Reviews
Hanna Weibye
Parties in someone's back garden are often more fun than those in big fancy venues. Richard Alston Dance Company celebrated its 20th birthday with a big soirée at Sadler's Wells in January, but last night was their cheerful family gathering, held in their home theatre The Place, and offering a hearty buffet of short pieces rather than an elaborate three-course meal. Alongside world premières of short pieces by house choreographers Richard Alston and Martin Lawrance and star company dancer Ihsaan de Banya, RADC debuted a piece by London choreographer Joseph Toonga, and rounded out the meal Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Neither the name, the look, nor the recorded sound of Perfume Genius (*****) seems like the thing to set about a packed Royal Festival Hall with shock and awe, though there was plenty of both in last night’s show. The Seattle singer, known to his mum as Mike Hadreas, has developed a cult following for his ability to combine fragility and scorching power in lyrics of intelligence and versatility. Live, he displayed extraordinary vistas of emotional and techncial breadth.Last year’s third album, Too Bright, raised both eyebrows and expectations with a much broader range of sounds and techniques Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is irresistible to watch Andrew Roberts, the ambitious historian of one of history's most ambitious figures, narrating a three-part account of his hero’s life and times. He is giving us a superb analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte’s gifts, flaws, insecurities and achievements. The first instalment opened with a glorious sunset over the South Atlantic, and several views of the dramatic scenery of the volcanic island of St Helena where the exiled Napoleon was held for six years, 4,000 miles from home, as the prisoner of the British, until his death in 1821 at the age of 51. We saw pivotal Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What Wes Orshoski’s new documentary points out, above everything, is how much pop success relies on an ordered narrative and an easily understood package. First-wave British punk band The Damned, on the other hand, wrote as many great songs as their peers, but their career has been a mess of random creativity, changing line-ups and dreadful business decisions. There is a telling moment where Rat Scabies, the original drummer, weeps as he recalls the one occasion the band had all their ducks in a line. With a major label deal, solid American management, and 1985’s chart-friendly Phantasmagoria Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Connections are missed and made in Jonathan Dove’s Flight – a giddy airport fantasy of what might be and what never was. Not yet 20 years old, this contemporary score is quite a departure from Opera Holland Park’s staple fare of well-aged verismo and bloodily rare Italian drama, but in a glossy new production by Stephen Barlow it pulses with all the same urgency and human interest – and not a suicide/secret pregnancy/long-lost parent in sight.Driven by propulsive motor rhythms and percussion ticks, Dove’s score has the same slick statelessness as Andrew Riley’s designs. Here a bit of Copland Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Interceptor began as it didn’t mean to go on. A young boy of mixed race walked home through an estate and saw two men in a violent altercation. One, who was white, shot the other, who was black, presumably dead. “Dad!” called the boy. The murderer pointed the gun, realised he was aiming at his son, and scarpered.Spool forward a couple of decades. The boy, now an adult, had moved out of a gritty tragedy and into a trigger-happy comedy. Ash (OT Fagbenle) was a customs cop on the hunt for small fry in tandem with his buddy Tommy (Robert Lonsdale). Their first chase across a crowded Waterloo Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Of the two works by Hans Werner Henze on this curious if ultimately satisfying double-bill, neither quite answers to the name of opera. Henze originally conceived The Country Doctor as a radio opera, that still-rare and unfairly maligned genre, which allowed him to set the whole text as Kafka wrote it, with the doctor a disembodied voice at front and centre, a neutral observer of his own mental disintegration while the imagined events of his long dark night of the soul work their horror around him. The stage adaptation Henze wrought in 1964 was really a vehicle for the gifts of Dietrich Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any suggestion that the companion piece to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, his disturbing documentary on the state-supported mass killings undertaken for Indonesia’s Suharto regime, could actually be a more troubling film might seem surprising. The Act of Killing was extremely unnerving. The Look of Silence is even more distressing, even more frightening. Inong, a death-squad leader interviewed in the new film, chillingly says, “if we didn’t drink human blood, we would go crazy.”This was the still-pumping blood of a dying person whose throat he had just cut. In the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s an intimacy, an interiority, to music for viol consort that even the string quartet can’t match. The physical placement of the three members of Phantasm who opened this concert of music by Gibbons, Purcell, Locke and Lawes was telling. Occupying three sides of a square, facing one another directly, theirs was a private musical conversation the audience was permitted to overhear. Fortunately it was one full of eccentric, charming episodes, as well as some moments of glorious darkness.This was the first of two concerts built around Purcell’s viol consorts – anachronistic works that had Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Titles can be warnings as well as come-ons. In Gary Owen’s new play about a teenager growing up in the Welsh Valleys, it’s not difficult to guess what the main theme of the play is. Stumbling out of the performance tonight I had the distinct impression that this is the most disturbing, even chilling, play of the year. Not only is it written with enormous skill, but what it has to say about men, and boys, feels both emotionally true and morally repellant. It’s a drama about truths that maybe I just don’t want to know about.The central character in this four-hander is 17-year-old Liam, a mummy’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is supposed to be a major five-part documentary series probing into the innards of the Metropolitan Police, but it felt suspiciously like W1A in uniform. Was it the muted but insistently ominous background music, always trying to tell us that something really significant was happening when we were just watching yet another slab of b-roll footage? Or the dry, earnest voice-over, intoning that "this is a force under pressure"?Above all, maybe it was the way that gatherings of high-level officers might equally have a been a BBC strategy meeting. When the Met's Head of Communications started Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title might suggest, Christian Schwochow’s West (Westen) takes us back to the time of Germany divided. It's almost a chamber piece, catching the very particular experiences of a woman and her young son who leave East Berlin and end up in a refugee centre in the city’s American sector, where they’re forced to reappraise their expectations of what their new life in the West will be.We first encounter heroine Nelly (Jordis Triebel, really strong throughout) and her young son Alexei (Tristan Gobel) on a snowy East Berlin street in 1975. They’re seeing off Nelly’s partner, the boy’s father Read more ...