Features
Marianka Swain
This year’s Olivier Awards saw the Young Vic trounce its South Bank neighbours, with Ivo van Hove’s revolutionary A View from the Bridge leading 11 nominations and four wins; the production opens on Broadway next week. It reflects an extraordinary period during which the theatre, originally an offshoot of the National, has grown to become one of Britain’s major creative powerhouses – all under the aegis of South African-born David Lan, artistic director since 2000.Following a £12.5 million revamp, the Young Vic now attracts daring experimental artists from Europe and beyond, both Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I walked into her office and started the usual small talk about what a charming room it was and what a lovely view and I do like your curtains. She didn't know me from Adam - she didn't watch Antiques Roadshow, and she wasn't interested in my small talk about furnishings. She said, 'Yes, yes, come and sit down. Now tell me, what do you know about the Franco-Prussian war?'"Hugh Scully's long years thinking on his feet in live television, first for the regional news show Points South West and then Nationwide, must have come to his aid as he muttered something about "1870 . . . major turning Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2007) about two Bangladeshi sisters, one confined to an arranged marriage that takes her to London, the other eloping in a "love marriage" in Bangladesh. She followed that with a documentary, Village at the End of the World (2012), a year in the life of a remote Inuit fishing village in Greenland, whose 60 residents fear the closure of their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An encounter with Hamburg’s Reeperbahn is akin to assimilation into a real-life kaleidoscope where bright lights, mass revellers and shills touting bars, night clubs or strip joints combine in a single multi-sense overload. The tumultuous thoroughfare is dedicated to excess.The Reeperbahn, the main drag of Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, approximates two garish, illuminated British seafront parades – maybe Blackpool and Southend – that have been elongated and then arranged face-to-face on each side of a street with emporia such as Amsterdam Headshop, beer halls and pole-dancing venues Read more ...
David Nice
One of the summer’s greatest pleasures has been to confirm an often untested truism: that you may hear some of the finest and rarest music-making in out-of-the-way places. Just take a local who’s made the grade – in this instance, violinist and conductor Thomas Kemp – and who can gather friends and colleagues of equal calibre around him, harness the most atmospheric and/or unusual local venues, here spread around beautiful Kent country in the vicinity of heavily wooded North Downs and the Pilgrims’ Way, and you have a top-notch festival. Whether its reputation and its financing can make a Read more ...
james.woodall
With eyes trained on sporty Rio de Janeiro once more for next year’s Olympic Games, cultural portals on to the city are bound to be offered in all sorts of places around the world. One such is Rio+Film, a new film festival at the Barbican Centre focusing exclusively on the great Brazilian city by the sea. Rio+Film is likely to have further editions elsewhere.Curator Adriana Rouanet says the “+” in the festival’s name underlines that the chosen films burrow beneath the usual image of beach, football and carnival. In the Saturday-night hot spot was Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s 2002 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Laurent Garnier, 49, is a key figure in the development of French electronic dance music. A DJ at the Haçienda in Manchester just as house music began to explode in 1987, he went on to helm nights at the Rex Club in Paris in the Nineties. These became a vital hub around which French dance music coalesced. Garnier went on to be a successful producer and live performer, releasing multiple albums, many for his own F Communications label. He regularly drew links between jazz and techno, most famously with his millennial anthem “The Man With The Red Face”. A new, significantly updated edition of Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's that time of year again, with autumn casting a shroud over London and the LFF offering the perfect tonic. The only problem is that with 238 fiction and documentary features over 10 days, even diehard cinephiles with no desire for human contact or fresh air would be hard pressed to sift and select. The festival programmers attempt their customary guidance, with films tucked (sometimes too neatly) into themes such as Love, Thrill, Debate and Dare. For our part, theartsdesk's film writers offer some very personal tips – films we've seen and would highly recommend, others that we ourselves Read more ...
Jessica Swale
I never thought I’d be a writer. Writers are people with something to say, big ideas, agendas. I was a director, through and through. I love working with actors, playing with music and text, thinking in three dimensions. The solitary confinement of a writer’s life filled me with dread. And so I spent a very happy eight years directing before I wrote my first play, Blue Stockings (pictured below by Manuel Harlan), and needless to say, the writing of it took me completely by surprise.I’d been working as Max Stafford-Clark’s Associate Director at Out of Joint. We were rehearsing Sebastian Barry’ Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s hard to believe that East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival has only been around for six years. In that short time, it’s become a cherished fixture in Scotland’s musical calendar. For regular concert-goers, it’s a calmer antidote to the August festival mayhem of Edinburgh, just half an hour away, and just a couple of weeks after the capital’s wall-to-wall chaos ends. And for East Lothian locals, it’s a well-appreciated intensive burst of classical music in the beautiful but decidedly untouristy villages and historic buildings of their neighbourhood.And it’s to the credit of co-artistic Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Chicago Jazz Festival is a freebie extravaganza, held over the Labor Day holiday weekend, its massive crowds welcomed by the looming chromium jelly bean that is sculptor Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. Onward into Millennium Park, right on the shore of Lake Michigan, there are a pair of long tents for the afternoon sets, with alternating bands ensuring constant musical motion.The evening performances take place on the impressive Jay Pritzker Pavilion stage, designed by Frank Gehry. Completed in 2004, it’s been the jazz festival’s home for the last three years of its 36-year history. It’s as if Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even if you never saw him conduct, you may well have sung one of Sir David Willcocks's carol arrangements. I remember the unnatural excitement in our church choir when the orange-jacketed Carols for Choirs 2 arrived on the scene, enhancing our repertoire with some especially juicy settings. Sir David Willcocks, who died on Thursday at the grand old age of 95, was steeped in the British choral tradition; for many, he was its heart and soul.David Valentine Willcocks joined the Westminster Abbey Choir as a treble, where he sang under Elgar's baton, and shaped The Bach Choir over 38 years, Read more ...