21st century
CP Hunter
Ever since her appearance on The Great British Bake Off in 2013, Ruby Tandoh has been a breath of fresh air to the food industry. Unafraid to use her voice and stand up not only for herself but for the marginalised communities she is a part of, she writes at the intersection of politics and food and has been unapologetic about calling out elitism in the industry. Her latest book, Cook As You Are, is a brilliant example of her ideologies and principles put into practice. In it, she has built the foundations for a future where cookbooks guide people towards the joy of eating, while being Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2015, an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter broke the world record for contemporary art by selling at auction for £30.4m, and the octogenarian is often described as the most important living artist. But I’ve always found the prices fetched by his work baffling and the claims made about him exaggerated, since his paintings leave me cold.The Hayward Gallery exhibition includes a group of drawings in which Richter employs tactics similar to those used in many of his paintings. A photograph of woodland is partially obscured by areas of grey overpainting. To me, this contrast between abstract Read more ...
Graham Fuller
An entertaining but undernourished industrial-domestic neo-noir set in South Wales,The Ballad of Billy McCrae depicts the power struggle between bent quarrying company boss Billy (David Hayman) and gullible failed businessman Chris Blythe (Ian Virgo), the story’s fall-guy protagonist.Directed by the enterprising Welsh filmmaker Chris Crow and dynamically scored by Mark Rutherford, the movie feels compressed – despite cinematographer Alex Metcalfe’s resplendent images of the hills and vales – and rushed. Getting an ambitious film made in Wales is admirable and Crow must have worked with a low Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
“On the Ordinance Survey map, it has no name”, writes Andrew Michael Hurley, of the wood that nevertheless gives its name to his essay. “Clavicle Wood” provides the first chapter in the Test Signal: Northern Anthology of New Writing. It is a mediation on meaning, bountiful in its praise of a place that is, above all else, a repository of memories: “We’ve come to call it Clavicle Wood, my family and I, on account of my eldest son breaking his collarbone there twice when he was younger". Like all the writing in Test Signal, it belongs to the contemporary. Amid the terror of the Read more ...
Robert Beale
“Remember me!”, sang Dido to a departed Aeneas in the heart-rending aria-chaconne announcing her demise that dominates the ending of Purcell’s baroque opera. But what if he did … if in fact he never could forget her? That’s the premise behind Errollyn Wallen’s Dido’s Ghost, a work incorporating almost all of the original Purcell score but dovetailing it into a full-length chamber opera of her own, with accompaniments from a combination of the instruments required for Purcell and some much more modern ones including xylophone and other percussion, and an electric bass guitar. Performed by Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
"It is dangerous for women to go outside alone," blares the electronic sign above the stage of the new Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe. This disquieting sentiment obviously takes some of its resonance from the Sarah Everard case, yet it also begs such questions as, really, always? When popping out to get milk? Does the time of day or the neighbourhood make any difference? And how should a modern woman interpret this; by staying in, or, like the production’s gutsy Juliet, Rebekah Murrell, investing in kick-boxing lessons?Ola Ince’s abrasively modern interpretation, complete with guns Read more ...
Robert Beale
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again. Manchester Collective, true to their pioneering and resourceful nature, went one step further. They made films, in collaboration with others, whose viewing could happen in a venue as a kind of event in itself. The result is Dark Days, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Almost alone among my friends, I liked and admired Ed Miliband, renewing my on-off relationship with the Labour Party having watched his first speech to conference live on TV. I had always considered him decent, thoughtful, intelligent – and, on the couple of occasions I met him, personable and (dare I say it) attractive. But the media decided long before the bacon sandwich incident that he was a nerdy no-good and the view widely prevails that “the wrong Miliband” got the gig – that David would have been electable in 2015 and therefore saved us from even more unnecessary austerity and the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
American filmmaker Ira Sachs excels at crafting throughtful relationship dramas in which middle-class characters confronted with crises or unanticipated realisations gain valuable emotional knowledge. His best works – Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Keep the Lights On (2012), and Little Men (2016) – demonstrate an evenness and maturity rare in the rough and tumble of indie cinema. Sadly, Sach’s new film Frankie pales beside its predecessors, despite the presence of Isabelle Huppert and Brendan Gleeson and a postcard-perfect Portuguese Riviera backdrop.Conceived as a light meditation on mortality Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by Mark-Anthony Turnage, showed they haven’t given up making waves.Engaging many of Manchester’s most distinguished solo musicians – and performing in ensembles whose numbers would daunt many another music-making organization right now – their enterprise and dedication are breathtaking. This live-streamed event brought together, as scene-setter Tom McKinney put it, “21 musicians, safely distanced’ at Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
The website of the National Crime Agency offers the following definition of County Lines: “[it is] where illegal drugs are transported from one area to another, often across police and local authority boundaries (although not exclusively), usually by children or vulnerable people who are coerced into it by gangs. The ‘County Line’ is the mobile phone line used to take the orders of drugs.” This definition does not feature in County Lines (2019), Henry Blake’s first film of feature-length, newly released on Blu-ray and DVD. Nevertheless, it does hold a conceptual relevance for this Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder is back with the Hallé for the latest (and penultimate) filmed concert in their “Winter Season” of 2020 and 2021, including the world premiere of Huw Watkins' Second Symphony. He introduces it from the Bridgewater Hall foyer, and mentions plans for a six-concert summer series with audiences present in the hall – well, let’s hope so.There’s the usual “tuning up” brief clip of the busy streets of Manchester, and it’s straight into Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, with principal flute Amy Yule’s delightful solo, the harps of Marie Leenhardt and Eira Lynn Jones, and Read more ...