Reviews
Ismene Brown
Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going experience, for others an empty whimsy. It's a show of mime, clowning and coups de théâtre, stunningly conceived on the twin themes of snow and the gruelling Russian winters outdoors, where street cleaners live out their lives, vagrants of an outcast kind of peculiarity and optimistic imagination, where brooms and bins are constants in their lives, where Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben Miller exists in a cloud of brainy abstraction, convinced that his serial bungling failures are merely the prelude to roaring success.Yet, just as their own series offer nuggets of mini-genius lying around on a carpet of dross, so this new offering (penned by Simon Nye) sizzled with a potential which one despaired of them ever attaining. Miller plays Read more ...
alice.vincent
In a year when eyes turned to London for the riots, the budget cuts and the hacked phones, there seemed to be a fair amount of middle England portrayed by British creatives. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National retold 2006’s Ipswich murders as a darkly comical contemporary musical, with middle-aged gardening competitions and dull community-centre realism success. Tracey Emin’s retrospective, Love is What You Want brought Margate’s grey, salty waters to the South Bank through giant blankets and explosive short films. Later on in the year, Paddy Considine’s writing/ Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Living and working 150 miles from London, one either clutches at local straws or gets on a train. I’ve done both in 2011, as usual, but in a way the local is more stimulating, not because it’s better (ha!) but because there’s so much less of it. For instance, I got much more of a kick from Siegfried at Longborough in Gloucestershire than from anything at Bayreuth, where everything is in the directors’ favour and they dispense huge sums year in year out on bizarre allegorisations of Wagner’s dramas.Besides being a brilliant piece of music theatre, Weinberg’s Passenger at ENO was superbly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Without wanting to sound humbuggy, do we really need another Great Expectations? Let alone two. There’s yet another movie coming next year but breasting the tape first is a new three-parter from the BBC. Cinema last visited the story of Pip Pirrip in 1998 when Alfonso Cuarón transplanted the novel to present-day New York. On television Tony Marchant had a go a year later. Theatre was there even more recently with Declan Donnellan's staging for the RSC in 2005 and Watford Palace's Asian version earlier this year. And looming over them all there’s always David Lean’s still definitive adaptation Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It would always be a risk putting such a gossamer Christmas charmer as The Nutcracker into a gargantuan Mammonite cavern like the O2 Arena, where magic only counts if it rings loudly in the coffers - car park £25! programmes £10! As with the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet last June, Birmingham Royal Ballet have put up a cinema screen to enable thousands of viewers far away to catch what looks dolls-house-sized in real view. But where that other ballet is all about action and plot, this is a ballet about atmospheres and dreams, needing most delicate weaving into its setting.If you sit in a £ Read more ...
james.woodall
The Barbican has always led the way in London in international theatre programming. The year there ended on a high, with Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet from the Schaubühne laying down new markers for transgressive commitment. I was sceptical about it when I saw the Berlin première in 2008, and our own critic was not, commendably enough, in a mood to be fooled around with. Yet a production which stages, so stylistically, terror, insanity and loathing (all in Shakespeare) with six actors straining every sinew without entirely ridiculing the play has to be respected.From the Bard to a big blast: Read more ...
josh.spero
While I'm still learning to disentangle my mezzo from my Meistersinger, I enjoyed a lot of the opera on offer in London this year, especially at English National Opera. Parsifal was perfect and Rameau's Castor and Pollux, while probably a little too Germanic in direction with its dancing amputated legs and unerotic nudity, was wonderfully sung. I especially enjoyed the premiere of Nico Muhly's Two Boys, whose internet-era set design suited its perverse modern "love" story. The first chorus, which built up comprehensible layers into a modem's hum, was genius.On the art front, Egon Schiele's Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“For three weeks the Beans leave rich pickings for us Borrowers”. It’s probably not how most of us see the Christmas season, but if you’re a miniature person living under the floorboards, the seasonal treasures of the full-size humans – Beans – are irresistible. Setting this lovely one-off adaptation of Mary Norton’s books about the tiny recyclers over the advent count-down and bringing it up to date might have been obvious, but it charmed.The Clock family live under the floorboards of the house lived in by Human Bean Granny Driver. Living with her is lonely James, her grandson. His mum has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
And what a year it was! Comedy was king on stages around town, while a variety of Shakespeare royals -- Richard III à deux courtesy Kevin Spacey and the lesser-known but far more electrifying Richard Clothier, Richard II in the memorably tremulous figure of Eddie Redmayne (pictured above) - kept the Bard alive, and how. That was literally so in the case of Michael Sheen's astonishing Hamlet at the Young Vic, a life force that wouldn't go quickly or gently into the good night, as the final image of Ian Rickson's production asserted to controversial effect: no problems in this corner whatsoever Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Beethoven has been a real touchstone for classical music in the UK in 2011; flattening all in their way, the mighty Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly delivered high-speed, high-risk thrills in their complete cycle of symphonies.But while their recording, also released this year, is unquestionably my classical CD of 2011, in performance they were outdone by the stylish whirlwind of John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.This year’s Proms season for me was all about the CBSO and Andris Nelsons, who balanced a tenderly diffident performance of Walton’s Violin Read more ...