Reviews
Caroline Crampton
In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our sheep", the sheep representing the actual subject under discussion. It also offers a way of looking at David Mamet's one-act play Squirrels, too, for no matter how far away their flights of imagination take them, the characters will always find their way back to their original theme, with a little help from an improbable animal – a squirrel, not a sheep, but you get the idea.The action concerns Arthur, a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The veteran South African jazzers Adam Glasser and Pinise Saul transformed the gleamingly elegant Crazy Coqs cabaret den into a throbbing township jazz club last night, with an exhilarating programme of original South African jazz, seasoned with standards and township folk. Joining forces with the percussionist Marcina Arnold, a relative newcomer to their ensembles, they roughed up this venue’s urbanity with unfamiliar fires of passion and yearning.As well as playing piano with a gallery of South African jazz greats, Glasser is noted for his work on the chromatic harmonica, and last night’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it feels as though modern music has lost its magic – that the more that's produced the more ordinary it seems. Last night, however, down the Bohemian end of one British seaside town, the crowd sat expecting something pretty special. They had good reason. These days 67-year-old Emmylou Harris, with her long silver hair not only looks Southern gothic but sounds it too.Harris is over to celebrate the reissue of 1995’s Wrecking Ball. The original was an alt-country landmark in which Emmylou swapped her trademark quavering harmonies for an ageless, spectral sound. U2/ Bob Dylan “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten, Weinberg: Violin Concertos Linus Roth, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Mihkel Kütson (Challenge Classics)“I am a pupil of Shostakovich. Although I have never had lessons from him, I count myself as his pupil, as his flesh and blood.” Mieczysław Weinberg's close, complex relationship with his senior mentor continues to affect how we perceive his own music. Which is maddeningly inconsistent, and the jury's still out as to whether he's one of the great Soviet composers. But, when Weinberg is on form he can be terrific, and this 1959 Violin Concerto is a magnificent beast. It Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, Hurrah, Hurrah", there should be celebration for him after battle. The Johnny of this story, Joe Bonham, an ordinary "Joe", got his gun alright, but there is no happy ending for him. Aged 20, one day in September 1918, he is saved from an exploding shell but reduced to a silent, faceless torso, lacking all four limbs and the ability to hear, see or speak. In the 120-seat Little studio, Johnny Got His Gun Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“We want to be the most creative and the most loved ballet company in this country,” Tamara Rojo told the audience in the Barbican Pit last night. “We want you to love us.” The director of English National Ballet knows a thing or two about gaining the love of audiences, something she has excelled at in her own dancing career, but it has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, over the 18 months she has been at ENB, to watch how skilfully she can work the same magic on a far larger stage. Under her leadership, ENB’s company atmosphere and public image now vibrate with passion, frankness, Read more ...
ronald.bergan
There is a very old joke about a Hollywood actor, waiting to hear whether he has landed a plum role in an upcoming production, who gets a call from his agent. "I’ve got some bad news for you," says the agent. "Your mother has just died." "Oh, thank goodness!" says the actor. "I thought you were going to tell me I didn’t get the part." That says everything there is to know about the cutthroat world of the movie business, something that takes David Cronenberg almost two hours to say in this redundant and pointless evisceration of contemporary Hollywood.The television soap opera plot - which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.In contrast, Hanna herself was never and isn't deferential. Her vital importance to cultural and rock history is set in stone as, for the former, she initiated the Nineties feminist musical groundswell riot grrrl and, for the latter, she sprayed the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” (a deodorant brand) on Read more ...
Simon Munk
Videogames aesthetics are often misleading. There are many examples of beautiful games that have no artistic merit, emotional heft or ludological interest. There are also many examples of ugly games that grip utterly. Of course, the ideal is both simultaneously – and Transistor almost does that.On visuals, its beautiful Steampunk setting is wonderfully realised. This, combined with exemplary character and narrative design, delicately draws you into a floating city and the story of Red and her sword/partner Transistor. She, silent fury and constant movement; he a disembodied voice revealing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's a bit of Gene Hunt revisited in Peter Bowker's new three-part drama. Philip Glenister returns to the Manchester stomping grounds he patrolled in Life on Mars, and he even drives an Audi (though it isn't Hunt's celebrated Quattro). But this time he's not a cop.It's 15 June 1996, the Euro 96 football championships are just swinging into action, and the Stone Roses and New Order are on the soundtrack. Glenister plays successful businessman Daniel Cotton, doing his best to patch up a poisonous family rift between his father Samuel (Bernard Hill, pictured below) and wayward, wastrel Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Any synopsis of Two Days, One Night is bound to make it sound like a worthy, sub-Loachian drama: A young mother, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), recently off work with depression, is made redundant from a small factory. In her absence, 14 of her 16 colleagues have voted to take their bonuses rather than let her keep her job. But she persuades her boss to host a second round of voting two days later, to allow her the weekend to persuade her fellow workers to support her.However, none of the above takes into account the brilliance of the Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, or the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The heat is on in Saigon, and 25 years after its world premiere, Cameron Mackintosh has just turned up the thermostat. Boublil and Schönberg's celebrated take on Puccini's Madam Butterfly has always been my favourite of their collaborations (though I retain an enthusiasm for the pre-revised score of Martin Guerre) and there are moments in Miss Saigon where, truth be told, they trump the Italian master of romantic melodrama at his own game.Maybe it's the ongoing proximity of America's disastrous involvement in the Vietnam war and the subsequent resonances of Iraq, but the show seems to pack Read more ...