Reviews
Marina Vaizey
This was the story of a remarkable man, Henry Cecil, a genius with horses and 10 times Champion Trainer. He was felled by tabloid scandal but rose again to train one of the greatest racehorses in history, Frankel. This wholly absorbing programme was not a tale of everyday folk, but of horse racing, told through its human and equine characters, looking into a rarefied bubble inhabited by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world – and the finest thoroughbreds of the animal variety. You don’t have to follow racing to have heard of Frankel, said to be the finest racehorse Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
2013 was the year that pop fans were forced to ponder the ethics of “Blurred Lines”. In 2014 classical fans followed suit, when Kasper Holten’s Royal Opera Don Giovanni unapologetically redrew the map of sexual boundaries. Suddenly Donna Anna was sneaking off for a quickie with the Don while her beloved laboriously declaimed “Dalla sua pace” – a willing partner (along with Elvira, Zerlina and all other women to hand) rather than a victim. Now Holten’s Don returns, if not precisely a reformed character, then at least a changed one.It’s clear that the director has been doing some thinking since Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hans Gál: Symphonies 1-4 Orchestra of the Swan/Kenneth Woods (Avie)Previously paired with those by Schumann, Hans Gál'sfour symphonies are now sensibly repackaged as a slimline two-cd set. Musicians are always trying to make the case for previously neglected composers, and it can be a crushing disappointment when you dive in but can't see what all the fuss is about. Havergal Brian's appeal still eludes me, but I've enjoyed getting to know Weinberg. I also "got" Gál; he's definitely one of the good ones. Conductor Kenneth Wood's accessible sleeve notes suggest that Gál's obscurity is partly Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When TFI Friday first assaulted our screens (nearly) 20 years ago, things were very different. An untucked checked shirt passed for sartorial elegance, magazines sold in big numbers and, within their pages, women were routinely objectified, but ironically and in front of a paper-thin façade of equality.This incongruous disconnect with society's current state – belt tightened, media fragmented and feminism back on the agenda - didn't bode well for the return, which, in order to succeed, would have to rely heavily on writer Danny Baker's unrivalled facility for inventive absurdism and ability Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Ashkenazy should be made an honorary Finn: not just for his constant championship of Sibelius’s orchestral works throughout his conducting life so far, but above all for the way he understands them. On the evidence of last night’s 150th anniversary concert, crowned by a superbly direct performance of the Second Symphony, his approach is now thoroughly Finnish at the deepest level in the way that it paces the sentiment, effortlessly negotiates the shifts of mood without histrionics and shears the music of romantic rhetoric. No Slavic or Teutonic plushness here.The first half, a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-home numbers but scored to the jagged, often discordant music of the composer Adam Cork, London Road seemed to want to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic Park franchise to hatch. The last film was 14 years ago and this fourth instalment seems to have been on the development slate almost ever since. Now that it's here at last, what’s new?For starters, this is a film which will give you tinnitus. The latest generation of dinosaurs are louder, scarier, toothier. Arguably, also sillier. Twenty-two years Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Seldom has there been such impassioned debate about whether a play has a right to exist. Writer Jonathan Maitland faced a barrage of criticism, with many accusing him of exploitation; others felt it was too soon for freshly unveiled horror to re-emerge on stage. Lead actor Alistair McGowan disagreed, noting Savile’s victims feel the telling of this tale comes “30 years too late”.Maitland’s 90-minute docudrama, set in 1991, juxtaposes Savile’s public and private personas in an attempt to understand how the monster hid in plain sight. On a This Is Your Life-style show, he’s the roguish “court Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A young man, in trouble with drunk or drugs, returns to his Scottish family riven by dark secrets? Of course, it’s a new Iain Banks dramatisation, the first since the author’s death two years ago. This version of his 2012 novel Stonemouth attempts to recreate the success the BBC enjoyed with its 1996 adaptation of Banks’s Crow Road. Compressing a near-400 pages of fiction into two hours’ television requires a thicket of flashbacks that tests the viewer’s recall, and piles coincidence a little high in places, though enjoyable lead performances, and Banks’ gripping, if familiar, preoccupations Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
I’ve been trying to imagine the elevator pitch for EightyEight Games’ fine new puzzler, You Must Build A Boat. The best, most succinct description I can come up with is: “imagine if Candy Crush was any good.”You Must Build A Boat is the sequel to 2012’s 10000000. In that game, a little pixelly dude ran across a dungeon corridor at the top of the screen, trying to retrieve treasures without being defeated by monsters. You helped him out by playing a match-3 sliding block puzzle at the bottom of the screen so he could beat the monsters, unlock chests and escape the dungeon by reaching the magic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Football is a subject close to Patrick Marber's heart. He's a lifelong Arsenal fan and during his sojourn away from London (and writing, as he was suffering from writer's block for much of it) in Sussex, he became involved with his local non-league team, Lewes, helping to establish it as a community-owned club in 2010.His beloved sport has inspired Marber's return both to the National and to playwriting (his last stage work was 2006's Don Juan in Soho and his most recent project was script-doctoring the film version Fifty Shades of Grey, which was rejected by the book's author EL James).Non- Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A steel corridor stretches as far into the distance as you can see (pictured below right); the gleaming sides and gently sloping floor invite you to step inside but, as you venture further in, it gets darker and darker until you are groping your way in pitch blackness. This unnerving experience reminded me of when, as a child, I followed my parents deep into the cliffs of north Cornwall as they gingerly crept along disused mine shafts, lighting the way with matches that quickly fizzled out. In the Hayward Gallery, I kept telling myself health and safety wouldn’t allow anyone to plummet to Read more ...