Reviews
Veronica Lee
Themed seasons are often the invention of programmers who have run out of ideas; they string together loosely related output under a cleverly non-specific season title when any old dross gathering dust in the cupboard is given an airing. So I read the notes of BBC’s The Call of the Wild season - with its mix of repeats and new material, and the dread phrases “the great British love affair with the countryside”, “nostalgic exploration” and “a light-hearted look at”- with a sinking heart. But fear not, because one of the first programmes in the season (and the first of a six-part series) was Read more ...
fisun.guner
No-nonsense Hayley Taylor is to the terminally unemployed what Jo Frost, aka Supernanny, is to the attention-seeking, tantrum-prone pre-schooler – but without the naughty step. In this reality three-parter she attempts to do what whole governments have so far failed to: to get members of the long-term, unskilled unemployed (what some might unkindly term the "Jeremy Kyle generation" – aka the underclass) back into the labour market. This she attempts to do, not by sprinkling magic Fairy Jobmother dust over the British economy, but by addressing the “negativity” of those she’s come to rescue Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rape, marauding soldiers, peasants on the warpath and a flash hero - are we at the Bolshoi’s Spartacus once again? No, we’re at the Mikhailovsky Ballet down the road at the Coliseum where a rather more Erroll Flynn-type spectacle is being offered, Laurencia. This is a Soviet warhorse predating Grigorovich’s Spartacus by two decades, and with a much more 19th-century costume ballet feel to it, more of an alternative Don Quixote, with a bravura pair of leading roles and lashings of Spaniards and castanets.It’s set in Spain, based on Lope da Vega’s 17th-century peasant revenge tragedy Fuente Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"She's just a kid," or so runs the mantra that weaves its way through Spur of the Moment, the Royal Court premiere from newcomer Anya Reiss, who was "just a kid" - well, 17 - when she wrote the play. How, then, to explain an exceedingly sharp, smart piece that will invite comparison with another recent Court find, Polly Stenham, who was a comparative "oldie" by the time she pitched up at Sloane Square? As ever, it's nigh impossible to calibrate talent with numbers of years old, beyond pointing out that Reiss possesses the former in abundance even if she is self-evidently lacking in the latter Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
York is a bit like Oxford, I’ve always thought: that perplexing contrast between the central squares and marketplaces, in all their twee glory – all aimless, besatchelled French students and anoraked tourists queuing for tea at Betty’s – and the simply glorious architecture and hidden back streets, from the ever-breathtaking splendour of the Minster to the endless succession of tiny hidden churches that inhabit every other corner. You could, potentially, hate it, but you always come away feeling pleasantly surprised, and surprisingly inspired.
And it’s a good place to hold an early Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons. It’s a romcom, and a Hollywood one at that, the lowest form of cinematic life for many (most often male) critics; it stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose career has gone from British television mediocrity to Hollywood royalty, a heinous crime for some; and its story, about a 40-year-old mother of two who falls in love with a guy 15 years her junior, is a reverse parallel of Zeta-Jones’s own personal life (her husband, Michael Douglas, is 25 years older than she). Just listen to those knives being Read more ...
bella.todd
Revivals of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion are generally too busy making an artistic case for the play over the My Fair Lady musical to worry about listening out for contemporary resonances. But in many ways Simon Cowell is the Henry Higgins of our day: betting with his fellow X-Factor judges that he can pass off such-and-such under-privileged teen as a pop star; putting them through their paces before a rigorous public test; and showing little regard for what will happen once they have been torn out of their reality and developed a taste for limos and red carpets, and Judgment Day has come Read more ...
judith.flanders
Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly closed his London studio, aged only 34, returned to France, and, after a brief stint in the garde mobile in the Franco-Prussian War, spent much of the rest of his life in and out of asylums. It has been suggested that the chemicals used in these pioneering decades of photography caused mental illness; but given his prodigious output - 17,000 sittings Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
What a thrilling sound the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra can make when it chooses! What a grippingly deep tone, from a lower strings section that sounds like you’ve got the bass on your car stereo turned up daringly high, what clinical precision (in the best sense of the word) in the wind section, what power in the brass. At times you could almost see the surges of energy shooting off into the auditorium. You could certainly hear it.
This was a Romantic behemoth of a concert: dripping with over-the-topness and oozing slush, the sort that is guaranteed to sell out the Albert Read more ...
david.cheal
So little time, so much stuff to see: that, in essence, is the story of Latitude. Now in its fifth year, this Suffolk festival offers a bewildering cultural cornucopia: music, theatre, dance, cabaret, comedy, circus, literature, poetry, as well as unexpected oddities such as performers dressed as unicorns wandering the woods at night and teams of ghoulish “medics” defibrillating random victims (I was one of them) during theatre group Duckie’s Saturday night masked ball. It’s a blast (albeit one that is almost entirely white and middle class - a state of affairs that has led to it being dubbed Read more ...
David Nice
Roll up, roll up for the ancient Roman circus of a production almost as old as I am. Thrill to the catchy tunes and the oom-pah basses of flash Aram Khachaturian, played with the kind of lurid splendour you thought could only be faked on Soviet-era Melodiya recordings. Enjoy the pageant of sword-waggling, goosestepping cohorts, flagellated slaves, skimpy-tunicked maidens and golden-wigged ephebes. Admire muscled flesh, less flagrant than in the outrageously homoerotic telly production Spartacus: Blood and Sand, but top quality all the same. And laugh out loud, as I did, not from a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Mikhailovsky Ballet is full of surprises. Predictably for a Russian company it brought a gala programme yesterday - unpredictably, it brought a rare example of St Petersburg 19th-century ballet comedy and a new commission of contemporary ballet. Neither of these is box office, so how refreshing is that? Then there were the thongs-and-glitter pas de deux of the strenuous 20th-century Soviet athletic style, and a classical jewel from Sleeping Beauty, and a wholly delightful court polonaise from a Glinka opera.
The combination generally made this show an eye-opener about the sheer babel of Read more ...