1930s
Laura Silverman
Stephen Poliakoff's slow-burning drama had turned into a propulsive whodunnit by this final episode, hurtling towards a resolution with panache and surprise. The five-part mini-series about a black jazz band in early 1930s high society has had the feel of an exploratory score at times. With syncopated beats and riffs decorating its unfolding narrative, the occasional scene and detail has seemed superfluous. But Poliakoff has had his reasons. By episode five, almost every character had a motive for murdering Jessie (Angel Coulby), the lead singer, or at least assisting in a cover-up.This Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What-ifs and might-have-beens are usually as pointless in music as in any other walk of life. Still one can’t help wondering how Alban Berg would have completed – and, no less interesting, revised – his opera Lulu, if he hadn’t been stung by some philistine insect in the summer of 1935 and died of the resulting septicaemia that Christmas Eve, with the last act unfinished and barely half-orchestrated.Berg’s earlier opera, Wozzeck, is taut and perfunctory, like the Büchner play it’s based on. Lulu, a setting of a pair of wordy plays by the proto-expressionist Frank Wedekind, is brilliant, Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
If by the end of a show you’ve both wowed and ouched out loud, I would declare it’s safe to say you’re getting your money's-worth. Tango Fire's new show at the Peacock Theatre, Flames of Desire, does all the above and more. In fact it could be described as the West End equivalent to a supermarket deal the average savvy consumer simply can’t resist – three for the price of one: exquisite dancers, a charismatic chanteur, and an electrifying band.The dancers are 10 of Argentina’s best, headed by the dancer/in-house choreographer German Cornejo. The singer, Jesus Hidalgo, has the charm and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bulgakov gets about more than you’d think. As a character in the play Collaborators, the Russian novelist was most recently seen helping Stalin with his memoirs. Within the last couple of years his novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard have both been adapted for the stage, while A Dog’s Heart was turned into an opera. All of these works were imbued with the Bulgakovian scent for phantasmal satire. So what's next for an author hooked on shape-shifting and the surreal?Don’t run a mile quite yet, but his memoir of serving as a young doctor in rural Ukraine has been turned into a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Boris Barnet may not be as well known in film circles as his contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein or Alexander Dovzhenko, but his role in the first decade of Soviet cinema was no less important. What he lacks in the more pronounced experimentation of those two, he more than makes up in his depictions of the fabric of everyday life itself. His Outskirts of 1933 was one of the very first Soviet talkies, and followed on from Barnet's highly successful silent comedies. Its subject, however, was darker - this is the story how the beginning of World War I affects life in a small Russian Read more ...
william.ward
Perhaps the longest-lasting, the oddest – and almost certainly the most gratuitous – battle still busy raging with its roots in the ideological conflicts of the past century is the one regarding the artistic output of Italy’s engagement with Fascism.You would be hard pressed to find even a ferociously anti-communist critic who condemned Shostakovich or Prokofiev’s Stalinist-era oeuvres as an affront to our liberal sensibilities. Aware of the ideological pressures of the time, we take it in our stride, as we do when viewing those 1960s “worker porn” posters (hunky proles building the new China Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with the 1995 album, All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio. Produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring Marc Ribot on guitar (and a cameo from Howard Coward, a.k.a. Elvis Costello, whom she married in 2003), her new album of vintage material largely from the 1920s and '30s, Glad Rag Doll, features songs that Krall has spent a lifetime Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Instead dapper Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a more than satisfactory replacement for the great Neeme Järvi - ran through this nightmarish world like an open razor, every cutting gesture aimed with deadly accuracy, having allocated the spiritual healing to a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Cleopatra didn’t hold a beast to her ass but in this lavish 1934 production, she could have. Cecil B DeMille amped up his two favourite topics - sex and sin - to create the world's second most opulent celluloid Cleopatra. Scripted by Waldemar Young (grandson of Brigham Young) and Vincent Lawrence (who seems to have kept working after his death), this hysterically fancy film was "based" on an "adaptation" of historical elements by Barlett Cormack - this is shorthand for “we only used the shiniest parts of the true story”. Despite phenomenal art direction by Roland Anderson and Hans Dreier Read more ...
David Benedict
“Has it ever occurred to you that flippancy might cover a very real embarrassment?" Elyot's response to fulminating Victor is a line of defence – and since he has run off with Victor's wife Amanda he has a good deal of defending to do. But the line is also Coward’s statement of intent. It's a direction as to how Private Lives works and is the key to why it’s not just his funniest and finest play but one of the greatest in the language. Disobey it – as much of Jonathan Kent’s overheated Chichester Festival Theatre production does – at your peril.The delicious flippancy is the (relatively) easy Read more ...
Laura Silverman
The Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, inspired by the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, is soon to return to the West End with Will Young. Its less well-known source is John Van Druten's 1952 play I Am a Camera. The title comes from the opening page of Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood's memoirs published in 1939 inspired by his years in the capital of a country reeling from the last war and suffering from the global Depression: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”The play focuses on Christopher's relationships with the people he meets in the city: Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel). It therefore comes as no great surprise that Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era latest should be lawless not just Read more ...