Reviews
Helen Hawkins
Shakespeare’s plays have ever been meat for masher-uppers, from the bowdlerising Victorians to the modern filmed-theatre cycles of Ivo Van Hove. And Sir John Falstaff, as Orson Welles proved in Chimes at Midnight, can be the star of his very own remix, bestriding three plays and dying offstage in a fourth. Inventive director Robert Icke has now created Player Kings out of the two Henry IV plays for this indelible character. It showcases Falstaff’s relationship with Prince Hal but leaves intact the frame of the play – Hal’s relationship with his father, Henry Bolingbroke, now Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brazzaville is on the north side of the Congo River. It is the capital of the Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa is on the south side of the Congo. It is capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaïre. The cities face each other, about 1.5km apart, divided by the river and being in different nations.Congo Funk! - Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982) unites them by collecting 14 tracks demonstrating their musical fortunes were intertwined. Take the compilation’s Les Bantous De La Capitale, who were formed in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sam Taylor-Johnson has fashioned her biopic of Amy Winehouse with great care and affection, but sometimes, as she shows her subject discovering, love isn’t quite enough. The superb jazz-inflected singer from north London, who in 2011 joined the sad club of pop-culture luminaries who died at the age of 27, has already been given the documentary treatment by award-winning film-maker Asif Kapadia. Documentarists can expose their subject both visually and forensically, but a feature film has the tougher challenge of telling some of the same basic story without the mesmerising presence of the Read more ...
David Nice
Purple patches flourished in the first half of this admirable programme: it could hardly have been otherwise given Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s devotion to a new work in his repertoire, and the current strength of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko. Even so, it was the culmination, Rachmaninov’s multifaceted “Choral Symphony” The Bells, which truly dazzled.It seems so obvious: Petrenko just knows this idiom and is completely at ease with the difficult Rachmaninov rubato. The Philharmonia Chorus was simply electrifying: hard to believe they weren’t professionals with a knockout Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Spoofing movies or movie genres has been done before, but Six Chick Flicks goes the extra mile. It's a funny, frenetic and feminist take-down of the kind of movies that are aimed at woman, but pretty much always written and/or directed by men. It's a comedy show, for sure, but movie buffs will love it too for its cleverness.Written by Kerry Ipema and TJ Dawe and performed with brio by Ipema and KK Apple, two experienced improv actors from the United States, the show is subtitled (...or a Legally Blonde Pretty Woman Dirty Danced on the Beaches While Writing a Notebook on the Titanic) and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alex Garland’s fourth movie as writer/director is a chilling glimpse of an American dystopia, fortuitously timed for the run-up to the forthcoming US elections. However, it steers fastidiously clear of drawing any obvious Trump vs Biden parallels, though it’s difficult to imagine that it hasn’t imbibed any inspiration from the Maga mob’s insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021.Set in an imaginary near future, it’s the story of a group of news correspondents in the process of covering the civil war raging in the USA, in which the government forces are slugging it out with the Western Alliance, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Site-specific” performance locations rarely come more atmospheric, or evocative, than this one. Beyond the East India Dock basin, with the hedgehog-backed dome of the O2 looming just across the Thames on a gusty spring evening, a cavernous “chain store” abuts the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse. For the London Handel Festival, director Jack Furness transforms this haunting (and haunted) chunk of early-Victorian dockland architecture into the studios of “Cyclops Pictures”. Here the renowned (if moody) auteur Paolo Polifemo will rehearse and shoot a film based on Ovid’s story (from the Metamorphoses) Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano fervently believes that talking about music is a vital part of his communicative art, and nobody does it better. Given that the London Symphony Orchestra's enterprising Half Six Fix format is scheduled for an hour each time, and that Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé lasts almost that long, there wasn’t going to be much room for pre-performance demonstration yesterday evenng, but what we got still hit the mark.Pappano asked his LSO players to float away with the opening of “Daybreak”, start of the more often heard Second Suite but occurring some 40 minutes into the full ballet Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"In care". It’s a phrase that, if it penetrates our minds at all, usually leads to distressing tabloid stories of children losing their lives at the hands of abusive parents (“Why oh why wasn’t this child in care?”) or of loving parents separated from their sons and daughters by over-zealous bureaucrats (“Social workers tore our family apart”). It’s a difficult subject to address, which is one reason why it’s more often done in the abstract, the language administrative, quasi-legal or covered a radio phone-in in which we’re invited to sum anecdotes in order to produce data. Well meant Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Tallinn is a very civilised city. It’s enough to provoke intense jealousy on arrival from the land of potholes, two year waiting lists and seven pound pints to find that not only do they have pretty much all the infrastructure of their Nordic neighbours, but you can get a beer for €5 to boot. And that’s before you get to the gig venues – a whole district of them, purpose built into office and warehouse spaces, all with huge cloakrooms where everyone politely and neatly hangs their winter coats and scarves, well-staffed bars and fantastically maintained sound gear. Just how efficient the Read more ...
David Nice
Milton Court, like its parent Barbican Hall, disconcertingly inflates the sound of larger ensembles and voices. Had there been a conductor for all four pieces in the Britten Sinfonia’s programme - Michael Papadopoulos was there for the two most recent works – the approach might have been more nimble and nuanced. Though Mozart in masterpiece form could have been a gambit to entice warier punters, a fourth British work would have rounded out the overall picture better.That all sounds grudging, especially as the senselessly ACE-defunded Britten Sinfonia needs all the help it can get right now, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Betsy,” a voice shouts from the audience as the encore begins. The request for “Betsy on the Roof,” from Julia Holter’s 2015 Have You in my Wilderness album, is met – it was already in the set list – but only after “Les Jeux to You” is performed. That originally appeared on 2018’s Aviary.This show is the Los Angeles-based Holter’s first song-focused outing in London since 2019. There was an accompaniment to the film The Passion of Joan of Arc in 2022, but this more traditional date follows the recent release of her sixth solo studio album Something in the Room She Moves. It’s one of a few Read more ...