Reviews
David Nice
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth.Britten always demanded the highest standards of artists he could trust (and, as movingly described in a programme article by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Shanghai director Fei Mu’s final film Spring in a Small Town appeared at the end of an era, coming out in 1948, a year before revolution engulfed China. The subsequent upheaval saw the director branded a “rightist”, or reactionary (he fled to Hong Kong. where he died three years later, aged only 45), and Spring… was shelved for almost three decades, only returned to audiences when a new print was made at the beginning of the Eighties. You can understand why the director’s emphasis on the intimacy of private worlds, and sense of a society looking backwards rather than forwards, didn’t exactly Read more ...
Naima Khan
If you've been rolling your eyes at the rash of articles hailing London's ever-increasing number of dry bars, allow writer-director Ché Walker to convince you of their amatory relevance. In his new musical drama, smooth-talker Klook and hard nut Vinette fall for one another over a long tall glass of carrot juice, with just the right kick of ginger. The Park Theatre's 90-seat studio space here gives us two sexy strangers who meet randomly in the grimy health club where Klook works, only to find that the two are craving a metaphorical detox. Walker, drawn once more into the American noir Read more ...
geoff brown
Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. In her case the things that came were the complete tracks of her Deutsche Grammophon CD Behind the Lines: songs from around Europe and America about war and the pity Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What a difference a change of cast can make to a show. On Wednesday night I saw Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta as the titular lovers in English National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall (see below for that review). Last night it was the turn of ENB’s other Royal Ballet emigrée, Alina Cojocaru, and guest star Friedemann Vogel of Stuttgart Ballet.Rojo and Acosta impressed me with their star power, and the intensity of their partnership, but left me feeling curiously un-tragic. Cojocaru and Vogel, on the other hand, had me spellbound like it was the first time I’d ever seen the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gary Lineker has been honing his marketing schtick for several decades now, selling us a spud-based product that promises to make us feel great, only to fill us with self-loathing as soon as it’s finished. Yes, the England football team, seemingly made of potato, slickly packaged, but ultimately unsatisfying and undoubtedly bad for your health. (The crisps, I hear, are much healthier than they used to be.)Of course we lost. We lost to Italy in the European Championships in 2012, and haven’t beaten the Azzurri in the World Cup since 1977. They’ve won it four times, most recently in 2006, when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage, DefianceAfter a few notes of barbed-wire, bent-string guitar, a descending riff kicks in. It’s a relative of the uptempo version of “Hey Joe”. The voice starts. It’s high-pitched, as if Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had only Love’s Arthur Lee and The 13th Floor Elevator’s Roky Erickson as an influence. The lyrics are hard to make out but touch on mean days and a girl who turns the singer cold. He might as well be dead and in a graveyard. The momentum is tempered by a break borrowed from The Elevators' “You’re Gonna Miss me”. The production is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Sam Walters, Britain's longest-serving artistic director of a theatre (43 years!), looks to the past as well as the future with his Orange Tree swansong. This varied festival features nine plays and six world premieres across two programmes, all of them staged by returning graduates of the Richmond venue's trainee director scheme. The diligent Programme One viewer will spot a number of recurring subjects, including science teachers and astrophysicists, the resurfacing in adulthood of childhood dynamics, and constant grappling with faith and mortality.The thematic throughline lends the evening Read more ...
Florence Hallett
At the risk of sounding crass, I can’t help feeling that had Winifred Nicholson painted fewer flowers she might be better represented in the annals of art history. Of course, being a woman hasn’t helped, but as a woman flower painter she was ever destined for the footnotes. As is often the way with female artists, Winifred was highly regarded in her lifetime, and at the outset of her career she outsold her husband Ben Nicholson, whose reputation, posthumously, has almost entirely eclipsed her own.Next to the white reliefs and austere abstract paintings that have secured her husband's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The practical considerations and limitations of choosing a work for a student showcase can lead to some wonderfully original programming. It doesn’t get much more original than a pairing of Thomas Arne’s ballad opera The Cooper with Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista, currently being staged by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.The new Milton Court Theatre is the natural home for something like the Arne – an intimate, close-quarters space where you can see your neighbours’ reactions as well as the action on stage. Which makes it all the more odd that the work’s broad comedy never Read more ...
Simon Munk
A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.As a ghost, of course, you no longer have access to guns Read more ...
geoff brown
Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused it with Handel, and a swig or two of Purcell, and just got to work. Latterly he spent far too much time setting toadying odes for Britain’s Hanoverian kings; no chance for revolution there. But “Gifted Conservatives”, unlike “Gamechangers”, wouldn’t today be an enticing name for a concert season’s thematic link. So there he was, Boyce the Read more ...