England
David Nice
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Many of us would be happy to admire it in isolation, especially in the company of Alice Coote, a mezzo as equal to its stature as the original interpreter, Janet Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The title says it all: Bertolucci’s landmark (if boring) French film has its last word changed from Paris to Halifax – where butter is only used for glazing parsnips. The very idea of Derek Jacobi taking Anne Reid up the scullery is enough to put anyone off their food but the two grandes dames of English theatre add class to the bittersweet romance of Sally Wainwright’s dog’s-dinner of a drama.Jacobi plays Alan Buttershaw who was stood up by Celia Dawson 60 years ago – except he wasn’t. Celia moved to Sheffield and sent him an explanatory note via a friend called Eileen who destroyed it and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Julian Fellowes has often seemed to treat Downton Abbey as a speed-writing contest, with momentous events and the tide of history whirling past like roof tiles in a typhoon. Happily, as series three has developed, the pace has evened out a bit, though Shirley MacLaine's Mrs Levinson barely lasted as long as the disfigured pretender to the Downton inheritance in series two, while the storyline in which Downton was financially ruined and then promptly saved by Matthew's convenient inheritance was straight from the Peter Pan book of screenwriting.It remains addictively watchable, and this season Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Set at the start of the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, Clare Bayley's Blue Sky follows an old-school journalist pursuing justice at the cost of neighbours and friends. Jane, played with careerist resolve by Sarah Malin, is convinced she has uncovered a case of extraordinary rendition. She believes the CIA are involved in the kidnap of a man seen being bundled on to a private jet in Islamabad so that they can question him under torture. “People,” she says, “don't just disappear.” Now she needs proof.Jane contacts an old flame, Ray (Jacob Krichefski) to help her trace the plane, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Year after year Kate Rusby, one of the undisputed stars of the British folk revival, turns out quality albums and even better live performances. Ten years ago she celebrated a decade in the business with a collection of re-recordings and unreleased material. Ten years on, she has put together a double CD that features a number of star collaborators and less well-known but equally talented friends and contains new versions of her favourite songs.The magic Rusby touch is characterised by a sweet and soft-toned vocal style and a heart-warming melancholy. It’s not by accident that the family Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Michael Winterbottom’s Channel 4 commission for a film on prison life resulted in this five-year experiment in the passage of time for jailed Ian (John Simm) and his young family left on the outside. The oldest of the four child actors was almost teenage by the shoot’s end. More prosaically, Ian’s time inside is marked on his wearily hardening face.The grand Michael Nyman score rightly suggests there’s something profoundly important in the passage of everyday lives, reinforced by the rural seasons in the family’s Norfolk home. There’s even sex and potential violence. In an intensely erotic Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Accolades are due again for the tiny Finborough Theatre, whose production of JB Priestley's all-but-unknown Cornelius constitutes the most exciting reclamation from the English theatrical canon since the same venue produced Emlyn Williams's startling and welcome Accolade some 18 months ago. Funny and endearing in parts when not devouringly bleak, the play is as eccentric as a title character who can debate "this suicide business" one minute and lose himself in a story about the Incas the next, and the young director Sam Yates and his hugely accomplished cast do the occasion proud. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The potential minefield that is the run-up to marriage brings filmgoers back to the altar once again courtesy The Wedding Video, an English romcom that is quite a bit better than one might at first expect. A mixture of pro forma slob comedy (what, no Rhys Ifans?) possessed of a genuinely endearing twist, director Nigel Cole's latest feel-good venture actually does cheer the heart, even if there are ample passages of grimace-and-bear-it shenanigans that have to be got through along the way. Rufus Hound (pictured right, with Lucy Punch) stars as Raif, devil-may-care brother and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first time I saw Orlando, on general release in 1992, I was blown away by the beauty of Sally Potter’s homage to Virginia Woolf. Beginning in 1600 when Orlando (the suitably androgynous Tilda Swinton) is a young man, the film skips and hops through to the present day. The first scene, a banquet for Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp resembling a pantomime dame in a tall red wig) takes place after dark and, in the glow of candlelight, everything is burnished a rich golden brown.The aged queen gives Orlando the deeds to a grand house – on one condition: “Do not fade,” she commands; “Do not wither, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Our athletes over at the Olympic Village might not yet have brought home a gold, but in an all-English programme at the Proms last night the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and combined BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC National Chorus of Wales under Tadaaki Otaka surely did just that. As the brash, glittering tumult of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast – “Praise ye the god of gold” – rioted around a packed Royal Albert Hall, the audience were still, marvelling at the skill and artistry of Britain (and Wales's) best.Mustering some of the most electrically-charged pianissimo tone we’ve heard this season Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Not all geese are swans, and not all Handel oratorios are like Messiah – storyless, spiritual, monumental sequences of reflective arias and choruses. By definition, though, they aren’t operas either, and it’s always a calculated risk to put them on the stage, as Iford Arts are doing with Susanna, a quasi-oratorio that Christopher Hogwood has described as “a pastoral opera verging on the comic”.The production’s director, Pia Furtado, would probably question that description. Iford Manor, near Bath, does, it’s true, have a pastoral touch. One looks out from Harold Peto’s wonderful semi-formal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from the exotic neverlands of Illyria and Bohemia, wander deep into Asia, set foot as far south as Africa, trespass up to the chilly north of Scandinavia and Scotland, and even make reference to Muscovy. And of course there are the Anthropophagi (wherever they're from). To map this world is something only the British Museum, that most capacious cabinet Read more ...