England
Boyd Tonkin
During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas, moreover, will have proved again to millions that Harry Potter and his wizard companions have lost none of their potency as divinities in the 21st-century household. The creatures dismissed by a sceptical thinker in 1709 as “ghosts, hobgoblins, witches and spectres” now enjoy a second life across swathes of British popular and literary culture. They have seldom seemed so robust and so resilient. Yet the Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Courier is a split entity that comprises two interlinked parts. One half involves a silent Gary Oldman who occasionally becomes hysterically enraged, the other a furious Olga Kurylenko who is never allowed a moment of silence. Director Zackary Adler perhaps aimed for contrast, maybe even balance, with this ill foray into the hit job thriller, but he’s ended up with confusion and lifelessness.Sinister veteran killer Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman) faces trial and has planned to kill the only living witness to his crimes before the testimony is given. A motorbiked hitwoman, aka “the courier Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining experience (menu, team, decor, diners) from a pivotal year in their restaurant’s history. What’s unclear is if this show was intended as a one-off documentary or the first episode of a series. What’s certain? It was a wacky time capsule.The programme opened with Blumenthal and Giles Coren, The Times’ restaurant critic, choosing a year to recreate. The Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As they celebrate their 50th year, Ex Cathedra have brought their much loved Christmas music by candlelight concerts to churches all across England, before giving five concerts in the run up to Christmas at St Paul’s in the Jewellery Quarter, in their home town of Birmingham. Singing to a packed-out Coventry cathedral on Monday night - Ex Cathedra’s first time there - was a group of ten from their consort of professional choral singers, who performed a mix of new carols and festive favourites.Opening with founding director and conductor Jeffrey Skidmore’s arrangement of Hildegard von Bingen’s Read more ...
Tom Baily
Once again the whodunit becomes the whoforgedit in the newest installment of the Britain’s Lost Masterpieces series. Host and art historian Bendor Grosvenor introduces us to what is one of the most beautiful he’s ever seen: a Madonna and Child believed to have been done by Sandro Botticelli, one of the members of “painting’s Premier League”. Much sleuthing is needed to verify the work, and to satisfy Grosvenor’s appetite.Social historian Emma Dabiri delves into the background of the work’s previous owner, the wealthy Gwendoline Davies, who bequeathed it to Cardiff Art Gallery in 1952. Davies Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Who won the Cold War? Nobody, according to comedian Rich Hall in this 90-minute film for BBC Four. His theory is that after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, Russia and America merely “flipped ideologies”. The US government now rules by lies and intimidation, while Russia embraced gangster-capitalism and became “a gas station with a bunch of rusty nukes out back.”Resembling an old outlaw who’d been dragged into town tied to the back of somebody’s horse, Hall cast a caustic eye over the neurotic decades after World War Two, as East and West stockpiled missiles and pushed the Read more ...
Simon Stephens
Light Falls is the sixth play that I have written for the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and the fourth that its outgoing Artistic Director, Sarah Frankcom, will direct.She directed On the Shore of the Wide World, Punk Rock and Blindsided. In many ways Light Falls marks a culmination of a collaboration that has informed my working life and a return to ideas I have been interrogating in that collaboration.I was born in Stockport and lived there until I went to university when I was 18. I live in London now and have done for 25 years. The relationship between the two places continues to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
These horribly remarkable times can shake the strongest souls. Since the popular acceptance of The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow at their worst have sometimes resembled their friends and supporters Coldplay, offering anthemic placebos to vaguely generalised ills, as Guy Garvey’s big, sentimental heart buried the odder, proggier band they once were. But this sixth album mourns the death of Garvey’s dad and close friends during a period of nihilistic national trauma, from Brexit to Grenfell. Bruising and unravelling marks its music.“Dexter and Sinister” is about lost faith and death’s certain Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Keane grew up six miles away in Battle, making this night in balmy Bexhill-on-Sea as close as they can practically get to a hometown gig. Prior to their first headline tour in six years, they’re playing new album Cause and Effect in full in an “in-store appearance”, hosted by the Music’s Not Dead record shop within the town’s art deco De La Warr Pavilion, but played in the main auditorium.This intimate localism from one of Britain’s biggest bands is somewhat undercut by the gig being live-streamed. But it’s a welcome opportunity to focus on new songs shaped by what singer Tom Chaplin coyly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Keane were always the best of that post-millennium Coldplay crowd. Tim Rice-Oxley showed adult craft in his lyrics and keyboard textures on their 5 million-selling debut, Hopes and Fears, where the small-town specificity of Battle, Sussex’s biggest band lifted singer Tom Chaplin’s yearning. Six years after they effectively broke up, this fifth album’s title announces itself as a sequel, dissecting Rice-Oxley’s divorce (foreshadowed in 2012’s Strangeland) with forensic relish.“You’re Not Home” describes the split’s aftermath like that of a neutron bomb: “bike wheels still turning” on the back Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Alexander Zeldin continues his devastating analysis of modern Britain in this culminating play of a (very loose) trilogy that started with 2014’s Beyond Caring, followed by LOVE two years after that. These are bleak dramas that show human beings washed up on the edges of a society in which levels of social support have been brutally pared down, even as they contend with change that has drastically disbalanced established ways of life, from zero-hours contracts (Beyond Caring) to homelessness (LOVE). The Dorfman has become a signature setting for the anonymous, dilapidated institutional Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Elizabeth Bernholz, known on stage as Gazelle Twin, comes straight from a line of musical visionaries – rebels and misfits whose influences fleet through her songs like will-o’-the-wisps. Here is the formal, clever ennui of The Stranglers, the wild, cathartic howls of Pink Floyd’s anti-establishmentarianism, and the unearthly arcs of Kate Bush’s otherworldly electro-folk. She chimes too with more contemporary outsiders: the sardonic flat-line of a knowing Metronomy, the spangled freneticism of MIA., Fever Ray’s bleak gut-swell propulsion, and hints of Björk’s operatic, overwhelming Read more ...