Reviews
emma.simmonds
At some point during Non-Stop - a mostly serviceable though increasingly nuts peril-on-a-plane movie - I began to doubt that Liam Neeson had ever had a credible career. Recently we've seen him starring in assorted nonsense such as Battleship and Wrath of the Titans and if you go back a few years you'll recall him looking bored in The Phantom Menace. But what we've gotten particularly used to is Neeson as the middle-aged action man, the skull cruncher from the pretty hideous Taken movies. There might have been a time when we thought he was elevating such films with his presence, but I think Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hassan Ismail Konyi is not the first young man to see football as a meal ticket. The twist is that he has rather more dependents riding on his dream that most. Hassan has 26 sisters and 35 brothers. He comes from South Sudan, the youngest country on earth and one of the more benighted. But a young man can dream, and his dreams are given fuel by his national coach.“After two years in my control,” says Zoran Djordjević, “he will be in Liverpool Barcelona Manchester United”. Zoran, who doesn’t do modesty or commas, is the short fat bald Serb who has spent the past 30 years on football’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing WNO’s Manon Lescaut a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that its director, Mariusz Treliński, had devised the production in terms of Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, “and simply tyre-levered the Puccini into it.” QED. Here are the same railway station, the same trains flashing by, the same barman, the same slinky, raincoated – or less – Manons (plural), the same general air of transient sleaze. Boris Kudlička’s designs have changed in detail but not in essence. The one essential difference is that, whereas the idiom was completely unsuited to and effectively shipwrecked Puccini’s version Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The most ambitious musicals spring from the most unlikely sources – you need go no further than Stephen Sondheim to establish that – but turning those musicals from novelty into living, breathing, involving experiences requires very special talent. Back to Mr Sondheim. Everyone who writes in this medium owes him a huge debt of gratitude but some – like composer/lyricist Gwyneth Herbert, the fresh voice behind The A-Z of Mrs P – would seem to have evolved almost in spite of him, from another place altogether. What’s exciting about this show, for all its shortcomings, is the level of ambition Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There aren’t many understated films about cannibal clans. Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, the Mexican original on which this American remake is based, reeked of despair and depravity, in a tainted Mexico City where a family fed on the homeless. Director Jim Mickle has almost inevitably made a sleaker, less disturbing film. More surprising is just how slow a burn it is. We know something is wrong with the Parkers: mother Emma (Kassie De Paiva), who falls down and dies hawking up black blood in the first scene, stern, grieving patriarch Frank (Bill Sage), teenage daughters Rose (Julia Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have a slight sense of déjà vu about a stage production of The Full Monty. Wasn't it a Broadway hit at the turn of the millennium? Well yes it was, but that was an Americanised musical version of Simon Beaufoy's Oscar-nominated 1997 film; now his adaptation of the movie is in the West End after its acclaimed debut last year at Sheffield Crucible, and the setting is back in familiar territory.We're in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in the late 1980s, a time when it is suffering the full ravages of Thatcherism. The city's proud history of steel-making is all but gone and a group of four Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance finds the National Gallery in curiously reflective mood. Taking as its subject the gallery’s own mixed bag of German Renaissance paintings, the exhibition sets about explaining – and excusing – the inadequacies of its collection, suggesting that it simply reflects the disdain with which German painting was once regarded. Certainly, in 1824, when the gallery was founded, the collection mainly comprised Italian and Netherlandish art, and the only German artists admitted were those who could imitate the jolly rustic scenes of Adriaen van Ostade, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter” to her. When she had finished the novel, depicting Vita as an androgynous time-traveller, she wrote defensively: “It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible.”Molly Gromadzki as the alluring Sasha performs demanding aerobaticsWelcome to her world of topsy-turvydom, in which the eponymous hero changes sex, cross-dresses, transgresses barriers of gender, place and time. Along the way he/she derides Read more ...
David Nice
Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.You can Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In between the second series of Silk and this new one, Peter Moffat took time out to write his rural-misery-and-cannon-fodder dirge, The Village. Having off-roaded so far from his usual track, perhaps it's no wonder that his return to the world of wigs, hypocrisy and legal sophistry felt a fraction off the pace.Last time we were loitering with intent around the nooks and corridors of Shoe Lane Chambers, we were sucked into a dystopian vortex of corruption and venality where just about everybody seemed to be compromised or on the take. Not least the legal system itself, with the noble Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Bury Court Opera acquired a pearl of great price when it persuaded Simon Over, music director of the Southbank Sinfonia and the Parliament Choir, to bring his 2010 production of Dido and Aeneas from Anghiari in Tuscany to perform in the beautifully appointed restored old barn just west of Farnham in Hampshire. It proved the launch of an alluring undertaking. Rigoletto, Cenerentola and Onegin followed, plus a clutch of visiting productions, while Over provided leadership that showed in the assurance of his young players.This year it’s the turn of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. A stellar medley of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Brutalism brutal? Pugnacious? Uncouth? The name was coined by English academic and architecture writer Reynor Banham – more on him in a moment – as a play on the French béton brut (literally raw concrete) and the English “brute”, and hence was probably doomed from the start. Who, after all, can love an architectural style that sounds like it’s got all the grace of a troglodyte doing a plié before punching you in the face? The civic courtship of Brutalism in its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies (or the “long Sixties”, as Jonathan Meades prefers it) hit the skids long ago, and Read more ...