Reviews
fisun.guner
They came, they saw, they conquered. It was the Sixties and London swung, while the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney dozed in a beery torpor. Clive James recalls the fizz of beer pumps as the dreary soundtrack of Aus, while Germaine Greer just wanted to escape to “a place of beauty”. She believed, she said, in the “great Australian ugliness”. No one mentioned the cultural cringe, at least not in the first part of Howard Jacobson’s two-part homage to his four brilliant Australians. The cringe, nonetheless, hovered in the air, unspoken, pervasive.Greer and James were joined by Barry Humphries Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When, before the great miners’ strike of 1984-85, Britain still had a coal industry, the miner was at the centre of a never-ending class war: you saw him either as an honest proletarian, in the vanguard of the struggle for better pay and conditions, or as a uppity worker, whose union held the country to ransom. Since the dismantling of the coal industry, an element of sentiment has entered the equation. Now, we miss the horny-handed sons of toil — and shed discreet tears when we watch Brassed Off.So Beth Steel’s new play, Wonderland, which looks at both the personal and political lives of a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Is this sheltered place the wicked world where things unspoken of have been?” The Governess’s question echoes through the careful suggestions and delicate temporal interweavings of Annilese Miskimmon’s The Turn of the Screw, twisting smiles into sordid suggestions, schoolrooms into places not of care but corruption.It takes a bold director to look at the evocative façade of Holland House – all crenellations and architectural ghosts – and then cover it up. Henry James’s Bly couldn’t find a more natural backdrop in any theatre in London, but Miskimmon turns resolutely away from this obvious Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite the profusion of slapstick jappery, explosions, a whimsical veneer and cartoonish portrayals of its characters, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is not a film aimed at children. The Swedish blockbuster also includes castration, explicit violence, death by being locked in a freezer and near-the-knuckle racial categorisation. Balancing the picaresque and the macabre, the film ends up as neither one nor the other, or a harmonious hybrid. Although intermittently funny, it is not the sum of its parts.The 100-Year-Old Man (Hundraåringen som klev ut Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In 40 years’ time, when some suit at the BBC is searching the archives for some suitable footage to illustrate women in music in the early 21st century, will he pull out an image of Miley Cyrus or Rihanna wrapped in fishnets and bondage tape? I ask because it seems as though the central question posed by this women-in-punk-themed edition of The Culture Show - namely, whether the spirit of the fearless femmes of the 1970s lives on today - must be answered not by the many successors to the punk, riot grrrl and grunge acts playing their way through underground venues all over the country, but by Read more ...
Katie Colombus
No one could accuse Nederlands Danse Theater choreographers Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot for thinking inside of the box. And yet that's exactly where they've placed their dancers in the opening piece, Sehnsucht, of this impressive Sadler's Wells program.A couple - Medhi Walerski and Parvaneh Sharafali - dance together, by turns tender and embracing or pained and wistful. As their relationship plays out, so the world spins madly on, which sees the rooms tilting and slowly rotating so that up becomes down. The dancers slide gracefully around the walls, hang off window ledges, sit on chairs Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Women everywhere may start cutting loose in their kitchens after seeing Goddess, a sweet if slight Australian film that suggests a hybrid of Mamma Mia! and Shirley Valentine. Adapted (and greatly expanded) from a solo play written and performed by co-screenwriter Joanna Weinberg, the film's terrain is sure to hit many distaff moviegoers where they live, whether or not they find themselves displaced to Tasmania with a former boyband star (in this case, Ronan Keating) as their often-absent husband. At times too peppy for its own good, the film's abiding virtue is the first leading role onscreen Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The National Theatre delayed the opening of this play about newspapers for two weeks as it waited for the results of the phone-hacking trial. Is this what a tabloid would call “legal health and safety gone mad” – or what a broadsheet would characterise as “a sensible precaution”? Either way, in the wake of last week’s verdict on former News of the Screws editor Andy Coulson, who was found guilty of phone hacking, Richard Bean’s new play is certainly timely. And it stars the charismatic Billie Piper, who can make a legal dictionary sound interesting.Piper plays Paige Britain (geddit?), Read more ...
Russ Coffey
First there was Hyde Park Calling, then it was Hard Rock Calling and now, re-located in Clapham, it’s just the Calling Festival (presumably the organisers thought Clapham Common Calling carried too many connotations). The venue may have changed but last weekend was, pretty much, business as usual - a couple of stages, watery beer and a two-day smorgasboard of pop and rock. This year, though, all the pop was on day two. Saturday was for real rock.The first day's early-afternoon acts were young guns, who played in the pouring rain to an intense rock-crowd. Midlands- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saturday commuters sprinting for the 17.33 to Ardrossan find themselves dodging an obstacle course of swing-dancing young couples, soundtracked by a pensionable trad jazz band. A shifting crowd of about 100 pause in their journeys at Glasgow Central station to enjoy Penman’s Jazzmen, skilful Scottish veterans comfortable with each other and the demands of this century-old New Orleans music.Four days into 2014’s Glasgow Jazz Festival, its existence will have been news to many of the Glaswegians entertained by this enterprising street gig. More obviously momentous events are signposted around Read more ...
fisun.guner
Well, I’ll be damned if subscriptions don’t shoot up this summer. This lovingly made paean to the New York Review of Books, directed by Martin Scorsese and his long-time documentary collaborator David Tedeschi, was better than any advert, though I’d hesitate – but only briefly – to say that it was one long advert. 95 minutes probably makes it an advertorial feature, like those misleading pages you see in magazines and increasingly newspapers. Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. One’s attention was drawn early on to that famous masthead: the word “Books”, it was pointed out, is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The National Gallery has a range of personas it adopts for its exhibitions, and for this one, about colour, it has deployed the po-faced, teachy one. The pompous tone is because it’s not just about art this time, there’s science in it, which makes it extra serious. And we know it’s science, because the posters and promotional material look like the cover of a chemistry textbook, with bursts of colour against a black background reminiscent of an explosion in a laboratory, or something exciting in space. In fact, the gallery has adopted the science book look wholesale, with black walls Read more ...