Reviews
stephen.walsh
Whatever one may feel about Bellini’s music, it’s hard to think of him as in any sense a political composer. So you could almost hear the hearts hit the floor when the curtain went up – or rather was as usual already up – on the opening of Bellini’s Puritani with Orangemen and a scruffy Catholic Arturo instead of good old Roundheads and Cavaliers. Surely Annilese Miskimmon isn’t trying to make Bellini relevant and meaningful, with Elvira’s madness as some kind of reductio ad absurdum of power-sharing.To tell the truth, I’m still not sure what political point she is making here, or even Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The repercussions of loss ripple inexorably through Simon Stephens’ 2003 play One Minute. Foreshadowing elements the prolific playwright has developed in his later work, it’s a testing piece that speaks most of all about the currents of loneliness that fan out within the fabric of the modern metropolis.There’s a degree of bleak poetry in its depiction of a London that dwarfs the separate lives of those who struggle within its mesh. The city’s sounds, its “slaughtering metal” and the like, seem a presence of their own, as they are indeed in this revival by Delirium Theatre at The Vaults. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When Immanuel Kant, the existentialists, and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point all get referenced right from the start, there can be no doubt that Irrational Man is on its way toward achieving the "total heaviosity" that its writer-director Woody Allen famously lampooned in Annie Hall. That the latest in Allen's record-breaking annual output of films manages not to send itself up but to engage pretty much throughout owes a lot to a terrific leading man in Joaquin Phoenix, who on this occasion makes you wonder what sort of partnership he and Hitchcock might have made had their careers aligned. Read more ...
David Nice
Every Proms season needs a late-romantic rarity to envelop its audience in a bewitching spider-web of sound. This year’s candidate was of more than passing interest, the incandescent Second Symphony of Franz Schmidt, scion of the Austrian Empire – born in what is now Bratislava, three-quarters Hungarian, an embattled cellist in the Vienna Philharmonic during Mahler’s tenure. The orchestra now wants to do him proud again, thanks to the very centred championship of Semyon Bychkov. And Schmidt’s music has the virtue of not being over-familiar to the Viennese players, unlike Brahms’s.Let’s get Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Can we – should we – control the future? That’s the dilemma faced by anxious parents attempting to steer their offspring through a labyrinthine school system, educational think-tanks, and the teachers shaping young lives. Tamsin Oglesby’s play is an intriguing opener for the Matthew Warchus era: impassioned, fiercely topical, and – with its relatively youthful cast – kicking against the “old” in “Old Vic”. That, and electric guitars as rousing musical accompaniment. The school of rock is now in session.With 23 actors and myriad thorny issues to service, Oglesby necessarily favours breadth Read more ...
Simon Munk
From the sublime, to the mundane. Last week's insane Metal Gear Solid V gives way to this freeroaming action-adventure cash-in on the Mad Max: Fury Road film. But a threadbare plot and far too much back-and-forth in play does this game no favours. Particularly in comparison to the other big action game out this week.When Max's infamous Interceptor car is grabbed and scrapped by a group of Scabrous Scrotus' War Boys, the wheels are set in motion for a showdown. But first, Max needs a new car – the Magnum Opus – created piece by piece by insane, hunchback mutant mechanic Chumbucket.To build the Read more ...
David Nice
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark attended Nielsen’s 150th birthday concert earlier this year in Copenhagen’s glorious new concert hall. Her grandparents were there at the premiere of Nielsen’s blithest work, his cantata Springtime in Funen on 1921. Our own dear Queen has never shown such interest in music, but all the same last night's Prom celebrated the day on which she became our country’s longest reigning monarch with Gordon Jacob’s fanfare-laden arrangement of the National Anthem. Then it was off with a gust of fresh air into national celebrations of a far quirkier nature by the greatest of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When is a monologue not quite a monologue? When it is interrupted by another voice, one that contradicts and argues with it. In Cordelia Lynn’s Lela & Co, her Royal Court debut which is effectively and savagely staged in the claustrophobic heat of the upstairs studio space, the drama starts off as a classic monologue, with Lela telling the story of her life, starting with her birth. Then she tells of her rather brutish upbringing up to the age of about 15. Exactly what happens next is a moment of contradiction when the narrative swerves in an unexpected and frankly horrible direction.If Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Doctor Foster takes its name from a nursery rhyme, but don’t be lulled. From the moment its brunette protagonist finds a long blonde hair on her husband’s scarf, we are hurtling headlong into a revenge drama. Doctor Foster – known to her pals as Gemma and played by that nice Suranne Jones – is already Googling vengeance literature and taking her cue from Congreve: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,/Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” After one act, and four to go, it promises to get horribly ugly.To begin with Doctor Foster looks like a jeopardy-free midweek drama set Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s a strong word, misery. It makes you think of unremitting sorrow, a darkness it’s difficult to see a way out of, unforgiving conditions that make life well-nigh unbearable. A fertile backdrop for a career in stand-up comedy, you might assume. But despite the promise of his film’s title, it’s a subject that veteran US actor and comedian Kevin Pollak hardly dares to touch in his bright, breezy but frustratingly lightweight debut feature.Instead, he goes for quantity over quality, and assembles interviews with what’s admittedly an astonishing roll-call of more than 50 comedians and comedy Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When English National Ballet premiered Lest We Forget in April last year, to enthusiastic reviews, they were ahead of the pack with First World War commemoration, and the ambitious modern programme was the first sign of Tamara Rojo's determination to make the company's repertoire more contemporary. But in the intervening 18 months there have been war-themed ballet programmes aplenty, and we have all got used to the sense of dynamism that swirls around ENB under Rojo's leadership. Stripped of these mitigating factors, last night's revival at Sadler's Wells was a chance for the three pieces ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...