Reviews
Robert Beale
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen 20 years ago, is still one of the jewels in Opera North’s treasury. It was revived in 2013 for their “Festival of Britten”, and now is back with a fresh top music team and a cast of (mainly) young British singers, several in company debuts, which bodes extremely well for them and for us. Chief of this new generation is John Findon in the title role. I admired Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’ quality as Grimes in the original and the first revival, but Findon’s performance equals and in some respects excels it.The revival is co-directed by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bart Layton’s class-conscious pulp fiction gives Chris Hemsworth his most convincing lead role since Thor as Mike Davis, an LA jewel thief on one last job while tentatively facing his hollow life. An all-star cast including Marvel compadre Mark Ruffalo, pictured bottom right, and Halle Berry happily sink into character parts to give the familiar heist set-up flesh and bone.Mike’s ice cool hijacking of high-end diamonds along LA's 101 freeway almost gets him a bullet right at the start. His empty, expensive apartment, glum servicing by a prostitute and hand-wringing discomfort on an actual Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Visual artists gave up on titles long ago, resorting to neutral labels such as Untitled. Choreographers still feel bound to tag their works descriptively, which can be a challenge if the dance is about everything or nothing. The Irish director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan found a neat solution in MÁM , the 80-minute piece he made when he first arrived in West Kerry in 2019, choosing an Irish word that means so many things, and so many different things, that as a title it can only suggest everything and nothing all at once. A mountain pass, a burden or obligation, a handful of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would you want to marry a spy? After watching Betrayal, probably not.Writer David Eldridge has used the paradigm of the secret world as a means of exploring relationships both personal and professional, and how one is liable to corrode and distort the other. A quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi is dropped in as a clue – “the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces.”The Persian link is apposite, since the story orbits around an Iranian plot to stage a terrorist outrage somewhere in the Manchester area. Our somewhat flawed protagonist is MI5 agent John Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2007, Pina Bausch was preparing her company’s latest “city piece”, this one based on a visit to Kolkotta. But she was also brewing up something special, a work for six of her long-serving women dancers, created separately from the city piece but out of the same set of questions.Even if Bausch hadn’t somehow sensed the need to do something for her female troupers while she could (she died suddenly in 2009), the piece is inherently like a memorial, a call for the dancers to be remembered. Indeed, they insist on it. These are regular self-exposers, anyway – a line of beauty queen contestants Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong is continuing to put his own stamp on landmark works of the mainstream repertory with the Hallé. This time it was Beethoven’s Third, "Eroica", Symphony. That’s not to say that his programmes are devoid of novelty for the orchestra’s Manchester audience. He’s made Unsuk Chin the “Featured Composer” for the present season, and her subito con forza, written as a tribute to Beethoven in 2020, represented her in this concert. It’s a piece of which the Hallé gave the UK premiere (in the BBC Proms of 2021, under Sir Mark Elder), but except for those listeners who attended its Read more ...
James Saynor
“We will sacrifice our souls for you!” yells out a class of kids in The President’s Cake, nominally addressing a leader hundreds of miles away – the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein. The slogan the children are forced to spew by their paranoid teachers is, on one level, mindless enough. On another, it goes to the heart of this exceedingly good movie: How much do you have to sell your soul in a dictatorship falling apart at the seams?Set in 1990, not long before the first Gulf War, the film follows frantic days in the life of nine-year-old Lamia, who lives in a one-room wicker house on a wicker Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Some 16 or so years ago, I recall hearing what sounded like fireworks from my hotel room in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. I was aware of the Russian-occupied, unrecognised state of Transnistria, but thought that it was very distant, It wasn’t – and I still think they were fireworks, but I can't be sure.In Tbilisi, I heard stories of Russian tanks lined up just 40 kms or so from the Georgian capital; in Yerevan, Armenia and Baku, Azerbaijan, I was told quiet understated cases for both countries’ longstanding claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. That crash course in the poitical turmoil of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Lincoln, you have not been a Monday night crowd, they can be a bit funny,“ says Suede frontman Brett Anderson just before then band exit the stage for the final time. “You’re more than just watchers, you got involved.”It’s doubly true. For multiple obvious reasons, Monday can be an underwhelming gig experience for both bands and audiences (I’ve come to almost resent it when bands I like hit town that day). But within this giant, red brick, converted 19th century steam engine shed, the capacity 1500 crowd respond fervently from the very start.It says something about Suede’s partial rejection Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An infamous international financier, with a contacts book that includes presidents and dictators, a dark dossier on everyone he’ll ever need to bribe or blackmail, and a cold, ruthless heart, spends a long night in downtown New York trying to save his business. And he’ll go to any lengths to do it, including pimping his own son. Terence Rattigan wrote Man and Boy in the Sixties and set it in the Thirties, his evil protagonist partly based on a crooked Swedish businessman finally undone by the Great Depression. But it screams of the here and now, of Robert Maxwell, Bernie Madoff and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Bayard Rustin is a fascinating but little-known figure in US history: a civil rights organiser who worked behind the scenes on both the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as campaigning for pacifism (he was on the British anti-nuclear Aldermaston March in 1958) and gay rights. He was also an accomplished singer and lutenist, and advocate for Elizabethan song repertoire. An unlikely but intriguing combination, and one that was at the heart of yesterday’s Night Shift concert by personnel from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Blues Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Emerald Fennell’s latest film begins with a sly joke. As the production company credits roll, the sound of distinctive creaking overlays them, increasing in frequency and intensity, and joined by male groans that reach a climax. She's at it again, we are being led to think, the gratuitous graphic sex.Well, yes and no. When she cuts to the visuals of the scene we have been hearing, it’s a raucous public hanging, where, as an excitable youth informs the crowd, the rope wasn’t properly placed to break the man’s neck and his slow suffocation has produced “a stiffie” instead. (Close-up of man’s Read more ...