Reviews
Hanna Weibye
Sylvie Guillem is retiring in exactly the same way as she does everything: in her own time and on her own terms. She turns 50 this year, but it’s not that age is finally catching up with her – at least, not in her body, which she acknowledges has potentially many more years of dancing in it. She just wants to go out at the top of her game, and for this most intelligent of ballerinas, that also means a new programme: no easy wallowing in the back catalogue for her, but new commissions from Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant, receiving their UK première in this run at the Wells, which will be Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s not often that you arrive for a piano recital to see members of the audience on the stage, clustering around the instrument and taking photos of it. Those curious about the newly unveiled, straight-strung Barenboim-Maene concert grand (the name above the keyboard is simply BARENBOIM) were periodically ushered away from it; it was closed and reopened several times before it was time for the maestro himself to take control.The first event in Daniel Barenboim’s four recitals of Schubert sonatas involved several component parts that added up to a distinctly odd evening. Let’s dispatch one Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To begin at the very bizarre ending. Fleetwood Mac, finally reunited as a five-piece with Christine McVie stage right on luscious vocals and keyboard, had just thrashed out a show of great finesse for two hours. It had all gone peachily. McVie was given a last lovely encore - “Songbird” – crooned solo on a grand piano. That should have been it. Many were already going, or gone.But after one last bow Stevie Nicks, as ever an accident in a taffeta factory, had a rambling tale to tell about McVie’s prodigal return after 16 years. This bathetic oration lasted about three minutes. Then Mick Read more ...
aleks.sierz
St Paul’s Cathedral is an icon of national identity. The building that rose up from the fire and smoke of the Blitz has also witnessed the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Di some twenty years later. In October 2011, this temple of God found that the Occupy anti-capitalist movement had set up camp outside its monumental front steps. Steve Waters’s new fictional account of this episode of protest shows how the Dean of St Paul’s responds to this action — and it stars Simon Russell Beale in the main role.In a panelled room, heavy with oak, that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The imposition of a brutal jihadist regime is relayed with formidable articulacy and a surprising lightness of touch in this gut-wrenching drama from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako. Although its narrative events are as horrifying as those of any thriller Timbuktu avoids the manipulative tricks of genre cinema. Sofian El Fani's sun-kissed cinematography mirrors the defiant beauty of the landscape and its people, while the screenplay - from Sissako and Kessen Tall - gently draws out the hypocrisy and absurdity of the situation, alongside the exasperating injustice.Inspired by the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gravelly, Winstone-esque banter about the trauma of putting down the sawn-off and having to stop for red lights. Poor taste in swimwear and the chunkier kind of jewellery. We know what to expect from a sitcom about life on the Costa, on the run. Which makes SunTrap, BBC One’s new take on the genre, highly adventurous. Unfortunately, having torn up the rulebook, what we’re left with is not a brilliant new approach, but a fistful of fragments, albeit highly coloured and diverting in patches. As fugitive tabloid reporters (the series’ title tips the wink about who’s in the Beeb’s sights here) Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Al Pacino gives it his barnstorming all as Danny Collins, an ageing, coke-rattled rocker who calls it quits in order to reconnect with his family and recharge his life. Sentimental (but not brazenly so) and buttressed by an ace supporting cast, the film finds Pacino hurtling through his 70s in irresistibly energiser bunny mode. Whereas such contemporaries as Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson have pretty well faded from view, there's plenty of life in this celluloid mainstay yet. Indeed, there's something delicious in watching Pacino gobble whole the part of a rock god living off his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman it was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris’s National Theatre. Thank goodness for Restoration comedy, stepping into the breach as reliably as it did with The Man of Mode in 2007 (who could forget Rory Kinnear’s Sir Fopling Flutter?). Throwing everything and the ancestral silver at the play, director Simon Godwin delivers an evening generous with wit, joy and affection. There are no big concepts here, just energy and irreverence, and it works a treat.Farquhar’s The Beaux' Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Perhaps it was after Bestival 2008 that its organizer, Rob da Bank, made his pact with the ancient gods. That year the Robin Hill Country Park site was reduced to a cold, sleet-raked, tornado-blown mire. The event truly lived up to every overuse of the word “mud” the British media hurls about eagerly each festival season. It was then, presumably, that da Bank, together with his acolytes in necromancy, turned to the pagan arts to facilitate positive weather conditions for future events. It was a piece of epic sorcery that’s mostly held fast since.The Bestival organizers forfeited their souls Read more ...
David Nice
Violinists either fathom the elusive heart and soul of Elgar’s music or miss the mark completely. Canadian James Ehnes, one of the most cultured soloists on the scene today, is the only one I’ve heard since Nigel Kennedy to make the Violin Concerto work in concert, in an equally rare total partnership with Elgarian supreme Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia. Last night he found the same emotional core in the Violin Sonata at the end of a colossal programme with a no less extraordinary but much less widely known companion, the American pianist Andrew Armstrong.In their smart suits and ties, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine if broadcasters thought the only living pop star worth giving air time to was Lady Gaga. Imagine – the horror. It would be wall-to-wall Gaga for the foreseeable future. And then imagine if the only living contemporary artist commissioning editors at Channel 4 and the BBC even bothered looking at was… Grayson Perry. Imagine. But wait. You don’t need to imagine – Perry has carved himself a big niche: as the go-to telly transvestite sociologist-cum-artist, fronting programmes trying to pin down the essence of Englishness, taste and class, and why critics seem to sneer at the type of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Finally reaching its concluding 22nd episode, delayed further by the "mid-season break" fashionable with American shows, Gotham [****] stands tall as a distinctive contribution to the seemingly inexhaustible superhero universe. Instead of relying on gargantuan cartoon characters and a hurricane of computerised effects in Marvel Avengers style, Gotham has used the scope afforded by a prolonged TV series to develop a specific world populated by rounded characters which evolve and move convincingly through time.A Batman prequel rooted in DC Comics mythology, Gotham pieces together a putative Read more ...