Reviews
Russ Coffey
His daughter may be Hannah Montana and he may have set country music sales records but, worldwide, Billy Ray Cyrus will never escape his mega-hit “Achy Breaky Heart”. Although that was a novelty record, it epitomised everything people find preposterous about America’s red states. Which is why, outside of America’s heartlands, most people find it difficult to take Cyrus seriously. It's something he finds very frustrating. I’m American is Cyrus’s “patriot” album. It’s all about troops and home and stars and stripes. It’s full girls left behind, and parents’ war records. Just the Read more ...
David Nice
Here we are again. Marvel as you enter at the aptly gaudy lighting of Albert's colosseum, but know that unless your place is with the Prommers towards the front of the arena, the musicians will often sound as if they're in another galaxy - maybe one hinted at in the George Herbert words, if hardly the Judith Weir music, of the opening BBC commission, Stars, Night, Music and Light. Though spattered with Messiaenic orchestral paint - not to mention the obbligato sniffalong from my annoying neighbour - it felt like a very tame, rather olde-British gambit. Not so the great blazes and catastrophes Read more ...
josh.spero
If I'm being honest, I never saw the charm of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. Too many quiet disappointments, too much capital-A Acting. They lacked naturalism in presentation and content, whereas Double Lesson, from Channel 4's First Cut series of quirky documentaries and quasi-documentaries, had naturalism to spare last night.It probably helped that the show, a monologue given by Phil Davis to and across the camera, was based on real experiences of teachers who had attacked their pupils. Davis, playing David de Gale, explained from his potting shed, where he over-symbolically tended young Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“These premises have 24-hour security surveillance,” reads one of the notices on the wall as we audience traipsed round the outside of Cardiff’s Coal Exchange between stages of this mobile production of Stephen Deazley’s new opera about people who can’t sleep. It turned out to be the only poster that had nothing to do with the performance, in among the “Nobody Sleeps” signs, the “Keep Awake”s, the “No Beds” (or whatever: “Nessun dorma” I didn’t see or hear, but might have done; it would have been thematic and does in fact crop up in the libretto).Personally, I’m one of (I hope) billions for Read more ...
fisun.guner
It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny art jokes, but this gag feels like it’s already a little flat. And I’m disappointed to be disappointed. Chapman exhibitions are always something to look forward to, and I was looking forward to this one, especially since they had in mind a game. And the game in this instance was that they had worked independently for the first time - in separate Read more ...
Ismene Brown
All ballet companies dream of finding a genuine creative talent among their ranks, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, visiting from the farthest end of the world ballet map, have one in Andrew Simmons. The unknown name on their triple bill on this rare visit to London shows a young mind drawn naturally to grace and understated expressiveness.His creation, A Song in the Dark, is effortlessly better than the busy, inconsequential work by Jorma Elo, one of the most noised names in ballet at the moment, for reasons that escape my understanding. Both pieces are leotard ballets, Elo’s in red, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of Russell T Davies’s second most famous creation arrives coated with a transatlantic sheen, courtesy of an injection of co-production money from the USA’s Starz cable network (home of Spartacus and Camelot). Happily, this has not obliterated the homegrown roots of the Doctor Who spin-off, since this opener cut fearlessly between portentous action scenes at CIA headquarters and a judicial execution in Kentucky to Cardiff city centre and expanses of rugged Welsh coastline, where Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) was trying to live an anonymous post-Torchwood existence with her Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Kafka is a bit of a stranger to British stages at the moment, but elsewhere he remains a strong presence. In his short parables, as well as in his classic novels such as The Trial, he conveys a deep understanding of the human condition. But while European postmodern culture might shrug off his insights, he is still close to the heart of some Middle Eastern theatre-makers. In this production, an adaptation of one of Kafka’s most famous short stories, the Palestinian ShiberHur theatre company prove his abiding relevance.Set in an almost deserted punishment camp, the story is as taut and spare Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A mean, muscular and unflinching display of concentrated brutality and shaved-down storytelling, the Spanish thriller Cell 211 is armed with the furious intensity of its caged environment and a chain of events which cascades like dominos over and beyond its prison walls. It’s an unlikely candidate for award-season acclaim, but Daniel Monzόn's film cheeringly arrives laden with Goyas - as if Spain’s strongest man had triumphed at a beauty pageant.Relative newcomer Alberto Ammann (pictured below right and left) is Juan Oliver, an eager-beaver trainee prison guard being shown the ropes ahead of Read more ...
howard.male
So how did you survive the 1980s? I don’t mean money-wise; I’m sure you had plenty of that. I mean musically and therefore spiritually. It was a diet of Thomas Mapfumo and old Nina Simone albums that got me through the first half, until the Red Cross parcel of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs arrived in 1985. Who knows how many times that treasured piece of vinyl got lowered onto my 30-quid hi-fi in my desperate attempt to ward off the encroaching thunder of Phil Collins’s drum kit and myriad other musical abominations of the period?Swordfishtrombones was the album that marked Tom Waits’s dramatic move Read more ...
william.ward
Programmes about Italian organised crime made by the foreign media are always hampered by the finnicky nature of the beast itself: there is so much background detail that needs to be staked out at the outset that your head is whirling from information overload. Like its mainstream political parties, high-street banks and national daily newspapers, Italy has three, four or five times as many of each as any other European country of similar size.Italy’s Bloodiest Mafia didn’t really bother with a comparative overview, other than to inform us that the Camorra, the Naples-based Mafia, has killed Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In the days before there were any paparazzi to catch celebrities unawares, the pictures of the stars that reached mere mortals like ourselves were carefully staged by the film studios. Establishments like MGM, Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures employed stills photographers to produce atmospheric shots of the action as it unfolded on the set and to make studio portraits of individual actors for release to adoring fans.Photographers like Clarence Sinclair Bull, Greta Garbo’s favourite collaborator, and George Hurrell who imbued Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich with such smouldering allure, Read more ...