Reviews
David Nice
If you don’t know the steps or the stars being semi-spoofed, will you laugh? Yes, though perhaps not as much as anticipated. The best parody needs to be as good as the original, and “the Trocks”, as Tory Dobrin's New York-based company has been known in its 40-plus years to date, take their Petipa and Ivanov very seriously. The drag gags are mere ornaments to a classical feast, and don’t fly into the fantastical like some of the ones you get in any Matthew Bourne show; the real reward is some remarkable dancing.For a start, there’s the visual feast of men en pointe, as the corps – of eight Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For three unassuming musicians, sitting cross-legged in a row, Korean folk-noise fusion band Jambinai’s London debut last night was seismic. With an ambitious project to integrate the techniques and idioms of traditional Korean folk with a blend of noise-rock, drone-rock and electronic music, they gave a concert that was, from the moment the grinding drone of the geomungo started yawing through the crowd, utterly distinct and original.There are two formations performing, a trio of multi-instrumentalists, with Eun Young Sim playing geomungo (a traditional seven-stringed zither, plucked with a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
With the election of lefty outsider Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, are we entering a new era when upsets and surprises have become a new way of life? Is it really true that anything is now possible? As if to engage with these pressing questions, Tanya Ronder’s new play is all about how a perfect family is suddenly visited by some totally unexpected events. What starts with a dodgy doorknob escalates over 90 minutes into a full-scale domestic breakdown.The perfect family is composed of Gordon, his second wife Serena, and their young daughter Rachel. While the confident, if emotionally Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The Deer God is a platform game set in a lovingly rendered world of pixel art. It is completely unforgiving and will test to destruction both your platform jumping skills but perhaps also your patience.In the cut scene that starts the game, you are a hunter who accidentally shoots a young deer before being set upon by wolves. Raised from the dead by the titular forest god, you are reincarnated into the body of the deer and made to serve out a curious penitence. You must now live and survive in your new body, while helping some other inhabitants of the wilderness solve their problems. Along Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser, who's portrayed as the dominant creative mastermind behind Rockstar Games and its phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto series, The Gamechangers (**) sought to depict legal battles over GTA's violent and sexually explicit content as landmarks in the history of artistic freedom. Rockstar Games didn't approve the film and, having filed a lawsuit against the BBC for trademark infringement, denounced the finished product as "random, made-up bollocks".They do have a point, since the film visibly staggers under its own contradictions. A skimpy budget Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the oldest and most striking venues in London lends itself to immersive theatrical experiences. A few years ago the Victorian interior of Wilton’s Music Hall was infused with pre-show activity to recreate the 1920s of The Great Gatsby. Now a similar flick of the wrist by the same director draws punters into the 1930s and an adaptation of one of cinema’s great con capers.To enter the venue for its first show since a major repair job is pretty thrilling, with jazz singers performing in the bars, actors in costume playing cards, the swell of people and music conjuring the milieu of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When a lead character is warned that “it’s easier to be scrutinised in a small town”, it’s instantly clear they are not going to take the advice, keep their head down and make sure they don’t attract attention. In South Korean director July Jung’s first full-length feature, police chief Young-nam inevitably makes her presence felt soon after her arrival from Seoul in the southern coastal region of Yeosu.Although A Girl at My Door explores small-town hierarchies and tensions, and the rifts and violence barely below the surface, it has to be taken as a commentary on South Korea overall as well Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Antonio Salieri. Mozart’s nemesis – wrong. Beethoven’s teacher – right. Unjustly neglected in his own right – maybe. Bampton Opera have put some flesh on the bones of his reputation with an English-language production of La grotto di Trifonio, first performed in Vienna, October 1785. They have done Salieri proud: we can see for ourselves why he is who he is.He wrote a later operatic entertainment whose title encapsulates the tension at the heart of opera: First the music, and then the words. So, first the music. It’s heady stuff. Richly chromatic, sumptuously orchestrated, easing in and out Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Nicole Kidman has returned to the West End 17 years after causing an innuendo-laden sensation in The Blue Room, the David Hare play that promptly transferred from the Donmar to Broadway, where one major magazine at the time actually bothered to inform readers where best to sit for the optimal view of a stage semi-neophyte en déshabillé. And guess what? Back on the London boards to play the erotically indrawn scientist Rosalind Franklin in Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51 under the direction of Michael Grandage, Kidman is even better communicating a life of the mind than she was all Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The tale of Orpheus – a musician so talented his art could overturn the laws of the universe – is the originary myth of opera itself. Is it any wonder, then, that it’s a story that the genre continues to tell and retell with such care and fascination? Three versions, spanning almost four centuries from Rossi’s 1647 Orpheus to Little Bulb Theatre’s 21st-century production, punctuate the current Royal Opera House season, starting with Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice – seen for the first time in the company’s history in its French reworking.Dominated almost to the point of imbalance by its ballet Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a barrel; beside him stands a white woman with a filthy face. The former looks like he had enough wits to survive the squalour for a while, the latter looks doomed. As ghosts immobilized in time by the Danish journalist and reformer Riis’s camera, they open the door to the ghosts, alive and dead, who populate the post-colonial misery of Costa’s Read more ...
David Nice
It was a sad coincidence that this Monday Platform “showcasing talented young artists” took place only weeks after the death in a road accident of Roderick Lakin, Director of Arts for 31 years at the Royal Over-Seas League which was last night's backer. For no concert could have been more sensitively tuned to a personal farewell. Overt melancholy only surfaced in the slow-movement theme of Brahms’s Second Piano Trio. But wouldn’t you want Dowland, Bach and Schubert at your memorial concert? I know I would, and especially from these artists, all so inclined to mature introspection that they Read more ...