Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
It is never a great sign when a local authority is forced to comment on a music festival. The opening night of the In The Park series of shows at Newcastle's Exhibition Park forced such a reaction from the city council, after claims of overcrowding to see headliner Lewis Capaldi perform, on a day of sweltering heat. Nothing amiss was found according to the council, and by this night, the final one in the series of shows, there were thankfully no issues to cause concern. Instead the sunshine was accompanied by a light breeze to create an atmosphere more suitable for picnics than rock Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival, long known for its explorations of some of the less well-known parts of the opera repertoire, this year features two of the best-loved, alongside its other fare.Its first two nights saw a new production of La Traviata (jointly with Norwich Theatre, to which it will go after the Derbyshire spa town’s summer festival is over), and a borrowed one from Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park of The Merry Widow (seen last year both north of the border and in London).The Verdi is a staging of which no good producing house would need to feel ashamed. BIF has sometimes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reviewing The Clash’s 27 October 1976 appearance at Birmingham’s Barbarella’s, UK music weekly Sounds detected a particular, unique, characteristic of the band. Jonh (sic) Ingham identified “a Clash trick of everything dropping out except for Mick Jones' guitar, dropping back in two bars later behind a thundering crack from Terry Chimes' baseball bat sized drumsticks.”The drop-out was a feature of dub, the form of studio-created reggae which emerged in the early Seventies. Music historian David Katz has pointed to “Ivan Itler the Conqueror,” a 1970 single side credited to Bunny Lee Allstars, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The man who made Interstellar, Tenet and Oppenheimer can hardly be accused of not thinking big. Now, with The Odyssey, he’s thinking epic. Clocking in at a whisker under three hours and peppered with bankable stars, Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s imperishable poem is a bold attempt to recreate the ancient world of the 12th Century BC, with its gods, monsters and all. And it's the first feature film to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras. Many early reviews have been ecstatic, hailing Nolan’s $250m-worth of movie for its thrillingness, boldness, majesticness and so forth, but Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton’s summer jamboree for opera lovers this year offers a brace of baroque works, written 90 years apart, with the character of sorceress as their common feature.Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula was one of the string of Italian operas created by him for London shortly after his arrival in Britain. First seen in 1715, it has four soloists only and the conventional unities of time and place – though early performances were apparently given with spectacular stage effects.The sorceress, Melissa, rules a magic island where two young men and one young woman are her captives. She loves Amadigi, he loves Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Dismemberment is a key motif in the writer-director Simon Stone’s The Oresteia. It reflects the treatment of two of the piece’s several dead bodies, as is hinted at when their killer is asked where he buried them. “Many places,” he replies coolly. And it’s what Stone himself has done with his ancient source material,As the play’s publicity materials announce, it is “after Aeschylus and others”. But the trilogy Aeschylus left us (actually, a tetralogy, according to a programme essay by an eminent classicist: a lost satyr play was the fourth part) is like a rock formation that’s only visible Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ana Mendieta’s work gives me the creeps. This is a deeply unfashionable view, so much so that I may well be cancelled for it. Mendieta is so highly regarded that The Guardian devoted a four-page feature to her while their art critic Jonathan Jones gave her Tate Modern exhibition a five-star review. For me the job of a critic is to be as honest as possible and, although I would love to like her work, it – or rather, the work for which she is most revered – makes me cringe. But more of that later.Having died in dubious circumstances at the horribly young age of 36, Mendieta has become a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Trump Arrangement Syndrome”, my propensity to see the world refracted through the lens of the omnipresent ogre’s cult, raised its head again. In watching a mad monarch, dementia tearing at their mind, insults raining down on those who fail to praise them, he loomed large in the consciousness yet again. How long will it be before we can look upon Lear and not see the orange man-child? Soon, I hope - but I doubt it.Finn den Hertog, listed as director and adapter, has a wonderful stage on which to work, a fine cast and, for only the eighth time in the 75-year history of Pitlochry Festival Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The regular scriptwriter for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, Efthimis Filippou, has worked with another director, Karim Aïnouz, on Rosebush Pruning. It’s a film that bills itself as “inspired by” Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 satire, Fists in the Pocket, but deals in the same kind of lurid surrealism as Lanthimos’s off-kilter yarns.This is a narrative that’s by turns enigmatic and unsubtle. Bellocchio’s starting point is there – the son of a large, dysfunctional family, in which one child is epileptic and one parent blind, sets about downsizing it – but in Filippou’s hands it’s become a cluttered story Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This week saw something of a landmark gig for Birmingham’s ever-exuberant folkies, Bonfire Radicals. New album, Spaghetti Junction was revealed to a home crowd; long-time violinist Sarah Farmer played her last show with the band; her replacement, Emily Dawe was introduced to a welcoming crowd; and at least one tune was performed for the last time and finally exorcised from their live set.Gigs in rooms above pubs aren’t necessarily a joyful experience when there’s a blistering heatwave going on. However, the Hare and Hounds had the presence of mind to install air conditioning some years ago Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A voice at the start of dancer Aakash Odedra’s performance speaks out of the darkness about the Sufi myth behind what we are going to see, one of a caged bulbul — a nightingale — yearning to be merged with the divine and singing for its freedom in ever more beautiful ways. In this, the voice says, the bulbul represents the artist’s quest for perfection, always refining his work until death brings a sense of freedom and transcendence.What follows is a simple yet extraordinary, lavish piece choreographed by Rani Khanam and performed to the music of Rushil Ranjan, played by the Manchester Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A febrile energy powers Timothy Sheader’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which arrives in the West End with an edgy vibe that powerfully conveys the idea of Jesus as a dangerous revolutionary. At the age of 56, the musical isn’t showing its age remotely, with its vigorous, unashamedly complex rhythms and persuasive interrogation of the Bible marking it as a resounding classic even for Lloyd Webber agnostics like this critic.You could argue that Eurovision star Sam Ryder was made for the role, a former carpenter with an impressive beard and a lion’s mane of hair, who after years of Read more ...