Reviews
Ismene Brown
In the Cuban National Ballet’s Swan Lake fourth act, the corps of swans do a curious, aggressive attacking run you don’t see in any other production - they lower their heads and charge at Prince Siegfried, with hands fluttering angrily behind them, as if they were the evil magicians, not the creatures under a spell. There is a spell cast over the Cuban Ballet, a 60-year-old spell, which was once a force of astounding light and artistic release, but which is declining into depression.Alicia Alonso will be 90 this year, and the miracle-worker who gave birth to Cuba’s amazing incarnation as one Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A public telephone rings, unanswered, in the middle of the desert; a young girl pushes her grandmother in a rusty wheelchair, jerkily inching their way across the flat red expanse of the outback; a boy digs deep into the sand and lies brownly submerged in water the colour of his skin. The winner of last year’s Caméra d'Or for Best First Feature at Cannes, Samson and Delilah has bucked recent trends in Australian film, having already achieved substantial success both at home and abroad. It’s the least romantic love-story you’ll see all year, but probably also the least cynical.The story of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is the first gig I have attended where a sign at the door states: “First act - long. Second act - even longer”. So we have been warned, and as soon as Ken Dodd takes to the stage he refers to his (by now) legendary ultra-lengthy shows. “This evening will be a test of bladder strength,” he tells us, and proceeds to entertain almost non-stop for the next four hours (he has been known to do five or six).
Dodd certainly has extraordinary staying power. He’s 82 and celebrating 55 years in show business - and clearly still loves performing as much now as he did when he first started, as a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Another night, another cast, another Judas Tree (see first-night review below this) - and yet more proof of what a tough, durable, shape-shifting piece Kenneth MacMillan created in his last year of life. Recently theartsdesk interviewee Thiago Soares talked of his preparations to play the central male in this gladiatorial ballet, and last night he made the role of the Foreman his own, taking to the stage like a razor-edged switchblade as the head of the gang of labourers who prowl at night through Canary Wharf and carry girls’ bodies to and fro.Theories about what The Judas Tree means range Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Alfred Hitchcock once claimed to have entered a Hitch look-alike contest and lost, characteristically making a joke out of a long-held private obsession. Doppelgängers, impersonators, imposters and victims of mistaken identity - innocent men wrongly presumed guilty - stalk his movies and television shows and now provide the inspiration for Double Take. Loosely based on a short story, August 25th, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges, it starts with the idea of the Master locked in a murderous mano a mano with his own double. "Two of you is one too many," as he puts it.That alone would be a juicy premise Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sean Lock, as well as being an acclaimed stand-up for many years, has also written for other comics, including Bill Bailey, Lee Evans and Mark Lamarr, and his profile has risen hugely through his stints as team captain on 8 Out of 10 Cats on Channel 4 and regular guest appearances on other panel shows, including QI and Mock the Week. His fans, including me, recall with fondness his sitcom 15 Storeys High, which ran for two series on BBC TV (and which was developed from the equally funny Radio 4 show Sean Lock’s 15 Minutes of Misery).So it’s nice to see him back on tour with Lockipedia, which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first cinema was two-thirds empty. A hundred seats had been laid out by the Lumière brothers in a Parisian salon, but only 33 of them were occupied. The small audience saw a film in which a crowd, mostly women in long dresses but also a large bounding dog, pour through a tall gate. None of them looks at the camera, as we would now. In 1895, stardom was not yet associated with film. The dog, as dogs will, gave much the most attention-seeking performance.Paul Merton’s love for the faded movies of yesteryear is a matter of record. Previous documentaries on Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the stranger facts of the theatre in recent years is the comparatively short shrift given to Alan Ayckbourn, who was once a seasonal mainstay. The upside of that same lessening of productions is that those Ayckbourn outings that do come along have for the most part been wonderfully welcome. Topping that list, and how, was the Old Vic's glorious revival of The Norman Conquests, which went on to triumph critically on Broadway, a street not always susceptible to this writer's ways. And now, within weeks of the author turning 71 on 12 April, we have a mini-Ayckbourn season: the transfer to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with their huge talons and fiery breath, steal their sheep and set fire to their houses as they attack on a regular basis. The opening scenes of How to Train Your Dragon, presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG (Shrek, Madagascar) in 3D, which portrays such an attack, are certainly vivid.The story by Will Davies, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (Lilo & Read more ...
howard.male
Standing in the black-walled gloom of the Bar Fly in Camden, I suddenly realise that I’m one of only a couple of dozen people completely transfixed by the band on the stage. Perhaps this is because, to most of the audience, they are just the third act in a kind of three-for-the-price-of-one night, and they simply don’t have the necessary party vibe that’s required to bring Saturday night to a satisfactory end. But as I find this Copenhagen outfit’s sublime, intense and obliquely romantic brand of indie rock one of the most compelling sounds I’ve heard in the past few months, I can’t help but Read more ...
Ismene Brown
French geography has a significant hand in the small but exuberantly formed opera and dance that comes out of that civilised country - scaled for the important theatres that lie far beyond Paris and which have a great deal to teach Britain about creating a vivid national landscape. Opera du Rhin’s smashing new production of Rameau’s Platée in Strasbourg is produced for small theatres but with not the slightest diminution of vitality and ingenuity, and if you didn’t catch it streamed live last week on arteliveweb.com or in its home theatre in Strasbourg, then you can still speed to Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Having already unearthed a Joseph, a Maria, an Oliver and a Nancy for three of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s many West End productions, at the same time generating several dozen hours' worth of free primetime publicity, the BBC are now aiding the “merciful Lord” in his search for a Dorothy (and a Toto, although we’ll have to wait until future episodes before we get into the Alan Partridge-esque circus of dog auditions) to tread the boards in his forthcoming stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.Over the Rainbow is basically The X Factor for girls raised on Boden and Birkenstocks. One candidate's Read more ...