Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Neil Forsyth earned kudos a-plenty with his two BBC One series of The Gold, a dramatisation of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery and its aftermath. Now he’s stepped aboard the good ship Netflix for this story of heroin-pushing gangs in London and Liverpool, set in the dying days of the Thatcher government at the turn of the Nineties.Again the story is rooted in fact, and explores how a group of fairly lowly customs officers were recruited to infiltrate and destroy a multi-million pound heroin racket that was wreaking havoc with both poor kids in Northern housing estates as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Maybe because we are aware now of too many cases of a paranoid schizophrenic suddenly unleashing violence on an innocent stranger, the teenager under treatment in Peter Schaffer’s 1973 play, who has blinded six horses, is no longer a character we feel that conflicted about.Unlike Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens), the psychiatrist whose encounter with just such a lad upends his thinking about almost everything, especially his own motives for pursuing his career. While Alan (Noah Valentine) struggles with his desire for someone to inspire his life and settles on the divine presence he senses in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Wanda Sykes is a comic, actress and writer who has written for Chris Rock and appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Good Fight and, more latterly, Netflix series The Upshaws. But standup fans know her for her on-the-money political humour, and in this Netflix special she doesn’t disappoint.Sykes opens Legacy by reminiscing about her time at Hampton University in Virginia. Things have improved since she studied there, she says, pointing to the spacious auditorium she is performing in, new sports facilities, more cafeterias. In her day, the only dining option was, she says drily, “gravy, Read more ...
David Nice
Bellini's most consistently inspired opera, director Orpha Phelan tells us, has been set on a pedestal. Well, a pedestal would have been good for the titular Druid high priestess to deliver her celebrated invocation, a moon, perhaps some trees for the sacred wood, a chorus standing still in a semicircle. Traditional? Yes, but so is the shallow window-dressing for a rather interesting love-triangle. Though there's a splendid bellicose chorus, taken at a terrific lick here, Phelan goes in hard on the war aspect by setting the whole thing in a ruined church, post-apocalypse (she writes), with Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Talking about the demographic of audiences can put one on tricky ground. I once, for example, got into trouble for pointing out that Autechre’s crowd was 80-plus per cent middle aged white men. But really, the audience makes a show in so many ways, and that is especially the case when it comes to Mitsuki Laycock aka Mitski. Going into the Albert Hall, it was impossible to ignore the fact that it was packed overwhelmingly with girls and young women of various distinctly outsider-ish demeanours. From deliberately low-key baggy and tousled get-up through to extreme cosplay in East Asian styles ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape had its world premiere in 1958, with Patrick Magee, at the Royal Court. That same venue happens to be the site of Gary Oldman's last stage appearance in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money in 1987 – which I saw back in the day. So it's a genuine occasion to welcome both the play and its current performer back to this address as part of a heavy-hitting lineup of work across the year to celebrate the Court's 70th year. Devotees of this past and present powerhouse of a venue will surely recall Harold Pinter nearly 20 years ago delivering a now-canonical monologue in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Really Into Somethin' - Brit Girl Sounds and Styles 1962-1970 is an explicitly titled 89-track, three-CD clamshell box set. Take one of its terrific tracks at random: Adrienne Poster’s “The Way You do the Things You do.” A February 1965 B-side, it’s a cover version of the Temptations’ US hit. Recognisably a British production it, at this remove, sounds like a UK chart certainty. There had, though, already been a British adaptation issued a month earlier by Elkie Brooks, hence the B-side status for Poster’s version. Neither single was a best seller.
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Adam Sweeting
Melbourne’s petite popstrel Kylie Minogue zoomed to superstardom in the late Eighties, with her celebrity from Aussie TV soap Neighbours helping to boost her spectacular recording career under the manipulative auspices of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory. Apocryphally, her debut UK Number One hit "I Should Be So Lucky" was knocked together in a brisk 40 minutes, though, interviewed here in director Michael Harte's compelling three-part documentary, Pete Waterman insists it took all of two hours.Suddenly Kylie was a pop phenomenon, banging out chartbusters as easily as some people Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Literally the first masterpiece of the 20th century (premiered on 14 January 1900), Tosca has had to wait until the second quarter of the 21st to arrive on the Glyndebourne stage. That delay tells you much about Glyndebourne, and about the lingering odour of distaste and even revulsion that for a long time hung in polite operatic circles around Puccini’s “shabby little shocker”.This political melodrama makes its gorgeous tunes shine against a gruesome backdrop of power, pain and fear. Director Ted Huffman (on his Glyndebourne debut) must contend both with audience expectations about a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Former Royal Ballet principal Federico Bonelli has brought his Northern Ballet company south in the latest of its trademark narrative ballets. His dancers are a huge credit to him, but I wish they were appearing in a more challenging piece.The television adaptation of Anne Lister’s story put her firmly on the map as an early sighting of an English lesbian. Her sexual preferences, unlike male homosexuality, weren’t technically illegal but were still shocking to the politer parts of Victorian society, Those who saw the two TV series may find this stage version a tad tame, though at least they Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It began with a Gothic funeral procession. A drum beat ominously as a line of figures with shabby black suits, whitened faces, and jagged mascara around hollow staring eyes walked solemnly through the audience. We were sat in the dry dock of the Cutty Sark, dominated by the historic ship’s elegant copper-clad hull suspended three metres in the air, a permanent reminder that this would end with Aeneas’s departure across the sea. Ahead of us, the museum’s cluster of ship figureheads – including Disraeli and Elizabeth Fry – formed a simultaneously colourful and sinister backdrop to the drama Read more ...
David Nice
So polished and passionate are the 11 world-class players of Ensemble 360, pioneering music in the round in Sheffield and elsewhere for the past 21 years, that you'd be grateful enough to hear them in wall-to-wall standard fare. But the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival has been about so much more, featuring special curator-performers - pianist Kathryn Stott and cellist Steven Isserlis in previous festivals I was fortunate to attend, this year soprano Claire Booth - and working with top-class folk from other disciplines. This year's triple bill of Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman and the two Read more ...