Reviews
Turning the Screw, King’s Head Theatre review - Britten and the not-so-innocentSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as the ill-fated Miles in his operatic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The upheaval Hemmings wrought in Aldeburgh’s Crag House when... Read more... |
The Hills of California, Harold Pinter Theatre - ladies' night for Jez ButterworthSaturday, 17 February 2024
Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such... Read more... |
Tom Webber, The Hope and Anchor review - a fresh nod to the pastSaturday, 17 February 2024
Thursday night at Islington’s legendary Hope and Anchor: a challenging time and place to get an audience going, not least following the very assured edgy-yet-sweet singer-songwriter Daisy Veacock, another newish-kid-on-the-block on the edge of... Read more... |
David Harsent: Skin review - our strange surfacesSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries... Read more... |
Malofeev, BBCSO, Lintu, Barbican review - finesse as well as fireworksSaturday, 17 February 2024
This was a muesli programme: nutty, crunchy, just sweet enough, its success lying in the balance of the various ingredients. At times, such was the explosiveness of the playing, it felt like popping candy had been added to the muesli, but in a good... Read more... |
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, Tate Modern review - a fitting celebration of the early yearsFriday, 16 February 2024
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the... Read more... |
Cavalleria Rusticana/Aleko, Opera North review - a new foil for MascagniFriday, 16 February 2024
Opera North have a new pairing for Mascagni’s popular but clichéd Cavalleria Rusticana in this double bill: an early Rachmaninov one-acter, written when he was 19. The production of the former is a revival of the one seen in 2017 in their Little... Read more... |
Dear Octopus, National Theatre - period rarity is a real pleasureFriday, 16 February 2024
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and... Read more... |
Eureka review - not enough to shout aboutFriday, 16 February 2024
It's been a decade since Lisandro Alonso’s last film, Jauja, which signalled the Argentine's first collaboration with professional actors, notably a magnificent Viggo Mortensen. The pair reprise their collaboration in Eureka, in the first... Read more... |
Nelken: A Piece by Pina Bausch, Sadler's Wells review - welcome return for an indelible classicThursday, 15 February 2024
Perhaps the most memorable of the stage designs Peter Pabst created for Pina Bausch is back in London after nearly 20 years: a sea of erect pink silk carnations, the Nelken of the title. It’s canonical that there are 8,000 of them, but only the... Read more... |
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican review - the fabric of dissentThursday, 15 February 2024
Judy Chicago created Birth Project in the 1980s, recognising with typical perspicacity that the favouring of “the paint strokes of the great male painters” over “the incredible array of needle techniques that women have used for centuries” has... Read more... |
Bob Marley: One Love review - sanitised official version of the Jamaican icon's storyThursday, 15 February 2024
It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated... Read more... |
