21st century
Gary Naylor
Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its feet. But what of the other room, the writers’ room, where the ideas emerge mistily and the egos clang in conflict? [title of show] pulls back the curtain behind the curtain, behind the curtain.“More meta?” I hear you ask, a little wince in the voice. But, rather than an exercise in smartypants critiquing of cultural production from the inside-out ( Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anna Clyne’s This Moment had its UK premiere at Saturday’s BBC Philharmonic concert. She’s the orchestra’s composer in association, and this seven-minute piece was first played by the Philadelphia Orchestra last year.Inspired by the calligraphy of the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, it’s (in the words of the composer) “a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years” and very much a meditation on death. Not too cheerful a subject, you might think, but Thích Nhất Hạnh said that when you meditate on death you love life more, and that was Read more ...
Robert Beale
Of all the inventive and enterprising things Manchester Collective do, it’s most often been the playing of a string ensemble led from first desk by Rakhi Singh that’s been the most fundamentally rewarding.Last night’s concert was further confirmation of that. The formula for other outfits to introduce new music has often been three (or four) standards, with one novelty sandwiched in, on the spoonful-of-sugar principle. The Collective do it differently: they give you three or four novelties, with one standard inserted for recognizability. And in this case the standard (Tchaikovsky’s Serenade Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?Stefano Massini's play, adapted by Ben Power, never quite loses that vacuum at its centre, as it tells the story of The American Dream for the umpteenth time, sidestepping some inconvenient truths (also for the umpteenth time), while Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. Liptrot’s screenplay, cowritten with Daisy Lewis and director Nora Fingscheidt, turns her into a young woman called Rona, played by Ronan, but gives her an alternative CV as a research microbiologist by training. Actual Liptrot scraped a living cleaning oil-rig workers’ toilets at home on Orkney, Read more ...
Robert Beale
The first piece by Grace-Evangeline Mason I heard was six years ago, a simple song in a multi-composer “Manchester Peace Song Cycle” performed at the Royal Northern College of Music when she was studying there.It was striking because of its eloquent melody and evocation of child-like joy. Subsequent experience has confirmed the impression that she writes music that immediately communicates, that is often about something, rather than abstract (and she’s not afraid to tell us that), and that it does what it says on the tin.Her ABLAZE THE MOON, premiered by the BBC Philharmonic in the 2023 Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.Barney Norris’s 2024 play comes to London and finds the right venue in the Arcola’s intimate studio space freighting just the right quantum of claustrophobia into a production that often suggests our eavesdropping on three real people who have hired the room to rehearse. You wonder if it would all just go on whether we were there Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The convenience shop is already acquiring a patina of nostalgia, crowned by a warm glow of happier days. My mother used to send me out aged seven to buy her Embassy Number 1s with me levying a charge of one gobstopper in payment - see, I’m a victim already. Appropriately, that old-school shop is on hand when you want a setting for a gentle, heartwarming, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Going to the theatre can be a little like going to church. One communes on the individual level, one’s faith in the stories underpinned by a psychological connection, but also on the collective level, belief rising on a tide of shared emotions. Those complementary sensations, in an ever more individualised, screen-and-earplugs world, are rare – and an example of why people pay big bucks for Glastonbury, Taylor Swift and Oasis.There’s something theatrical, something devotional and even something Swiftie in the air during Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up (that isn’t really) to Six, Toby Read more ...
Sarah Kent
El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.Tatiana Huezo’s visually stunning film opens with Luz Ma and her mother rushing to save a sheep from drowning in one of the deep pools formed by the torrential rains that seem never to stop. With her father working away most of the time, this bright-eyed girl is her mother’s only helper. She can’t be more than 11 but we see her Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest is a test of stamina: a 3hr 15min study of a man paralysed by negative thinking. It also contains striking freeze-framed portraits of people and places that you want to pause and look at even longer than the editing allows, so beautiful are they.These shots presumably represent the photography of Samet (Deniz Céliloglu), a disgruntled late-thirtyish art teacher doing what he hopes will be the last year of his training in a remote part of eastern Anatolia. He yearns to return to a big city, preferably Istanbul. When we first see him, he is a very small Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.But this squabbly, stereotypical family is not what it seems. Soon the mother is behaving oddly, there’s a “Here we go again” look in her husband’s eyes and the daughter withdraws, somewhat traumatised. Only the son, who has taken on a Puck-like status as an unreliable observer, appears at ease – Read more ...