Reviews
james.woodall
What kind of play is Frank Wedekind's Lulu? The answer is a very odd one, with a fractured writing history. Wedekind subtitled his original five-act exploration of raw femininity, in 1894, "A Monster Tragedy", then divided it into two: Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. As becomes clear in Headlong Theatre's fresh, winning version of the whole thing, it really is two plays - the first about sexual adventure and rebellion, the second about commerce and corruption; yet staging it over one evening is quite logical, even if its brutal ending is peculiar and resolves nothing (no spoiler here - oh all Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Last night’s gala opening of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival may have been touched by living history – in particular the presence of Sean Connery (pictured below, arriving at last night's screening), who strode up the red carpet looking sharp and dapper in black – but the film on show, Sylvain Chomet’s ravishing animated feature, The Illusionist, was haunted by old ghosts. Not only the private phantoms of the late comic all-rounder Jacques Tati, who wrote the original script, but also memories of Edinburgh’s past. The audience even enjoyed the strangely dislocating experience Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Perhaps it's because the Almeida had a major hit with Festen (well, everywhere but Broadway) that the Scandinavian back catalogue of movies seems every bit as ripe for plunder as is mainstream Hollywood when it comes to feeding musicals on Broadway and the West End. But a high-toned source doesn't begin to make a satisfying evening out of this stage premiere of Through a Glass Darkly, a harrowing film shot in an emotionally devouring black and white that in the theatre, shorn of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic chiaroscuro, comes across as hollow and banal.You can imagine the appeal of the material Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Art and love, these have been my life,” sings Tosca in Puccini’s opera. “Music or words first?” the Countess worries in Strauss’s Capriccio. Now in the third of Grange Park’s operas this summer we have the warring advocates of tragedy, comedy, melodrama and farce in Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. Could it be guilt at its own idle detachment that draws country-house opera into the agony of self-reflective theatre? Well, Tosca is barely self-reflective – an excuse for a big aria and an off-stage cantata. But Prokofiev’s Oranges – like that other, and better, Strauss concoction, Ariadne Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hans van Manen does basic instincts in ballet better than anyone alive. The Dutch choreographer, nearly 78 and far too little exposed in Britain, is a near-contemporary of Kenneth MacMillan, another specialist in sexual relations, but where MacMillan is fascinatingly drenched in guilt, Van Manen takes a bold, guilt-free stand. Grosse Fuge, which Birmingham Royal Ballet revived in the Hippodrome last night in a smart triple bill to entertain all tastes, is all about mating display - four men in black oriental skirts and big-buckled belts, four women in beige Playtex-type corsets that give Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What is it with horror films and water? Think back through all the watery episodes in the horror canon, not the grandiose creature-from-the-deep type but the more domestic scenarios – beaches, showers, baths, bathrooms. From Hitchcock’s originary shower scene onwards, the list is long and gory. Most recently we've seen the elegant atmospheric manipulations of Juan Antonio Bayona’s El Orfanato with its plot-significant headland setting and dark tidal caves; now following close behind is fellow Spaniard Gabe Ibanez with his first feature Hierro.Sharing a mentor in Guillermo del Toro and even a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually manage the word "bonjour". Small wonder that a vacationing, newly single Katherine Heigl falls for this clearly keen linguist in a lift in Nice. His bared torso has nothing to do with it - surely, not! After all, a fella's skills with the bench press look even better accompanied by a self-evident immersion in the back catalogue of Berlitz.If only Read more ...
howard.male
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison. American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which could be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an odd enough statistic that only four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays have been made into films. Odder still that, of those, three are the work of Alain Resnais, the grand old man of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it was a curious moment when the director of Last Year in Marienbad got into bed with the author of Bedroom Farce. The last of those films, Coeurs, was no more than a mildly engaging romantic roundelay, but it was freighted with Anglo-Saxon certainties. Things like plot, meaning, a vague interest in the needs of the audience. Not far shy of 90, Resnais has for the first time adapted a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the many absent friends in contemporary British drama is the play that tackles questions of religious belief. At a time when more and more people take their faith more and more seriously, this lacuna at the heart — or should that be soul? — of new work is surely regrettable. But perhaps the tide is now turning: in May, Drew Pautz’s Love the Sinner at the National examined belief and sexuality; now Australian playwright Anthony Weigh, whose new play opened last night, wrestles with death and memory.The set-up is simple. Following a horrific massacre at a quiet infant school, somewhere Read more ...
graeme.thomson
American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance. Even stripped of the stridently Hollywood voiceover that teed up the US version of the show when it first aired on NBC back in March - “To know who you are, you have to know where you came from”, it boomed over a slo-mo montage of Olympian hugging - last night’s tweaked version, with a new, subdued British narration, told us more about US TV and America’s relationship with its own history than it ever did about its subject, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the game of musical chairs that has led up to their coverage of the soccer World Cup, BBC and ITV executives appear to have missed a trick; judging by last night’s explosive opening few minutes, in which Gina Yashere gave an expletive-laden analysis of England’s opening draw against the United States, the comic would be a whole lot more entertaining as a pundit than some of the mealy-mouthed ex-professionals they currently employ to tell us where it all went wrong.“Fucking England! Butterfingers for a goalie! How do you save a goal before letting it in? I reckon his wages have just gone Read more ...