope, from such a staple of the Opéra Comique.The context – France’s 16th-century Wars of Religion – offers not only echoes Read more ...
David Nice
A Hawksmoor church ought to be the right setting for the psychological terror of Britten’s great chamber opera, a slanted but still chilling adaptation of Henry James's novella. True, the once-deroofed interior has been coolly revamped as a rehearsal and performance venue, but imaginative lighting and a clear acting space, with room for a 13-piece ensemble to the side, ought to do the trick.Unfortunately this setting, straight from Aldeburgh, isn’t exactly that for what its "conceivers" describe as “not a conventionally staged production… not ‘semi-staged’, nor… a concert performance”. It’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's the age of the prequel, sequel and origin story, and the ingenious Charlie Higson has decided that now is the time to give Robert Louis Stevenson's divided-self myth a superhero-style makeover. Action-packed and a little bit shocking, this supercharged Jekyll & Hyde (****) has the makings of a major hit.After a crisp precis of the kind of stuff the original Hyde got up (we got a long-distance view of him beating politician Sir Danvers Carew to death in a London street), we were whisked forwards 50 years to Ceylon, where nice doctor Robert Jekyll was inoculating the local children Read more ...
David Nice
Castanets in Wagner? The imperfect Wagnerite will identify them in one place only: the Venusberg ballet music of the Paris Tannhäuser. The perfect variety will know that they’re also to be found in the overture and carnival scene of Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). Would that the rest of Wagner’s second opera were as wacky, but it’s still something to find the 21-year-old composer grappling with the German equivalent of an opéra comique or a dramma giocoso. We only got that overture in Wagner anniversary year, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth at the Proms, since a complete staging in Sussex Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Unswervingly confident, relaxed and assured, the élite of the 18th century are currently arrayed on the walls of the Royal Academy, gazing down at us with the utmost assurance of their unassailable place in the world, bright eyed and dressed to match. The swirls of public reputation are unpredictable: here is a revelation, the art of one of the most successful and highly prized portraitists of his day, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789), now almost completely unknown except to specialists.A Huguenot, born in the independent Protestant city state of Geneva, he trained in Paris, and went on to Read more ...