Reviews
Matt Wolf
Those nostalgic for a time when the Haymarket offered big names in well-upholstered plays will have a field day at Grace Pervades, in which David Hare furthers his relationship with Ralph Fiennes. Their partnership includes Straight Line Crazy here and in New York and the solo play Beat the Devil, in which Fiennes actually played the dramatist (15 years his senior) in the tale of Hare's battle with COVID. This play inhabits notionally less troubled times in its story of two titans of the Victorian era, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the latter of whom was the great-aunt of the legendary Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’m a latecomer to John Robins and Elis James’s hugely popular podcast, having only started to listen during a period of illness last year, when I quickly became hooked. The two (plus producer Dave) have an appealing chemistry that makes them a pleasure to spend time with. Prior to that I was aware of Robins as champion of series 17 of Taskmaster – a perennial favourite in my household – but had not seen his stand-up. Although his stage and podcast persona is of an obsessive neurotic driven mad by the petty obstacles in the path of everyday life, this new memoir narrates the more significant Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For a master dramatist - even for a tyro really - The Price is a strangely uneven play, brilliant psychological insights diluted by clunking structural issues. You wonder what it would be like in the hands of a less talented cast, a less experienced director, performed on a less convincing set - it could unravel very quickly. It was something of a surprise to find that amongst the credits in the programme, its weakest link proved to be its writer, Arthur Miller.We open on a middle-aged NYPD cop rooting through a treasure trove of stuff that you might find presented at an Antiques Roadshow Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head.” And so it proves. Benjamin Britten’s fisherman Peter Grimes is damned before a note is sung – condemned not by a judge, but by his own community. Deborah Warner’s brutal 2022 staging, now back at the Royal Opera for its first revival, never lets us forget this. We don’t even see a courtroom. Instead, the Prologue plays out as a hallucinatory fantasy, a fever-dream in the mind of Grimes himself: his dead apprentice haunts his thoughts, while a mob of dark figures circle like hounds. Grimes is a tragedy of alienation, but this staging Read more ...
johncarvill
Akira Kurosawa coulda been a contender. He used to be canon. Some of the critical sheen flaked off a while back, though. He hasn’t had a film in the top 10 of the Sight & Sound critics’ poll since 1982, the cognoscenti having pivoted to other Japanese masters such as Ozu, or Mizoguchi. Kurosawa is docked points for being too grabby, too Western, too prone to bourgeois sentimentality. His films commit the ultimate sin: they pander.No polemics here, but if you wanted to take up a critical katana on Kurosawa’s behalf, you could do worse than adduce Red Beard. The director himself called it “ Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity smiled on a lunchtime event you'd have been happy to hear any time, anywhere in the world. Edward Gardner's typically engaging short introduction told us that Royal Academy of Music string students were facing exams in a fortnight, so the brief was to find a programme predominantly for wind and brass. Quite apart from the fact that here were two amazing young soloists, RAM postgraduates, up to the mark of each work, the concertos in question were both created in 1924, both had divided double-bass parts - now that really was a coincidence - and (this bit I'm adding) Gardner had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A rich and occasionally irritatingly gimmicky album…less perfectly realised than Autobahn, though there are some quite pretty tunes. People often charge electronic music with being ‘mechanical,’ confusing machines like clocks and other wind-up toys with devices which operate in ways more analogous to the human brain, which create quite different musical problems from, say, musical-boxes. What is wrong with Kraftwerk, however, is that their music is in fact mechanical, creating a contradiction between form and content which eventually destroys its artistic credibility and any hint of a soul Read more ...
David Nice
It all adds up to a cleverly interconnected triple bill and the perfect experience for five singers from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Artists Programme. There are three losses, two of them deaths, only one mourned for, a baritone in all three operas and three other singers in two of them, plus dazzling, finely honed work from various small forces of the Britten Sinfonia under conductor Peggy Wu (also on the JPAP). The weak link has nothing to do with any of the performances, nor Talia Stern's surefooted direction, so let's get that out of the way first. I'd be surprised if Elizabeth Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Puppini Sisters brought their signature blend of close harmony singing to Islington’s Union Chapel on Friday, the opening night of a three-week UK tour marking their 20th birthday and the release of their seventh studio album, titled – naturally enough – The Birthday Party. There was nothing Pinteresque about the evening, just unalloyed joy onstage and off. “The Andrews Sisters on acid”, “The Spice Girls of jazz” and “Swing Punks” – this effervescent trio, whose fans include King Charles and Michael Bublé, are all those and more. With their retro-glamour aesthetic (reflected by a few Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Patriarchy is a trap for both men and women. This we know. But it’s not often that its takedown is as amazingly theatrical as this fabulous entertainment, Tender, by American playwright Dave Harris, now getting its wonderfully noisy premiere at the Soho Theatre. It’s a wildly immersive show, partly orgiastic, partly touching the bits other entertainments cannot reach, and brought to us by director Matthew Xia, who previously teamed up with the playwright to create the hit Tambo & Bones. Set in a dilapidated old theatre, this show explores the world of three male strippers, called the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The aftermath of school massacres for those left behind, and the pros and cons of restorative justice have become two strong themes for drama in recent years. Writer Fran Kranz combines the two, in an intense, claustrophobic piece that attacks both the brain and the heart. Mass has had an unusual journey: Kranz originally conceived it as a play, before turning instead to film (of the same name, in 2022), but then reworking it for his intended medium, which has its world premier at the Donmar. I haven’t seen the movie, so can’t compare; but it is perfectly at home on stage, and especially Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There has been a trend in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in recent years to portray Athens as a sexually repressive regime in which Queen Hippolyta is resentfully shackled to Theseus after he has conquered her in battle. The Bridge Theatre’s – ultimately gloriously escapist – Dream, portrayed Theseus as a tyrant from The Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, the beautifully austere Dream which played at The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last Christmas, showed him as a psychotic misogynist.This is a completely valid reading of the text – I personally have never recovered from the Read more ...