Reviews
Nick Hasted
The vertigo of lawlessness in Stalin’s Russia carries contemporary resonance in Sergei Loznitsa’s latest Soviet parable. As a Russian dictator invades a neighbour and erases his enemies and the US Supreme Court presides over an authoritarian rampage, paranoid purges and show trials no longer seem distant.Two Prosecutors is based on gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov’s novel, and set in 1937 during the Great Purge. We are in a provincial jail where starving old men burn letters petitioning Stalin for mercy. Fresh-faced local prosecutor Kornyev (Alexandr Kuznetsov) has somehow received a message Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Fear death by water,” says the fortune-teller in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There were a few moments in Natalie Abrahami’s new production of The Turn of the Screw when I worried that the fine musicianship and otherwise smart direction in evidence all around might founder irrevocably beneath the sodden weight of its core conceit. For long sections, especially in the second act, the singers stand or splash around a waterlogged stage. Yes, the fatal lake of Bly that so attracts little Flora in Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera (as in Henry James’s incomparably unsettling novella of 1898) Read more ...
David Nice
Was it a risk to attend a third Irish Baroque Orchestra Matthew Passion in as many years, given that previous indelible interpretations had come from Helen Charlston, Hugh Cutting and Nick Pritchard? Not really, because the shaping hand of Peter Whelan, musicianship incarnate, was bound to give us the connected dramatic arc in Bach's greatest of masterpieces as usual. And as ever he had several equals among the instrumental and vocal soloists.The revelation this year was the Christus of Frederick Long (pictured above on the right), supported by hyper-expressive work from the strings of Read more ...
Body & Soul, English National Ballet, Sadler's Wells review - a surefire hit and an absolute plonker
Jenny Gilbert
If it were true, as Timothée Chalamet has said, that ballet as an art form has become a museum, the job of running a national ballet company would be easy. Ballet never ceases to evolve, and to prove the point I’d be happy to offer the actor my plus-one on any night of his choosing, if only he’d return my calls.English National Ballet has been as front-footed as any in the business of supporting new work, new talents, new directions. This takes an appetite for risk and above all money. After seeing the company’s latest double bill, which included a world premiere by an untried choreographer, Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Tom Misch’s Full Circle is an easy, pleasant listen, but it tends to drift by without leaving much of a lasting impression. He leans into a softer, more reflective sound throughout, which suits his style, though it also makes the album feel a little too safe and one-paced.Tracks like “Red Moon” and “Slow Tonight” highlight what works best. “Slow Tonight” carries a relaxed, unhurried groove, with clean guitar lines and carefully layered instrumentation. The production across the album is consistently strong, with everything sounding polished and well-balanced. It is smooth and cohesive, and Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Years have passed since the early days of Gorillaz, when the real musicians behind the cartoon band remained hidden from view onstage. Yet some things never change, and while there was plenty of cheering for the arrival of Damon Albarn onstage, it was dwarfed by the roars for the first appearances of 2-D, Murdock, Russel and Noodle on giant video screens overlooking the stage.Those cheers came from a wildly diverse crowd, from kids with their parents to Britpop stalwarts who have presumably followed Albarn ever since. Perhaps some of the younger fans were drawn by the anime style of the band Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Tamerlano, tyrannical Emperor of the Tartars, is a burger-munching boor with a golf-habit, a bulbous belly and a crashing disdain for other people’s sensitivities. In Orpha Phelan’s dynamic, gleefully idiosyncratic production of Handel’s 1724 opera, Trump’s shadow looms large, as Tamerlano tries to force Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, to haggle for his freedom by offering up his daughter, Asteria, for Tamerlano’s sexual delight.The opera is one of many that Handel wrote as part of London’s craze for the Italian opera seria form – which featured multiple arias for its virtuoso singers – and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright David Hare is on a West End roll. Not only is his new play, Grace Pervades, about super thespians Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, making its way from Bath’s Theatre Royal to the Theatre Royal Haymarket next month, but his 1976 play with songs, Teeth ’N’ Smiles, now arrives at the Duke of York’s. Both are star-laden accounts of performance, with Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison as the Victorians, and Rebecca Lucy Taylor as Maggie the 1970s rocker. Also known as Self Esteem, she’s an Ivor-Novello Award winner last seen as Sally Bowles in Cabaret a couple of years ago. She also Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards does what it says on the tin. We watch the fêted newsreader from initial online contact with a 17-year-old from Cardiff - called “Ryan Davies“ here - to his arrest three years later, his sense of omnipotence shattered. Edwards’s family are noises off, and his work is represented by one BBC producer; only Ryan’s life is explored in any depth.This partial view is understandable given that Mark Burt’s screenplay is based on exclusive chats with the real Ryan, his family and friends, but not on material provided by Edwards and his family. ( Read more ...
David Nice
Are Seán O'Casey's Dublin plays good for theatre today, or just for the history of Irish drama? My limited recent experience makes it hard to be sure: Juno and the Paycock in London was a liberty-taking mess, and when everyone in a large cast needs to be top-notch - as they are, for instance, in the new production of Gorky's Summerfolk at the National Theatre - any weak performances in The Plough and the Stars scotch O'Casey's experimental ambition as he drops characters for whole acts, introduces others and takes us in unexpected directions, from late 1915 to the Easter Uprising of 1916. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Phil Ellis has been plying his trade for a while and is an established performer at the Edinburgh Fringe, where he has won awards – including the Edinburgh Comedy Award Panel Prize in 2014. And now happily he has come to a wider audience through his appearance on series 20 of Taskmaster.He makes a wry reference to the Channel 4 show during his mock bigging-up introduction by DJ sidekick (played by comic Tom Short) – who points out “loser” Ellis didn’t win. It’s typical of the self-mockery in Bath Mat, his touring show which I saw at the Leicester Square Theatre, in which Ellis paints a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rory Carroll’s previous book, Killing Thatcher, was terrific, and widely praised. It followed the IRA plot to murder the Prime Minister in 1984 and the subsequent police manhunt, telling the story with a journalistic degree of research and a novelistic eye for pacing and drama. For his follow-up Carroll’s gone back further into history to tell the story of the inciting event that ultimately led, along a winding path, to the Brighton bombing: the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA is, in a different way, as gripping as its Read more ...