Reviews
fisun.guner
Walk into the gaping mouth of the metal container featured in Miroslaw Balka’s installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you are plunged into a disorientating darkness. Unnerved, you shuffle forward, passing and perhaps finding comfort in the ghostly presence of other limbs, other bodies which are also shuffling uncertainly, all awareness of spatial relationships denied in the enveloping blackness.Balka, a Polish artist born 13 years after the end of the Second World War, has become known as a Holocaust artist. He mines personal memories of growing up in post-war Warsaw, and mixes these Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The well-prepared adult accompanying an under-10 to the Royal Ballet’s Tales of Beatrix Potter will take with them a pillow and a potty, the pillow for themselves, the potty to tuck under the seat for the necessary moment during this 70-minute marathon. Should the Stasi at Bag Search at the Opera House entrance insist on the potty being checked into the cloakroom, the canny adult carries a supersized handkerchief as backup, to stuff into the child’s wailing mouth when - 30 minutes in, with infant acuity - it realises that it has seen the best bits and there are another 40 minutes of these Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s what any woman dreams of. You’re in the throes of childbirth, contorted by spasms of medieval-style agony, when in bounces chirpy Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden to assist with the delivery. It remains to be seen how accurate this show’s title is (this was the pilot episode), since the list of celebs willing to expose their inadequacies when confronted with the kind of jobs normal people do is likely to be short.Judging by this saga of Amanda’s five-week crash course in midwifery, the aim was to produce something more along the lines of "I hadn't a clue what I was doing at first Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There’s simply no orchestral sound quite like it. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had barely done a bar of Bedřich Smetana’s overture to The Bartered Bride before I found myself grinning like a fool. It was as if I had stepped off a plane and walked into a bath of fresh foreign sun. The biting cold of winter had temporarily lifted for those who had made it to the Barbican this weekend. Spring had come early. The rush of notes and folksy flavours of the Czech overture probably would have added glow to our cheeks no matter who had delivered them. But there’s a big difference Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A penny for the author’s thoughts. An opening montage makes it quite clear that Vladimir Nabokov had no truck with witless modernity. Yet here nonetheless is a documentary on his infamous bestseller, and they've gone and named after a TV talent show about the hunt for an actress to play a singing nun in a West End musical. Why? Was the idea to interest Sound of Music fans in Lolita? If they were going for a song, that dodgy one from Gigi would have been rather more apposite: “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.Perhaps Nabokov would have chuckled. After a lifetime of wandering, he did spend his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"They all laughed at Rockefeller Centre, now they’re fighting to get in,” as the Gershwins put it. Much the same applies to Susan Boyle, the implausible contestant from Britain’s Got Talent who has soared fantastically from a closeted life of caring for her widowed 91-year-old mother in West Lothian to the top of the American album charts. In the inimitable stat-speak of music trade mag Billboard, Boyle’s debut album I Dreamed A Dream “marks the best opening week for a female artist's debut album since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.”ITV1 hailed Boyle’s astounding Read more ...
David Nice
Creative old age brings with it not just the expected serene glow but also a singular urgency, a fresh intensity, or so that magisterial pianist Claudio Arrau once wrote. Arrau was a living testament to his claim; so, now, is the 84-year-old Sir Charles Mackerras. Everything he's chosen to bring to life this season has a valedictory quality, or perhaps he simply selects the best. His Philharmonia diptych of concerts led us from the Wagnerian end of the world on Thursday to a Sunday afternoon of prelapsarian innocence in Beethoven's pastoral idyll and paradise regained in Humperdinck's Hansel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can just picture the meeting. Someone stands up and pitches. “We’ve got this girl, see. And she’s good at numbers, OK? You know, maths and stuff. But here’s the thing: she knows that statistically her best chance of a successful marriage is if she gets hitched to her 11th sexual partner when she’s 28. With me so far, guys? Trouble is, she discovers on her wedding day that Mister Eleven is really Mister Ten. Yeah? And then all hell breaks loose. What you reckon? Eh? Think it’s a goer?” Silence reigns in the room until the head honcho - you somehow assume it is a man - slowly raises his Read more ...
fisun.guner
Perhaps we think we’ve got the whole thing more or less sewn up in the nurture versus nature debate. DNA profiling, gene studies, twin studies, inherited traits - this is the stuff we read about almost daily and it is all meant to tell us who we are. At any rate we seem to live in a culture obsessed with genealogy, which is perhaps as much to do with living as atomised units as it to do with the latest research about genes, or what used to be called heredity.Or perhaps the fixation that has more to do with the television series which gets expert genealogists to look into the family tree of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
‘'You must see this show!” “You must not go to this show!” Faced with those exhortations from friends and colleagues who had already seen (and been quite shocked by) it, I of course go to Kim Noble Will Die at the Soho Theatre. I was trepidatious because they told me it includes film of him consuming dog food, vomiting, self-harming and doing an awful lot of ejaculating - not my idea of a chucklesome evening. But Kim Noble was once half of the award-winning, darkly surreal duo Noble and Silver (with Stuart Silver), who had several years of success at the Edinburgh Fringe, and this is his Read more ...
rose.dennen
J Mascis can almost only sound like J Mascis. Comparing the original material of J Mascis and the Fog and the Dinosaur Jr songs he played last night at the Garage in Islington, there's not a huge amount of difference between the bands. His laid-back, almost comatose delivery and very particular song structures stamp his personality onto every song. Which isn't really a surprise - he's toured with various line-ups over the last 10 years in this band, including Mike Watt of the Minutemen and Ron Asherton of the Stooges but the writing has been very much a Mascis mission.The only thing that does Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It is telling that there were drama critics at the Apollo to review Camille O’Sullivan’s show, The Dark Angel. The half-French, half-Irish woman is ostensibly a singer, but so unique is her delivery that each song is a piece of theatre in its own right. My companion confessed to being just a little scared of O’Sullivan, who has a distinctive look - part vamp, part cabariste, but wholly diva. She described the singer, with her raven hair and a gash of bright-red lipstick, as “a cross between Tracey Emin and Judy Garland”, but soon warmed to her. But then O’Sullivan is a pussy cat, as evidenced Read more ...