Reviews
Sarah Kent
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...
James Saynor
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.The Warner Bros sequel to that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in the pan; mixing up memories; just plain blank episodes. At various times, she relives distant moments in her life with her husband Ameet, who died more than 20 years ago. Very soon she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.As played by national treasure Meera Syal, who barely leaves the stage during this full-length tragi-comedy by Tanika Gupta, making a very welcome return to the National Theatre, she grows in emotional stature while her incurable condition Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Battle for Lakipia is a beautifully filmed and thoughtfully directed documentary that was made over a two-year period. Its focus is the conflicting claim to Kenyan land made by white ranch owners of English descent and the indigenous pastoralist people. In the 60 years since Kenya gained independence from Britain, tensions between the descendants of colonial Europeans and Kenyans have flared up periodically, and in recent years climate change has added fuel to the fire.Global warming has led to longer and more terrible droughts that scorch the grasslands and make it impossible Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her farming skills, or his 40-year-old son, David, the farm’s heir but an alcoholic and drug user who is unsuited to the work, to take it over.Played by the craggy non-professional actor Roger Marten, frequently shot in closeup, the farmer, a solitary widower, never speaks. Played by Emily Beecham and Rory Kinnear, Laura and David, each of whom covets the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Bold, ambitious, and good for the sector.” So said Charlotte Moore, the BBC chief content officer, who currently earns £468,000, in March last year as she defended plans to close the BBC Singers as part of a package of swingeing musical cuts masked – as usual – as a high-principled strategic rethink.Well, what a difference a year, or rather 18 months, makes. Last night, the world’s first permanent radio choir celebrated its centenary – the “Wireless Choir” began to broadcast from Savoy Hill on 2 October 1924 – at a packed Barbican Hall. It greeted the great survivors’ arrival with the Read more ...
David Nice
Nobodaddy, taking its title from Blake’s violent dark-god “Father of Jealousy”, is much more than a dance piece, and Michael Keegan-Dolan, whose company was formerly known as Fabulous Beast, is more than just a choreographer, with unique takes on the total work of art already to his credit.This is no exception, and may mark a new zenith. There's material enough for more than one happening. Typically, Keegan-Dolan weaves around an individual loss more Blake poems, the Irish rebellion of 1798, folk-based songs of exile in collaboration with the wonderful Sam Amidon, and reflections on the Miami Read more ...
David Nice
As Fiona Shaw’s shiningly free and easy narration told us, Shakespeare’s sparring Beatrice and Benedick are merely counterpoint to a supposedly comic plot that becomes a potential tragedy, and tests the japers’ seriousness. Berlioz wanted none of that in his last opera, all southern sunlight and moonshine, caprice and reverie. Last night we got the best of all possible worlds in a concert performance that showed an ideal way forward for this beauty of a numbers opera.Irish National Opera seems to have an infallible instinct for casting. Admittedly it has a seemingly inexhaustible well of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed with quirky detail, much of it surely never intended to go anywhere but over the heads of its original child readers.Yes, it may have been written for and about a 10-year-old, but Alice Liddell was clearly a precocious little girl. If eye-boggling phantasmagoria on a scale approaching that of the Olympics opening ceremony is what you want from your Read more ...
Jack Barron
Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it.In fact, Faber & Faber actively did something about it and released a selection of Cope’s poems in a slim, transportable volume: perfect commuter fodder. It turns out that this was the beginning of a series, and we now have a similarly slim and comparably portable selection of Stevie Smith poems, gathered under the title of her most well-known work, Not Waving But Drowning.Of course, we only have two in the series so far, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is there no limit to the number of times the comic book heroes and villains from Marvel and DC can be recycled? HBO’s The Penguin (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a spin-off from Matt Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman, which starred Robert Pattinson in the title role and Colin Farrell as Oswald “Oz” Cobb, aka The Penguin.Farrell’s Penguin returns here as the star of his own show, though his extraordinary physical transformation makes him utterly unrecognisable.The usually rather handsome Irish actor is reborn as a grotesque and malevolent gargoyle, his face pudgy and puckered, cursed with a painful Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The stock of the late 19th century playwright Arthur Wing Pinero has just received a significant boost, thanks to the brilliant work of the actress Nancy Carroll – not only as a superb performer but as a dab hand with an adaptor’s pen. Not seen in London since 1991, Pinero’s 1890 farce The Cabinet Minister has emerged as a tour de force in her hands: sparkling with wit, vibrancy and knowingly naughty innuendo. Trollope would probably have turned the same material into a weightier, more mordant commentary on the British class system, but here the text is intent on fleet-footed fun, firing Read more ...