Reviews
Naima Khan
From the creators of the much-lauded The Oh F*ck Moment comes I Wish I Was Lonely, a participatory look at modern communication and the human psyche. Flouting the rules of mainstream theatre, this by turns poetic yet provocative piece encourages the audience to keep all mobile phones on (imagine!), to answer whatever calls may come through, and even to use Twitter and Facebook to our hearts' delight. And having provided our mobile numbers on a piece of card, we receive the number of an anonymous member of the audience in return. So begins a newly fragile, temporary connection to a stranger we Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“Goya!” I scribbled enthusiastically in the first moments of La Pepa. “Dos de Mayo! Art as witness to history!” Despite the clichéd use of flickering strobes and a stock “chaotic” soundtrack of shouts and crashes, this opening scene purporting to represent the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1812, known in Britain as the Peninsular Wars) reminded me of the Spanish painter’s testimonies in oil to the horror and grandeur of that war; as shafts of yellow side-light pierced the blackness, unknown arms were flung up in the pose of the Tres de Mayo's doomed revolutionary before a firing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title, The Great War in Portraits makes very plain its use of portraiture as a lens through which to view this earth-shattering conflict, but any anxieties about its handling of such a tricky approach are quickly assuaged.The exhibition begins with Jacob Epstein’s Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill, 1915-16 (pictured right), a sculpture that still shocks Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Beyoncé is a fascinating tangle of mixed messages. She stirs people up and, most especially, she confuses men. On the train back from the first concert of her six-night stand at the O2 a group of blokes who heard we’d been to see her rabidly objected. She was, they said, just “selling her pussy”, and selling it cheap. Ire roused, they became very heated. They were lashing out fiercely, apparently under threat, for Beyoncé’s career exists at the populist vanguard of contemporary sexual politics. She gets it wrong some of the time, as in the black’n’white Helmut Newton-esque softcore of her Read more ...
David Nice
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Because it doesn’t happen often in opera that all the elements combine for total musical theatre that stuns: in this case, two great voices – Rebecca Evans’s soprano and Iestyn Davies’s countertenor – at what sounds like the peak of their stylish careers, an orchestra under the exceptional Christian Curnyn totally fused with what’s happening on stage, and an ingenious set from Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For those who haven't seen it, the funny face of the title belongs to Audrey Hepburn. As preposterous as that seems for someone so iconically gorgeous and although when others fail to notice her beauty it seems insane, Hepburn was famously insecure, so when her character Jo Stockton says, "I have no illusions about my looks, I think my face is funny" it doesn't sound insincere.The ravishing, Technicolor-ed Funny Face sees an independent woman turned into a bride, an intellectual transformed into an obedient beauty. Hepburn plays Jo, an employee of a "sinister" Greenwich Village bookstore Read more ...
Andy Plaice
In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the tumbling hair, was rather good at narrowing his eyes and staring into space while we let our hot chocolate go cold waiting to discover not only who carried out one of those incredibly theatrical murders, but to see its baffling mechanism unpicked.And now he’s back for series five, doing rather nicely in marketing and with his days as a deviser of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few anniversaries have got off to such a strong start in our current culture as that of the outbreak of the First World War. This new play by Peter Gill, which opened last night, is original in that it focuses not on the start of the conflict, or on life in the trenches, but on the end of the war — and the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles. But does it draw connections between that time, so long ago, and life in this country today?Act One and Act Three take place in the drawing room of the Rawlinson home in Kent. The atmosphere is positively Edwardian Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Barbican brought two of the great originals of contemporary music together last night. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti are temperamentally very different, but complement one another wonderfully, in an inspired piece of programming. Both are stylistically polyglot, straddling contemporary classical technique as well as jazz and, in Gismonti’s case especially, a range of folk idioms. Like two paths taking different routes up a mountain, they have both reached peaks of remarkable musical achievement, but taken different routes, and offered different views along the way. Read more ...
Simon Munk
Dracula, the ultimate symbol of undead power, mystery and evil. As the anti-hero in this action-adventure sequel to the excellent Lords Of Shadow, you'd hope this would make for an epic adventure, or at least some toothsome plotting. Instead we get an enfeebled, old man as main character, a meandering, over-complex plot with ill-judged shock factor elements and far too many dull sections to plod through. It makes Twilight look like The Hunger or Near Dark in comparison.Dracula awakens from a long sleep weak and feeble in the modern world. In order to end his cursed immortality, a MacGuffin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to have rather too much of a frolicsome thing, consider by way of example The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a giddily self-conscious 1607 romp from Francis Beaumont that would be more fun if it were at least a full scene or two shorter. Following on from The Duchess of Malfi as the second proper production to occupy the newly built Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Eileen Atkins's sublime solo essay in Shakespeare came in between), Pestle proves that the candlelit venue can accommodate knockabout theatrics just as fully as it can sotto voce villainy.The problem lies not in the space Read more ...