Reviews
Kieron Tyler
A giant arm sweeps across the rapt audience. The newly anointed onlookers all wear the same, white-framed, glasses. A chant is heard:“We are the robots.” Those congregating in the over-sized shoebox of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall could be at a cult meeting. In gathering to pay respect, the audience share more than a passion for Kraftwerk. They also all wear the same 3D glasses. Performing their 1978 album The Man Machine in full, Kraftwerk restate the uncertainty of the natural order. Whether prophetic or not, their message still resonates.Introducing The Man Machine before its release to the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When's the last time you encountered a play with a hissable anti-hero and a young heroine who radiates charity, decency, and all things good? Those polarities are on full-throttle view in The Stepmother, the all-but-unknown Githa Sowerby play from 1924 that makes up in its vigorous appeal to the jugular what it may lack in dimension and subtlety (Chekhov this ain't.) And if the opening night is any gauge, Sowerby's tale of a young wife and her unctuous, much older rapscallion of a husband has a demonstrable capacity for evoking responses from the crowd. Panto season aside, I haven't Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A lot has happened since uncompromising French cop drama Spiral was last on our TV screens in May 2011. More of continental Europe has arrived. Attention has shifted northwards to Denmark for The Killing and Borgen. Sweden’s Wallander and Sebastian Bergman were never far. The Bridge closed the gap between both countries. French contender Braquo threw down the gauntlet too, but it was never going to steal Spiral’s thunder as it was just too cartoony, too brutal to clench to your bosom. Can the return of Spiral, its flawed heroine Captain Laure Berthaud and her scruffbag chic raise the flag Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Who’s That Man – A Tribute to Conny PlankThe list of acts Konrad Plank worked with is a Hollywood Walk of Fame of Krautrock. As an engineer or producer he was behind seminal albums by Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, La Düsseldorf and Kraftwerk. From outside Germany, Ultravox and Eurythmics came to him. Later-blooming locals like DAF sought him ought. Naturally, Brian Eno was around, both collaborating with Plank and bringing Devo to his studio to complete their first album. As the liner notes of this four-CD box set note, Plank turned U2 down, something Eno did not.Plank died Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What-ifs and might-have-beens are usually as pointless in music as in any other walk of life. Still one can’t help wondering how Alban Berg would have completed – and, no less interesting, revised – his opera Lulu, if he hadn’t been stung by some philistine insect in the summer of 1935 and died of the resulting septicaemia that Christmas Eve, with the last act unfinished and barely half-orchestrated.Berg’s earlier opera, Wozzeck, is taut and perfunctory, like the Büchner play it’s based on. Lulu, a setting of a pair of wordy plays by the proto-expressionist Frank Wedekind, is brilliant, Read more ...
james.woodall
Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural America to enable his New York employers Global to start deep drilling for massively lucrative natural gas.In a failing Pennsylvania small town Butler runs up against ancestral devotion to farming and an incomprehensible aversion to instant fortune, and into (of course) a pretty schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie De Witt). In her inherited home she’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC has suddenly noticed that there used to be these really brilliant things called "albums", and now they're going out of style and out of date. Hence they're holding an Albums Season in all media (Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown, Steve Wright's Album Factoids, Johnny Walker's Long Players and many, many more). The rest of the planet has been living with the digital revolution in music for years, or even decades, so this late, lumbering response feels rather quaint. It's as if the Death of the Album can only occur when the Corporation says so, rather like pop music didn't Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Two very different Antipodeans are performing in London over the weekend. Having seen Nick Cave more times than you can shake a didgeridoo at, the time has come for this reviewer to scrutinise Rolf Harris – pop star, painter of the Queen, sentimental presenter of cuddly animal shows. When the spritely 82-year-old appeared to tumultuous applause I suddenly recalled that I had seen Harris on this very stage in 1999 alongside Cave, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries in a nightmarishly bizarre Meltdown gig. It was easy to forget his contribution. That night Rolf was somewhat overshadowed by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s nothing novel about novel-adaptations on stage. We’ve seen every classic from Pride and Prejudice to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woman in White (and The Woman in Black) get the full theatrical treatment, and I’m not sure any have ended up the better for it. The power of a tale is in the telling, and unmoored from the delicate narrative handling of an Austen or a Dickens things can go horribly awry. And so it is with the West End’s latest – a touring production of Dickens’ Great Expectations that has stumbled mistakenly onto The Strand and is doing its best to brazen it out.Jo Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Poor, poor Isaac Clarke. Life has been tough for the unluckiest space engineer in the history of space engineering; not only has his girlfriend dumped him and got herself lost trying to track down the origin of the markers, but the insane cult of Unitology is attempting to blow him to smithereens. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the last of the Earthgov forces has dragged him at gunpoint to follow in his ex’s footsteps to a mysterious snowball planet called Tau Voltanis.It’s just another day at the office for our greying protagonist in this brilliant, but nevertheless flawed third instalment of Read more ...
Chris Mugan
“Tschernobyl… Harrisburg... Sellafield… Fukushima” reads the display above the four figures standing impassively below like toys, suddenly turning these harbingers of the computer age into proselytisers for an anti-nuclear energy policy.Kraftwerk’s reinvention as agitpop polemicists, if only for Radio-Activity, is just one surprise in a two-hour set that cements their place as a seminal cultural force whose key works reward close reappraisal. It is night two of The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, their typically thorough concerts series that sees them play eight albums over successive nights. If Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A colourful confection which is certain to satisfy both the young and young at heart - and above all, gamers - Wreck-It Ralph is the conceptually fabulous, aesthetically various tale of a brick-brandishing brute who longs to be a hero. The cinematic debut of TV director Rich Moore (Futurama/The Simpsons), it features the voice talent of John C Reilly and Sarah Silverman and boasts not just a third dimension but a meticulously constructed universe.Continuing US animation's recent trend of aligning us with evildoers (see Megamind and Despicable Me - the latter is returning for a sequel this Read more ...