Reviews
Thomas H. Green
Benjamin Clementine’s idea of repartee with the audience is producing a clementine orange and smiling shyly. Clad in his trademark greatcoat-over-naked chest, with bare feet and outrageous pompadour hair, he sits at a spotlit grand piano and manoeuvres the fruit gently about before setting it down. It’s hardly even a gag but, given his between-song demeanour the rest of the time, this is the Clementine equivalent of prat-falling on a banana skin while making farting noises. His audience, however, are onside and audibly respond with affectionate laughter. He has created a consensus bubble of Read more ...
bella.todd
There’s an extraordinary moment, in Peter Strickland’s deeply sensual, desperately funny and feverishly powerful S&M love story, when a camera travels slowly into the darkness between a woman’s thighs. It’s an extraordinary moment in the soundtrack, too. In place of the golden strings and softly hovering choral notes, Brighton Dome suddenly fills with a monochrome electronic pulsing, as if an army of giant moths is flying over with wings of black sheet metal.Your eyes finally flick back to the other half of Cat’s Eyes. Faris Badwan has spent the performance tucked away behind a synth, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“All children, except one, grow up.” So begins J. M. Barrie’s iconic tale of arrested development, given new power and poignancy in this high-flying production. A century after one of Barrie’s youthful collaborators, George Llewelyn Davies, was killed at Ypres, it tells their familiar story through the prism of the brutalising First World War, in which context Peter’s neverending youth becomes an escapist beacon.Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel’s rich reimagining opens with wounded soldiers, far from home, tended by reassuringly maternal nurses – there are enough mother issues in Barrie’s Read more ...
Simon Munk
In short, Game Of Thrones the videogame. The Witcher 3 sees this epic role-playing fantasy series truly rival its key competitor, the Elder Scrolls series. The Witcher 3 particularly scores on delivering a huge, credible and complex world with incredible granularity – it's real go anywhere, do loads of things stuff.The game sees Geralt of Rivia, the series' hero, out to hunt down a younger Witcher who is being chased across the kingdom by a mysterious bunch of rather nasty-looking ghosts called the "Wild Hunt". The Witchers are monster-hunters who'll rid a town of infestations such as ghosts Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Glasgow-based Corin Sworn is the fifth winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Every two years a British artist is chosen on the basis of a proposal, rather than existing work. The fashion house then supports the project with funding, a bespoke, six-month residency in Italy and, following the Whitechapel Gallery show, an exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, where the HQ of the family-run business is located.It's an extremely enlightened form of patronage, but its emphasis on process rather than product is risky. Since artist’s projects are likely to change course en Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"You make clothes that make the darkness in me matter": If such an accolade strikes you as profound, make a beeline for McQueen, the James Phillips play about the tortured, all-too-brief life of the maverick talent Alexander McQueen that constitutes the longest 100 minutes I have spent in a theatre in many a month. A shaven-headed Stephen Wight cuts an impressive figure as the designer who is infinitely more compellingly represented at the moment at the V&A, but this play feels like a grubby attempt to trade off his name. Let's just say one can't imagine the real McQueen making it through Read more ...
David Nice
Crotch-grabbing, suggestions of oral and anal sex, stylized punching and kicking and other casual violence offer diminishing returns in your standard Calixto Bieito production. Sometimes a scene or two flashes focused brilliance, which only makes you wonder why he doesn’t apply the same rigour throughout. His 17-year-old Carmen has more such fitful insights than most of his other shows, and they’re very much complemented here by assured conducting and singing to make this punchy edition of Bizet’s amazing score, shorn of most of its dialogue, flash past at an energetic and colourful pace in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Brighton whooped as if she had never seen risqué entertainment last night, as cabaret veteran Joey Arias brought his Billie Holiday-meets-bawdy-standup show to the Brighton Festival. Able to switch between sincere tribute and brilliantly, cathartically filthy jokes instantaneously, he makes an audience unfamiliar with his style take a few minutes to calibrate their response. Once you understand that the Holiday is for real, and everything else tongue (or that’s what it looks like, anyway) in cheek, the evening makes curiously, but compellingly refreshing dramatic sense. The echoes Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Forest of Arden takes many forms, but in Blanche McIntyre’s meticulously purist production, it’s strictly a state of mind – no leafy bowers in sight. Here, the unspoken can be voiced, the bounds of gender and class broken, and courtly conventions stripped away to reveal folksy values. McIntyre’s is a typically astute interpretation, but – other than a couple of well-deployed props – lacks the playfulness and invention that might help a languidly earthbound three hours take flight.Shakespeare’s comic take on pastoral romance begins with a flurry of banishments. Usurpring Duke Frederick Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Those expecting an evening at the circus tonight, such as L’Oublié(e)’s advertising hinted at, were in for a shock. I saw a few children in the foyer and would be intrigued to know what they made of it. There were moments of pure nightmare amidst its parade of striking imagery. The debut show of French dancer and contortionist Raphaëlle Boitel is an imagistic, allegorical hour, heavily dipped in circus techniques, yet mostly deserting that medium’s levity and comedy in favour of an abject hallucinatory quality. I was gobsmacked by its audacious visuals but occasionally turned off by its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skateboarding female vampire in a striped Brêton top. A James Dean look-alike with a junkie father. A prostitute as confessor. Spaghetti western-influenced music. The black-and-white A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a smorgasbord of attention-grabbing elements brought together in what is being promoted as the “first Iranian vampire Western”.The accuracy of the geographic tagging will be returned to in a few paragraphs, but one thing is clear about the self-consciously quirky A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: it’s a unique proposition.The setting is Bad City, somewhere in Iran. Arash ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Frank Loesser seems to be known in Britain for one show and one show only, which seems a shame given that the composer-lyricist of Guys and Dolls has a CV that includes the ravishing The Most Happy Fella and his 1962 Pulitzer prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was last seen locally a decade ago at Chichester but remains unproduced in London since, well, whenever. And by way of partial recompense, along came a one-off concert version of the show and what a glory it remains, its defining mixture of satire and sweetness pretty well unmatched by any musical Read more ...