Reviews
Adam Sweeting
There was a gnawing suspicion that The Silence wouldn’t amount to much, since it was dumped in a four-night splurge in the middle of the mid-summer doldrums, and even the normally docile Radio Times had decided to stamp its foot and pick holes in it. One’s apprehension proved ill-founded, however. It turned out to be taut, tense, well acted and smartly written, and carried enough pace to lift it over the more credulity-stretching passages.Australian screenwriter Fiona Seres had set the bar pretty high for herself. On the one hand, The Silence was a drama about an extended family, with the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living, breathing, leering musical beasts. Last night's stunning Wigmore Hall debut by Sarajevan-born pianist Ivana Gavrić - to a sellout crowd - was a very compelling example of the latter: a performance where the musical storytelling was being so well communicated that it was almost as if she was speaking to the audience or rolling a projector. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between London and New York.The other three are Broadway musicals of different vintages and of differing degrees of renown, ranging from an alternately plaintive and raunchy product of the 1960s (Sweet Charity) to an arty 1970s Stephen Sondheim favourite (A Little Night Music) and on to a 1980s crowd-pleaser (La Cage aux folles) that won a Tony for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the middle of the pulverisingly loud and utterly thrilling experience that is Hofesh Shechter’s new production Political Mother, I wished suddenly that all dancers could come and see this piece, see what clarion theatre dance can be. If the theatrical thread often thins almost to vanishing point in some of the more mediocre ballet productions that turn up, this work is a positive rope of theatricality, thick, hard, massive, a slab of incredibly loud music and incredibly fierce, reflective emotion.Shechter is an Israeli Londoner, both choreographer and composer - choreographer, that is, in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The friendship between level-headed Sarah (TV’s Hustle star Kelly Adams) and impulsive Zoe (Lucy Evans) is the emotional core, as Zoe dumps her college course to surprise teacher boyfriend Malcolm (David Horton) in his flat and declare her undying love. There is a vague sense of unease in glimpsed locations, apparently in East London, where a bag lady squawks Cassandra-style warnings. But Watson can find no cinematic use for the city, and we’re soon stuck in Malcolm’s flat, along with wheelchair-bound Declan (Jonathan Rhodes) and his Goth girlfriend Kendra (Calita Rainford).Declan is the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.First-half depictions of contemporary Russia work more assuredly on the comedy front, even if this concert’s brand of humour quickly slips considerably south of Moscow to lodge somewhere in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Laura Moody says she was given a cello as a child to curb hyperactivity, but listening to her last night you might well have wondered if she’d had Tourettes too. The singer-cellist’s sound included clicks, shrieks, howls, and a lot of things that probably shouldn’t happen to a cello - as if she had taken every musical influence that had come her way in her 28 years and put them in a blender. The result? It was certainly extraordinary and sometimes disturbing. What surprised me most, though, as I sweated it out in a muggy hall was just how often it became mesmerising.Moody has a natural Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
So was it nice to see him (to see him nice)? Actually nice is probably the wrong word for Bruce Forsyth on the evidence of the opening documentary in a new series of Cutting Edge – tetchy, obsessive in his habits and (as we shall see) sometimes downright unpleasant, may be nearer the mark, as director David Nath gains access to Forsyth’s two palatial homes (both on the edge of golf courses, it almost goes without saying) in Wentworth, Surrey, and Puerto Rico.Living with Brucie was done a disservice by being advertised as if authored by his wife Wilnelia Merced-Forsyth, a sort of love letter Read more ...
David Nice
So most of us blinked and missed Martha Argerich gliding into Kings Place's Argentine celebrations last week. Yet here I am writing again about this liveliest of venues' Chopin marathon, and like a would-be Prommer who joins the last night party without having been to the Albert Hall more than once in the season I'm culpable of marking the grand finale after experiencing only a slice of modest Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo's 10 concerts devoted to our bicentenary boy. Never mind: both the encyclopedic recitals I did hear seemed to take us through a turbulent lifetime. That would be true just Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's tough being a critic. There I was last night at Punchdrunk's first operatic foray, The Duchess of Malfi - put on in collaboration with the English National Opera - trying to make sense of a typically Punchdrunkian world that had been shattered across three never-ending floors of disused office space in the back of beyond, attempting to maintain objectivity, coolness, clarity, soberly parsing the multifarious activity, diligently attending the sporadic music-making, scribbling it all down nerdily in my notepad, when a dishy young performer nobbles me, drags me into a darkened room, locks Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I must admit that I enjoy killing things and, since the target of my murderous instincts are clothes moths, fruit flies and, occasionally, rats or mice, society condones my bloodthirsty instincts. But while I get some satisfaction from my exploits, the women in Paula Rego’s drawings and prints appear to go about their murderous business with a mixture of resignation and detachment. These things have to be done, their world-weary faces seem to say, let’s expedite them with as little fuss as possible.The main difference, though, is that their victims are human; a series of large pastels shows Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you know David Mitchell and Robert Webb from Peep Show on Channel 4 (written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain), in which Mitchell plays the insufferably self-important Mark and Webb the self-deluding idiot Jeremy, then you will easily recognise similar stock types being used in That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC Two, which goes to show you should never mess with a winning formula.That’s not in any way to denigrate That Mitchell and Webb Look, which started its fourth series last night, because, as with the British and swearing, it’s both funny and clever. Mitchell and Webb, who met at Read more ...