1930s
Saskia Baron
Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman’s 1974 evocation of 1930s Mississippi, wasn’t a commercial hit on its original release, even though Pauline Kael called it a masterpiece.This Depression-era tale of a trio of hapless bank-robbers was shot on location with no star names. Keith Carradine plays Bowie, the youngest of the thieves who have just escaped from a chain gang. In jail since he was 16, he has a naiveté that Carradine captures beautifully.Holed up in a small town, the loose-limbed Bowie falls for a local girl, Keechie, played by Shelley Duvall in her first major role. Struck by Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.There was orchestral virtuosity in the form of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, pianistic virtuosity in the shape of Steven Osborne playing Britten’s Piano Concerto, and a kind of compositional virtuosity in an eight-minute burst of Ethel Smyth – “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” from her opera, The Wreckers.All this was delivered by conductor Ben Glassberg with an up-and-at-’em energy and determination that defied the heat and humidity of a summer evening in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Miles Malleson, known as an inter-war character actor who popped up in numerous small roles on stage and screen, was also a surprisingly prolific writer and adaptor. Mint Theatre Company of New York love truffling out work like his Yours Unfaithfully, a 1933 play on a topic that still resonates today, even if the social milieu of the piece doesn’t.The Jermyn Street Theatre is an ideal venue for this comedy of new manners. With deft touches, its pocket-sized stage can still suggest the era and class setting on show: genteel suburbia with intellectual ambitions, hence the artists’ busts and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Getting on for 27 years ago, Thomas Adès’ These Premises Are Alarmed was one of the pieces commissioned by the Hallé for a premiere in the opening series of concerts at the new Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Kent Nagano.Now that Adès, then their composer-in-association, is about to be artist-in-residence (as composer, conductor and performer) over the coming two years, it was a neat idea to return to it. The three-minute piece struck me that first time by the fact that its vast list of percussion resources seemed to take literally the nickname of “kitchen” for that department, for it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Diary of Anne Frank became a Broadway play and has formed the basis of a lengthy catalogue of films and TV series, but the name of Miep Gies is rather less well-known. Yet without Gies the Anne Frank story might never have reached the wider world, since it was she who helped the Frank family, along with four other Dutch Jews, to remain in hiding and evade capture by the Germans from July 1942 until their luck ran out in August 1944.It was Gies, too, who kept Anne Frank’s diary safe after its author was arrested by the Gestapo, and who gave it to Anne’s father Otto when he returned to Read more ...
Robert Beale
“Let the organ thunder!” is the sentiment a lot of us will associate with an orchestral concert featuring the king of instruments. The Hallé’s programme with Anna Lapwood as soloist (repeating, from her BBC Proms debut with them in 2021, the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony) seemed designed to evoke that thought.But the organ in the Bridgewater Hall isn’t exactly made for thundering. Big Bertha it is not. What it is really good at is a light, clear and sometimes fiery sound – ideal for Poulenc’s 1939 Organ Concerto, which was the undoubted highlight of the evening.There was light and airy French Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.Upgraded this time round to the open expanse of the Olivier stage, the play occupies an Irish backwater from designer Robert Jones that seems to stretch to infinity and beyond, the vista defined by a striated stage curtain (it looks beaded, but isn't) itself suggesting the porousness of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that you are aware throughout of violence and pain as the flipside of passion at its most intense. Some will complain (and have) that the result negates the comedy coursing through this time-honored text; I would argue that the laughs are still there, tempered in this instance by an awareness of the lacerations oftentimes inflicted by love. After all Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night at the Barbican was my first experience of a film with live orchestra, which has become a big thing in the last few years. The film in question was Alexander Korda’s extraordinary HG Wells adaptation Things to Come, from 1936, imagining a century of the future.As ever with sci-fi, while it is fun to see what predictions turned out right and which wide of the mark, the main takeaway is what the film tells us about the anxieties of 1936. Things to Come has a notable symphonic score, by Arthur Bliss, the first to be released as a commercial soundtrack album, and the film that first Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two intriguing themes and two great guest artists were offered by the BBC Philharmonic to their Saturday night audience in the Bridgewater Hall: the themes were what “classicism” really is, and the variety of music inspired by (or written for) dance.The artists were Angela Hewitt, soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, and Sir Andrew Davis, making another welcome visit to Manchester. You might say that a third theme of the evening was the chance to see the two of them deliver a masterclass in piano playing and orchestral conducting.Classicism, then: what is it? Whole books have been Read more ...
David Nice
It’s coming up for two years since some of us watched the first three seasons of what’s increasingly coming to seem like television’s greatest dramatic triumph. Babylon Berlin. So we might be excused for being in a bit of brainwhirl when it comes to the multiple plotlines sown early on in Season Four.It starts on the eve of 1931, and the components include desperate street children, suppression of free press, the increasingly deluded exploits of a mad industrialist family, fratricidal urges, a vicious secret court, bent coppers, gangsters, the theft of a valuable jewel, connecting high Read more ...