Reviews
Matthew Wright
You would expect a galactically-themed album like Astronautilus to blast off into extra-terrestrial airiness. The fifth album from west-country jazz-rock space cadets Get The Blessing scorched some earth at its launch in Shoreditch last night, yet the battery of horns, bewitching, asymmetric drums and repeating patterns of surging melody felt grounded and earthy.They played nearly all of the new album, with a couple of old favourites, “OCDC” and “Cake Hole”. Their sound hasn’t, on the surface, changed all that much since their prize-winning 2008 debut All Is Yes. Drummer Clive Deamer and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For an art form with a marked penchant for looking over its shoulder, it’s surprising how rarely ballet has exploited its own origins story – not least given the fabled opulence and style of its leading character. The Sleeping Beauty makes a nod to Louis XIV and the court of Versailles in its final moments, but in most ballet goers’ mental archive that’s just about it.Full marks to David Bintley, then, for turning a light on the Sun King and his love of dancing, and for recognising in the story a prime opportunity to create another rare thing: a glamorous showcase for the company’s men. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
On my way to see this show, I had to walk across Soho. No fewer than five people asked me for money; one was a real hassle. Yes, I know that the government says that the economy is booming, but the record number of homeless in the capital tell a very different story. Yes, I bumped into five of them in 15 minutes, although I know there are thousands more. And maybe one of them is Joanne.As these five short monologues, each of which is written by a different writer, illustrate, Joanne is a very troubled young woman. She is a self-harmer, and has just been released from prison. Outside she is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lance Armstrong's spectacular crash-and-burn makes for gripping stuff in The Program, the story of the sports legend-cum-druggie who cycled too close to the sun and went on to pay the hubris-laden price. And as a star vehicle for Ben Foster, Stephen Frears's latest film not only serves as a reminder of this director's singular way with actors (note the performances that have gone the Oscar route under his watch) but makes one wonder why his young American lead hasn't yet entered Hollywood's inner sanctum when he so clearly has the stuff.Armstrong's saga of disgrace-on-an-epic-scale isn't new Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Free as air, but there was a very heavy price to pay for his ecstatic exploration of the sky by the Cornwall painter Peter Lanyon, who died in 1964, aged just 46, as a result of injuries received in a gliding accident. The Courtauld Gallery is known for its series of original, incisive, acute and intense exhibitions taking a sharply focused view of one aspect of an artist’s work. Often these provide a revelation and so it is here.For Lanyon, who has fallen out of fashion as have several other significant figures of his generation of British artists, this is a very welcome examination of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps. His English-language debut is even more off the charts, yet also the most familiar; after all, it is essentially a love story. The proposition of The Lobster is a future society where being single is regarded as a crime. Those found to be alone, even if they’re newly widowed like our hero, John (Colin Farrell), are arrested and despatched to a rural hotel, where they have 45 days to find a partner amongst the other guests. Punishment, for those who fail, is to be transformed Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tom Morris has a strong feel for drama that explores the personal implications of fanaticism: his production of John Adams’s powerful opera The Death of Klinghoffer for New York's Met and the ENO, used a language of great simplicity that allowed the work’s most disturbing complexities to come through with formidable power. Once again with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, an equally rich text, there is a stripped-down quality to his overall vision, supported by a generally superlative cast and finely tuned pacing. This works wonders with a play that explores the dark ways in which human frailties Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The justification for playing Brahms with a chamber orchestra is well rehearsed. In fact, I have on my desk a Telarc boxed set of the four symphonies “in the style of the original Meiningen performances”, recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the visionary Sir Charles Mackerras in 1997. Then, as now, the idea was to lighten the texture and give greater prominence to the woodwind. By drawing back the dense curtain of string sound, the light could shine through and Brahms’ contrapuntal delicacy be revealed.That was 18 years ago: a long time in the history of an orchestra only just Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe transplanted to present-day Atlanta, Georgia: it sounds like an inspired idea. The hypocritical religious devotee becomes a charlatan preacher fleecing his flock, offering salvation in exchange for hard cash and a distinctly unpriestly grope. But Marcus Gardley’s attempt to put a contemporary spin on a once incendiary play comes with a trying side order of cartoonish caricatures and creaky sex farce.The tone is set by the opening sequence, in which randy Apostle Toof (Lucian Msamati) lays his healing hands upon a half-dressed ditzy blonde congregant (Michelle Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back when this was the plain old Brixton Academy, before Britpop, before New Labour, before the world wide web had weaved its way into our homes, before the war on terror, before the nebulous notion of ‘content’ had yet to ruin everything and devalue everyone, I saw Ride play a gig here. It was ace.Tonight, it seemed as though everyone who had been there that night was back: older, wider and balder perhaps (the ratio of men to women was roughly that of a pre-suffragette parliamentary cabinet), but with the anticipation of a child on Christmas Eve. It’s a heritage gig of course – let’s not Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It’s huge, it’s just huge, said Benedict Cumberbatch, struggling to express the scale of the challenge that playing Hamlet presents. As Lord Bragg reminded us, Cumberbatch is the lead in the middle of the fastest-selling theatrical event since records began, thanks to his charisma and his worldwide fanbase. It is, Bragg told us, the largest role in Shakespeare: 1,500 lines. There was a clip of Orson Welles, declaiming that it is the only play by a genius about a genius.In this 40-minute discussion set out on the stage of the Barbican theatre, the glittering candle-lit Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Israeli director Mor Loushy's documentary Censored Voices grapples with the weight of history. It draws on interviews taken by the future writer Amos Oz with Israeli soldiers immediately after the end of the Six Day War in 1967 which were heavily censored at the time by the Israeli army, with only around 30% of the resulting material subsequently published in a book by Oz’s colleague Avraham Shapira, The Seventh Day.Censored Voices appears at first a deceptively simple work. Both Oz (main picture, with the original tape-recorder with which the two worked) and Shapira appear at the beginning Read more ...