Reviews
Matt Wolf
Change, we're often told, is the engine of drama: people end up somewhere markedly different from where they began. So the first thing to be said about Nick Payne's blistering new play The Unbelievers is that its concept is as brave as leading lady Nicola Walker's take-no-prisoners performance. Playing a mum who can't stop obsessing about the disappearance of her son (as who could given such a situation), Walker makes something ferocious out of human fixation, grabbing Payne's narrative by the throat and allowing Marianne Elliott's correspondingly unflinching production to strike boldly at Read more ...
David Nice
It was guaranteed: string masterpieces by Vaughan Williams, Britten and Elgar would be played and conducted at the very highest level by John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London.Would a rarity by Arthur Bliss and a slow movement from a Delius string quartet arranged by Eric Fenby match them? The otherworldly Delius did; the muscular Bliss, despite special pleading by John Wilson in an affable spoken introduction, sounded magnificent and was worth hearing, but not quite on the genius level. No matter; this was a vintage Wilson programme, and the mastery of him and his players was Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jean Genet’s 1947 play has been quite a clothes-horse over the years, at times a glamorous confection dressed by designers, and regularly shape-shifting and gender-fluid. Cards on the table: I have disliked most productions of it for this odd vacuity, which allows it to become unmoored so radically from its source, the real-life case of a mistress and her daughter murdered by their two maids.It pokes at you from the off with its sense of itself as an anti-play; it's more an arch ritual, there to provoke and mystify its audience, especially the average bourgeois. Its latest incarnation Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of this entertaining political drama is always welcome, though its soap-tinged mix of transatlantic politics and volatile personal relationships is beginning to look a little too genteel for our current age of ever-worsening crises.In the real world we have Trump on the rampage, the Middle East liable to blow at any moment and China surreptitiously taking over the world, but somehow The Diplomat is still fussing over the terrorist attack on a British aircraft carrier, HMS Courageous, that happened way back at the beginning of Season One. Delightfully, the show never stops believing Read more ...
Gilbert & George, 21st Century Pictures, Hayward Gallery review - brash, bright and not so beautiful
Sarah Kent
There was a time when Gilbert & George made provocative pictures that probed the body politic for sore points that others preferred to ignore. Trawling the streets of East London, where they’ve lived since the 1960s, the artist duo chronicled the poverty and squalor of their neighbourhood in large photographic panels that feature the angry, the debased and the destitute.
Scrawled on decaying walls, the racist, sexist and homophobic slogans they recorded on their wanderings, create an atmosphere of dread – of impending and actual violence. The streets were mean and, especially as gay men Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To hear Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason speaking live is to hear a woman who very much recognises that her lifelong mission to challenge the perception of who should play classical music is ongoing. Though she has given birth to seven children who have gone on to be stand out classical musicians, she knows that there are still those who deny them the recognition they deserve because of the colour of their skin.The complete failure of certain individuals to understand Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s statement last year that "Rule, Britannia!" at the Proms – with its references to slavery – might make people Read more ...
Justine Elias
Another day, another shooting: this is Florida, USA, where the "Stand Your Ground" self-defence law allows people to use lethal force when they perceive a threat to their lives. The idea may be shocking to Britons, but such laws have become prevalent in America, even though they may be providing cover for straight-up murder.In The Perfect Neighbor, which won the top documentary prize for director Geeta Gandhir at the Sundance Film Festival this year, a minor dispute turns deadly. The film unfolds through found footage, mostly through police body cam video and courtroom coverage, but this isn' Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bryony Kimmings’ new show – her first in five years – was created to celebrate the opening of Soho Walthamstow, the previously neglected Art Deco beauty that’s now one of London’s shiniest venues. She uses every bit of its vast stage to great effect and even manages to get a chunk of the audience on it for its witty epilogue, of which more later.In Bogwitch – part comedy, part theatre, part performance – Kimmings recounts a year in her life after she and her new partner moved out of London with their blended family to a rundown cottage in the sticks, where they will live off the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of La Bohème for Opera North is over 32 years old but still feels young. And for its audiences it still has the ability to capture – as the opera is designed to – the experience of youthful love and separation, its ecstasy and its heartbreak.It's set in the 1950s or early 1960s, rather than the 19th century. But in some respects it takes its cue from the stories that Puccini and his collaborators used as their source material, Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, and the format they created from them. What we see are literally scenes – tableaux – with Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Many orchestral concerts leaven two or three established classics with something new or unusual. The LSO reversed that formula at the Barbican last night, with three pieces written since 2000 offset by just one familiar item, Sibelius’s Third Symphony. The result was invigorating, challenging – and very enjoyable.The presiding artistic mind was that of Thomas Adès, featuring both as conductor and composer. His passion for the music he had chosen shone through, overcoming the rough-and-readiness of his baton technique, and his enthusiasm brought forth a range of sounds from the orchestra Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Guillermo del Toro strains every sinew to bring his dream film to life, steeping it in religious symbolism and the history of art, cannily restitching Mary Shelley’s narrative and aiming grandly high. He can’t sustain Frankenstein’s heartbeat over two-and-a-half hours which try to justify a lifetime’s devotion to the subject. There are, though, marvellous passages where the ages of reason and magic meet.We begin in Arctic wastes, where an icebound ship encounters broken Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his seemingly bestial Creature (Jacob Elordi). Each tells their tale. Young Victor ( Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Their new album may have been born out of a deep dive into Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic reimagining of the post-Manson killings’ atmosphere of late 1960’s Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. However, Solar Eye’s intro music as they took the stage at the Hare and Hounds this weekend wasn’t Charlie’s “Look at your Game, Girl” or “Cease to Exist” but something far more triumphant – the theme from Rocky.Still, these local boys are making good right at this moment, and clearly in a celebratory mood, with the recent release of their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! and a handful of Read more ...