Reviews
sheila.johnston
There's a fabulous movie about Robin Hood opening today. Step forward Gianluigi Toccafondo, whose luminescent five-minute Rotoscope animated version of the myth is an impressionistic, utterly original blender-mix of Chagall, Bacon and Munch. The only snag is that, to catch it, you do first have to sit through a 140-minute live-action curtain-raiser, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe - an Oscar-winning actor who's here as wooden and broad in the beam as a Sherwood oak. At 46, he's also a bit long in the tooth to be starring in a film that bills itself as about the beginning Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Chamber music is a highly motivational experience - here is a group of instruments of quite different qualities parading, fighting, ganging up, inviting each other’s new ideas, dialoguing, and all this variety heightening the build-up to the moment when all instruments proclaim unanimity in a grand finish, or (even better) huddle up in mutual creative conspiracy and conjure a mysterious little spell that makes the outsider long to be part of it. All of which was present last night in both the performance and the music of Robert Schumann’s third Piano Trio, played by the Tetzlaff siblings, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Religion, and a sense of the revival of belief, is such an important part of everyday life in the wider population that it is one of the stranger facts about contemporary theatre that so few plays tackle this subject. In fact, the last new British play to do this at the National was David Hare’s Racing Demon in 1990. Now, 20 years later, the same Cottesloe theatre space bears witness to a new play, which opened last night, about the same subject.Canadian-born playwright Drew Pautz’s Love the Sinner begins at an international meeting of church leaders in a hotel somewhere in Africa. As these Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Since Eurydice was the ill-fated wife of Orpheus, master musician, it’s not inappropriate that this reworking of the classical myth by the award-winning US writer Sarah Ruhl should be so much like a song. Her language has a kind of blunt lyricism, and the action of her drama, with its recurrent waves of water imagery, has a vivid, surreal fluidity that eddies and flows like an elusive melody. Sometimes the playfulness is beguiling; sometimes it merely seems arch. And in Bijan Sheibani’s stark production, it is too deliberate, and too rarely genuinely moving, to permit Ruhl’s themes of love Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a comic described (usually by the comic himself) as “the new Bill Hicks”, I would be rather comfortably off. It’s tosh, of course, and, as his brother astutely says in American: The Bill Hicks Story, only Bill Hicks could be Bill Hicks, because what you saw on the outside was what was on the inside. Hicks himself is in no position to argue either way: he died, aged 32, from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Those who die at the height of their powers are usually conferred icon status; some deserve it; many do not. On balance, Hicks almost certainly does, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last night in Wormwood Scrubs a prisoner hanged himself. Successfully. A doctor confirmed “that life is now non-existent”. Later on the same wing it happened again, only this time the suicide attempt didn't come off. For many years it has felt as if the great tradition of television documentary is now non-existent. Programmes like this give you hope that, like that second man on a wire in D Wing, it might just pull through.The workplace fly-on-the-wall has been a collectors' item ever since the channels started to multiply. The economics of embedding a film crew in a specific milieu, Read more ...
howard.male
“The Eighties – where do you bloody well start?” Geoffrey Palmer’s lugubrious voiceover seemed even more world-weary than usual as this hour-long special on the decade everyone loves to hate began. And I felt for him, I really did. Because I am, appropriately enough, the grumpy old hack who's not at all happy to be assigned the task of revisiting this decade in which, it has to said, just about everything was shite. But let’s get one thing clear. I hated this decade at the time, unlike most of the minor-celebrity talking heads hired to give their 10 pence worth on this show.It soon becomes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's 4.00 in the afternoon and Brighton Festival curator Brian Eno is fast-forwarding us to the future. Perched onstage behind an array of consoles, he tells us we're in for "something special for the end of term". The conceit is that the audience are students in the year 2069, indeed the event programme takes the form of notes for a university course on "Cultural Reconstructions". Rather than a single "lecture", though, there are three, and they will take us through to 11.00 tonight.Eno tells us before he begins that "after the Great Pulse of 2042" all digital recordings of the early 21st Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his devotees wouldn’t necessarily be too familiar with the face. But when in the course of the evening he started singing in a voice for which he is better known, the picture became clear. To some of the audience, anyway: MacFarlane is the genius behind Stewie Griffin.Family Guy needs no introduction. Or if it does, it won’t be getting one here. After a Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's an admirable project: to recast the interiors of stately homes as immersive artworks, a musical recital combined with sound installations designed to make the viewer look anew at their surroundings. Certainly as I entered the hallway of Hertford House in Marylebone, where the Wallace Collection is housed, the rich, shifting tones of Simon Fisher Turner's electronic sound manipulations filled the air like perfume, amplifying the opulence of the surroundings and making me – and others – linger on the grand staircase. This was ambient music in the truest sense, deep subliminal bass notes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
These past five days in May have seen some fairly oddball goings-on labelled as "New Dance at the Southbank Centre". Accidentally coinciding with other oddball goings-on on the national scene, since it was booked up long ago before elections were called. But no double-act in politics is likely to be quite as peculiar and weirdly stimulating as that between the Spanish cabaret artiste La Ribot (often to be found nude) and the postmodern French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, playing two sides of a woman who can’t help being at war with herself, like slapstick twins or conjoined politicians. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The political tectonic plates were re-aligning, the economic indicators were jittery, but the cultural kaleidoscope also shifted a bit last night with the unveiling of Susheela Raman’s new material from her yet untitled new album, which on this evidence and some unfinished masters floating around could be one of the albums of the year. Names for the album being talked of include Vel, the Tamil for spear, Tamil Voodoo and Incantation (don’t do that one, guys, people will expect Andean pan-pipers, one of the few global influences you won’t be getting here).Raman, born in London from Tamil Read more ...