Reviews
Veronica Lee
The words “starring Robin Williams” hardly inspire film-goers with confidence these days. After a career that includes the dramatic highlights of Good Morning Vietnam, The Fisher King and Dead Poets Society, and the amenable comedy of Mrs Doubtfire, he has more recently made a slew of films over which it would be kind to draw a veil. But he’s back on terrific form in World’s Greatest Dad, one of the most original and funny comedies released this year.Williams plays Lance Clayton, who has a failed marriage behind him and is a failed writer - his rejected novels include the titles The Narcissus Read more ...
david.cheal
This was a warm and convivial evening in the company of the American folky-rootsy-rocky singer and songwriter Josh Ritter. His band made a rich noise, and his voice was keen and true, almost every lyric clearly audible. At the end of this, the last night of Ritter’s UK tour, the crowd – he seems to have a strong female following - were on their feet, and there were several calls of, “We love you, Josh!” from the stalls. And the songs, in which myth and metaphor and stories from the old America summoned up a world of ships and wolves and death and love and mountains (and cars, too), were Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One after the other they came. Stunning aria after stunning aria. Affecting in their harmonies, infectious in their rhythms, arresting in their textures, vivid in their melodies. The Royal Opera had taken a mighty gamble with Agostino Steffani's 300-year-old Niobe, Regina di Tebe, a forgotten opera by a forgotten composer. But they were completely right to do so. For Niobe is a masterpiece. And last night's performance was a triumph.What theatrical capital there is in the miserable little tale of Queen Niobe is not immediately obvious. The story crops up in The Iliad four pages Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How did vampires manage to stage a near-total hijack of the popular media? It used to be just Christopher Lee in a cloak with Hammer Films’ home-made cardboard bats hanging on wires over his head, but now we’re up to our throats in Buffy, Angel, The Twilight Saga, Blade, Van Helsing… and True Blood, HBO’s somewhat superior exercise in blood-squirting southern Gothic, now back for its second series on Channel 4.Is the lionisation of vampires a way of embracing the “other” in a suffocatingly formatted society? Is it an artistic metaphor for sexual liberation? Or is it just a celebration of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The constant strobing lights us white like we’re watching an Atom bomb test. From its garish credit sequence to the somehow inevitable vagina’s view of a penetrating penis, Enter the Void attempts assaultive cinema. You’d expect no less from Gaspar Noé, whose previous film Irreversible (2002) menaced audiences with the prospect of Monica Bellucci’s character’s real-time rape half-way through. The director is an idealist as much as a provocateur, as this long trip through the post-death visions of a murdered young American in Tokyo proves.We only see casual drug dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A play could be written about, or for, Michael Gambon's fingers, and perhaps Beckett's 1958 Krapp's Last Tape is it. I've seen this solo piece many times, most recently in a studio theatre rendition from Harold Pinter that opened a window on to his own mortality and won't quickly be forgotten. But what Gambon brings to the table - well, desk - is the abiding sense of a man struggling for his share of the light amidst darkness at the very moment that his powers may be slipping away. Or are they? Only those fingers know for sure.Indeed, during the opening passages of Michael Colgan's production Read more ...
David Nice
From primeval baying to a very human song in excelsis, Mahler's Third Symphony cries out for Olympian interpretation. That I've found in recent years with Abbado in Lucerne and the Albert Hall, Bělohlávek at the Barbican and Salonen on the South Bank. Since Vladimir Jurowski always demonstrates fresh thinking, and sometimes a burning intensity to match, the first performance of his London Philharmonic's new season was bound to be at least as challenging.That it certainly was from the opening bars. After two months of hearing conductors and orchestras handling mass and void in the Proms' Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Do paws get any mightier than Llŷr Williams's? When not crashing down onto the Wigmore Hall Steinway like a ton of singing bricks, they were digging deep, like strong, nifty moles, foraging for the contrapuntal melodies that lay beneath the topsoil. Williams was made to tackle the beefy German classics on this programme.Busoni's transcription of Bach's great Chaconne in D minor was grand and bracing, like the lusty, lyrical stirring of a mighty male Welsh choir. The fluency and conviction and sweep of the rushing scales - in octave or alone - and those enormous chromatic climbs was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Felicity Fitz-Frisky and Hansel Amadeus Mannish (aka Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones) describe their act as “twisted pop cabaret” but that doesn’t begin to encapsulate a show that expertly parodies modern music. An easy target, you think, but this duo bring real singing and musical talent, plus a deliciously bitchy touch to the subject.Frisky and Mannish first came to prominence at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe, where School of Pop was a breakout hit with almost universal five-star reviews and quickly became the must-see show of the festival. Now they are touring with their follow-up show, The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's revival of Passion, a transforming production that not only marks the start of various Donmar-related tributes to Stephen Sondheim in his 80th birthday year but also reminds us that this theatre reopened its doors in 1992 with the UK premiere of Assassins, since which time it has staged five further Sondheim shows; Passion, to speak as openly as this musical's heroine does of the entire spectrum from ecstasy to pain, is one of the very best.A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's Read more ...
judith.flanders
I have a friend who loves telling jokes. One night he started a well-worn story: “Please,” he said, “if you’ve heard this before, don’t stop me – it’s one of my favourites.” I am always reminded of that evening when watching Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo – the Trocks to their many thousands of fans across the world – when they touch down in London on one of their regular stops. The jokes are great – the dance is pretty good too – and if the jokes are a bit familiar, well, that’s all part of the fun.As it often does, their second programme begins with Act Two of Swan Lake (pictured Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live but to live forever. The answer? They become a bloody nightmare.It's a funny old opera, The Makropulos Case. Nihilistic to its core in the thrust of the libretto, but curiously life-enhancing musically. The first act should knock you out with boredom, so heavy is its tread (one initially thinks) through the obscurities of a probate case. That it didn Read more ...