magic
Gary Naylor
In a small Appalachian village, where people say “Y’all” and prospectors are still searching for silver in the mountains, Barbara Allen wants more than the humdrum life of a Trad wife (as I suppose you would call it these days). Already a bit of a rebel, she has a suitor, the dim, fighty Marvin, but there’s something just there, she knows, if only she could see it.She’s right, of course, else we wouldn’t have a show, and that something is Witch Boy John, part of a coven of sex-mad spirits whose hedonistic lifestyle has become dulled by its accompanying alienation. He wants to feel joy and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just a flimsy music stand on the RSC’s biggest stage greets us. Sir Ken, no longstaff in hand as we might have expected, dons his coat, perhaps left over from Abanazar’s costuming in an upscale pantomime, and raises his weedy, reedy baton. Instantly, all hell breaks loose on Bob Crowley’s beautiful sparse, now tilting set, supplemented by Akhila Krishnan’s Donner and Blitzen videos. The game’s afoot all right.The clue is in the title of course. Prospero, like a wizardy Leonard Bernstein, conjuring a storm to shipwreck his usurper brother, Antonio, Duke of Milan and shipwreck, amongst others, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was as famous as it gets really, author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes stories, a polymath and a rare British example of that most continental of figures, the public intellectual. Across The Atlantic, Harry Houdini was a phenomenon, the escapologist showman, personifying The Great American Dream, even making movies.A century on, Holmes and Houdini (both of whom are invented characters, lest we forget) persist as metaphors and memes that require no explanation.Ah, lest we forget. Neither man could, to the extent that memories became pathologised. The writer Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Peace and Goodwill to All Men outside. Inside, on stage at least, there’s not much peace nor goodwill to be had on the horror-filled Saturday afternoon before Christmas. A high-spirited full house is set to spend a couple of hours with spirits of a very different kind. In every sense, it's a shocking contrast.Of course, this is no original IP, many punters, having seen what they liked in the Paranormal Activity movies, sitting down, drink in hand, bag of merch tucked under the seat, for a new fix, this time in the West End. That said, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition, whether Marley Read more ...
Jon Turney
The slightly overwrought subtitle, "How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future", gives a good indication how computer enthusiast Sam Arbesman treats his subject. Software, written in a variety of programming languages whose elements we refer to as code, is ubiquitous.It underlies many parts of modern life, and current efforts look like extending its reach profoundly. And, while we can try to understand it by reading books like this, it’s not clear that we can influence it. Although it is made by humans, it is easy to get the impression (digital Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.Their aesthetic has rarely if ever been compared to his – perhaps because they are so firmly rooted in a very English pastoral, while he has always been about wide-horizons Americana – but in fact listening to this record as social media is flooded with his pronouncements and creations, it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.Coppola subtitles Megalopolis “a fable”, and its tale of an imperious architect fighting venal New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently staged in London, setting the bar high, but it’s a simpler story, a simpler aesthetic and it’s obviously an easier gig to adapt a great film rather than an all-time great film, first winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Waiting for the curtain, I gulped back contradictory thoughts: I was so excited about them getting it right and Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
History is very present in Philippa Gregory’s new play about Richard III. Literally - History is a character, played by Tom Kanji. He strides around in a pale trenchcoat, at first rather too glib and pleased with himself, but quickly sucked into the action as Richard’s life plays out in front of him. If only Katie Posner’s production, which started at Shakespeare North Playhouse and is now at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmund’s, could draw us in so powerfully.The blurb describes “an explosion of tarmac” as Richard III bursts into the modern day in a Leicester car park, but Kyle Rowe’s entrance Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Unbelievable is a strange title for a slightly strange show, the brainchild of Derren Brown, Andrew O’Connor and Andy Nyman, a trio with an impeccable pedigree in creating successful magic-based events. It’s a strange title because suspension of disbelief lies at the heart of the bargain the performers make with the audience. Nobody wants to be sitting next to the unbelieving sceptic cynically informing us that it’s all done with mirrors or that she’s no longer in the box and that it's just a dummy hand in the glove. The thrill of believing it’s actually happening, however much cognitive Read more ...
David Kettle
FOOD, The Studio ★★★There’s no denying it: Los Angeles-born Geoff Sobelle is a theatrical magician (quite literally – it’s how he began his career). Through a string of visually spectacular shows on the Fringe and more recently at the International Festival, he’s unleashed wildlife into the streets of Edinburgh, drawn aeons of history from a cardboard box, and even constructed an entire house on stage.So it’s perhaps no surprise that, for his new FOOD unveiled this year, Sobelle has transformed the Festival Theatre’s smaller Studio space into the setting for an immense dinner party Read more ...