Reviews
Caroline Crampton
In creating Mr Burns, Anne Washburn was trying to answer a question overlooked by most purveyors of dystopian fictions: what would happen to pop culture after an apocalypse? The physical and emotional challenges of life after civilisation have been endlessly explored, but very little attention has been paid to the fate of the ever-evolving collection of stories that we carry inside our heads.As its title hints, this play deals with one particular set of stories: plots from The Simpsons, Matt Groening's landmark animated sitcom about a dysfunctional American family, which first aired in 1987. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Karen Gillan’s first Hollywood leading role finds her in the surely unusual position of not liking what she sees in the mirror. After five years as Doctor Who’s regularly killed and resurrected companion Amy Pond, life doesn’t get any easier for the now LA-based actress in this low-budget horror, as her character Kaylie Russell tries to outwit the malevolent mirror which caused her parents' death a decade earlier.Director Mike Flanagan’s elaboration of his 2005 short of the same name tips one wink to Who fans, when statues seem to move in the mirror, much like the Stone Angels who haunted Amy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.Tracking down, and ensuring the cooperation of the participants for Dogs… looked like it proved more challenging. No surprise when Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some days, I feel very sorry for playwrights, especially those that become notorious through no fault of their own. If their most famous play causes enough controversy, it can take decades before people forget it. So now, 10 years since Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s early play, Behtzi (Dishonour) caused violent protests at the Birmingham Rep because of its depiction of a rape in a Sikh temple, I can’t think of any other way of starting this review of her latest without mentioning it.Khandan (which means family) is a co-production between the Royal Court and Birmingham Rep (where the play premiered Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Eventim (Hammersmith) Apollo, where Pat Metheny’s Unity Group last night gave a spellbinding, if sometimes baffling, performance, has hosted a goodly range of gigs in its time. Few of these can have offered such diversity within a single evening. Piece after piece left last night’s audience whooping with exhilaration, though Metheny’s fondness for mechanical innovation briefly threatened the audience’s otherwise adoring reception.Metheny opened with a solo on his 42-string Pikasso guitar, a Hydra-headed invention with a very delicate harp-like upper register. Watching him grapple in the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sadly the battle to shape stories from a female perspective, or even to tell stories about women is far from over. The Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University recently found that women represented only 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2013. If we look closer to home the most recent BFI statistics put the percentage of female directors working in the UK at just 8 percent (that's based on films released in the UK in 2012) - meaning this is even rarer than you'd think. So for a film to be directed by one woman and to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two knotted horrors stained West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. Three 8-year-old boys, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore, went cycling on a sunny spring afternoon. Their torn, bruised and in Byers’ case castrated bodies were dragged from a stream the next day. Three local teenage boys, black-garbed outsiders Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., were then tried for the crimes with a carelessness, incompetence and prejudice which seemed actively malicious. This “West Memphis Three” sacrificed 18 years in jail, as authorities who had in some cases risen to power Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Brian Friel’s affinity with Russian writers, notably Chekhov and Turgenev, is central to his work, the playwright seeing similarities between their tragi-comic characters, hanging onto “old certainties” despite knowing in their hearts that their time is up, and people of his own generation in Ireland. The correspondences go beyond theme, of course; he’s not known as the Irish Chekhov for nothing.Yet this production of Friel’s 1987 play Fathers and Sons, adapted from Turgenev’s novel, doesn’t produce the frisson one might expect. It’s elegantly mounted and entertaining; but considering the Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
How delicious that Garsington Opera has turned to Offenbach. The main impetus for this cheering development, taken up by Artistic Director Douglas Boyd, is conductor David Parry, who both translates (extremely well) and wields the baton.Parry was recently legated a set of Offenbach scores gathered by the late Patric Schmid, father of Opera Rara, for a planned recording project spanning extracts from many of the French composer’s lesser-known operettas. Could this open up the prospect of numerous rarities to come? Something to equal Leonard Ingrams’ teasing out of Haydn operas, then rarer Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I agreed with some reluctance to review British Folk Art, since I anticipated an overdose of quaint charm, naive whimsy and endearing eccentricity. You know the kind of thing – fire screens embroidered with overblown flowers and paintings of fat porkers, faithful dogs or stallions galloping like rocking horses.I needn’t have worried; some naive paintings are included along with embroidery samplers and patchwork quilts, but predictable items like these are offset by a stunning array of ship’s figureheads and trade signs including a cobbler’s boot (pictured below), a locksmith’s padlock and key Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Decidedly diverse in its musical offerings as ever, this year’s Field Day, which for the first time was spread over two days with the Pixies as a fitting finale, was gifted with glorious sunshine and a chipper ambience. Fresh ferocious voices breaking out and established names reaching back to their roots made for a harmonious mix of boldness and greatness.Thurston Moore’s exceptionally tight guitar skills and sparse melancholy lyrics gently weaved across the sunny afternoon breeze with the sublime sound similar to that of early Sonic Youth delivering a delightful wave of nostalgia. Meanwhile Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Before the Vikings came to Britain there was no whaling, though coastal-dwellers would avail themselves of any beached strays by chopping them up for their meat and oil. It was the bellicose Norsemen who imported the notion of actively pursuing the creatures, which is how the pilot whale hunt became a tradition in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. A line of boats would drive the whales into the shallows, where they were slaughtered by the islanders.It was the shape of all manner of hideous things to come, and it wasn't easy to sit through this first part of Adam Nicolson's history of whaling Read more ...