Reviews
Sarah Kent
Imagine you’ve inherited a castle in West Sussex plus five square miles of farmland. You continue the family tradition of mixed arable and dairy farming, but the soil is so depleted that yields decrease, year on year. Even with the help of government subsidies, after 17 years you are £1.5 million in debt. So what to do?In 2000, faced with these dire circumstances, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell took a risky decision. Inspired by the nature reserve set up in Flevoland, Holland by Dutch ecologist Franz Vera, they abandoned farming, tore down the fences, introduced herds of Exmoor ponies, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
David Nice
It may be unusual to begin festival coverage with praise of the overseer rather than the artists. Yet Roger Wright, who quietly leaves his post at Britten Pears Arts this July after a momentous decade, is no ordinary Chief Executive. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him; he has been a beacon during difficult times for the arts in the UK, and especially during lockdown; and he leaves the Aldeburgh Festival in best ever shape, just as he did the BBC Proms before it.What was for me the deep heart and soul of the first Saturday and Sunday – and, alas, circumstances prevented my Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell. The central figures of that band are Canadian singers Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt (assuming the latter is Canadian as Google wouldn't tell me). Together, their second album is a concept affair loaded with brilliant, poignant freak-folk responses to contemporary capitalism, the gig economy and similar. These include the inspiring title track “ Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a point in this pop revival jaunt where you could feel members of the crowd wince. Not for the performance, but because Nicola Roberts introduced a song by mentioning it was from “the Chemistry album, which came out 19 years ago”. You could almost feel some in the crowd recoil, as if expecting to crumble to dust at that confirmation of the passing of time.Reunion gigs can often carry that nostalgic air, and it was more pronounced than most at this show, part of the girl group’s first tour in 11 years. The sad passing of Sarah Harding due to breast cancer, here remembered through big Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I feel ashamed because I couldn’t become the man that you always hoped I’d become.” The line is repeated during “Father,” The Art of the Lie’s third track. After this, there’s “Mother and Son,” “Daddy” and the allusive “The Child Catcher”. Parent-child relations, from either perspective, are key to John Grant’s sixth solo album. Specifically, how these have rippled through his life to form his present-day self.The US-born though now Iceland national’s follow-up to 2021’s Boy from Michigan is not just about interpreting growing up in a context which would not accept him as gay. The scope is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Why would anyone want to stage a work like The Merry Widow in this day and age? Silly question. It’s the music, stupid. Of course, it’s an entertaining story and there are some good jokes. But I'd bet that if Heuberger had composed the music to this libretto, as he started doing, instead of Franz Lehár, who took it on afterwards, I wouldn't now be writing about Cal McCrystal’s new Glyndebourne production, or anyone else’s for that matter.I realise this might not be quite McCrystal’s opinion. To judge from his approach in Sussex, he sees the work as a comedy with musical attachments. Or from a Read more ...
Heather Neill
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still delightful) 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's most popular novel, is no exception.Looking back 30 years later at how Wickham was treated in Pemberley and Longbourn, Lukis allows him to put his own spin on events then and to give a glimpse of what he has made of life subsequently.Jane Austen's characters are so vivid they frequently jump off the page Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Success in running a large and expanding dance-house enterprise requires knowing when to play safe and when to play with fire, trusting that your audience will come with you. Sadler’s Wells’ annual Flamenco Festival is now such an established feature of the dance calendar that you can usually guess what the opening show will be: a major company with ranks of befrilled backing dancers, a hefty squad of guitarists, box-thwackers and hand-clappers, and at least two or three raucous singers, not to mention the star bailaora and her attendant men. Not this year. This year the opening spot was Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Alice Childress’s Wedding Band has arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith like an incendiary bomb, a weapon that casts a bright light over its target even as it ferociously burns it. It’s a piece about conflict – between racial groups, but also within them. The date is 1918, as the US is settling into its role as a combatant in the First World War. But it’s also the story of other wars hotting up in the year the play was written, 1962, a violent decade for Americans both in southeast Asia and, increasingly, on the home front. In both arenas, Blacks will be disproportionate participants, Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Edinburgh is lucky to get a lot of high quality musicians coming to perform, not least during the summer festival season, but the most high profile musical visitor to the city this weekend was none other than Taylor Swift. Everyone is talking about her: she was even mentioned by one party in the general election campaign. The streets are thronged with visitors who have come to see her, and on my way home from this concert I met hordes of smiling fans dressed in cowboy boots and sparkly tops.Pianist Simon Trpčeski might not quite be in that league of superstardom (yet), and I didn’t notice any Read more ...