Reviews
David Nice
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as the ill-fated Miles in his operatic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The upheaval Hemmings wrought in Aldeburgh’s Crag House when Britten and his life-partner Peter Pears were living there has potential for a similar ambiguity to the opera’s carousel of what’s innocent and what’s “depraved,” and Kevin Kelly has realized the essential drama in it.The main problem is that no 12-year-old of unbroken voice was going to act in a more explicit take than the opera’s on who is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such previous successes from this same author as The Ferryman and his mighty Jerusalem. Telling of the toxic legacy of a Blackpool stage mother, the play follows The Ferryman in granting pride of place to the inestimable Laura Donnelly (Butterworth's partner), and this dramatist's collaboration with his similarly Tony-winning director, Sam Mendes, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Thursday night at Islington’s legendary Hope and Anchor: a challenging time and place to get an audience going, not least following the very assured edgy-yet-sweet singer-songwriter Daisy Veacock, another newish-kid-on-the-block on the edge of the recognition so many young artists yearn for.Tom Webber, the boy-wonder from Didcot, now a fully-grown man, is clearly a little nervous, and it takes him a few songs to really get into his crowd-winning magic stride. The new material, four out of six in the early part of the set - need more running in, and placing them at the opening, nerves Read more ...
Jack Barron
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries green. But if points mean prizes, prizes also mean points, and point-scoring is a dubious means to judge a poet. While such institutions do much for the general reach and popularity of poetry, and though it’s always nice to be appreciated, you’d do better on the page than the awards stage if you want to get a proper sense of a poet’s interest in the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was a muesli programme: nutty, crunchy, just sweet enough, its success lying in the balance of the various ingredients. At times, such was the explosiveness of the playing, it felt like popping candy had been added to the muesli, but in a good way. The fireworks came in the brilliant John Adams finale, but also from the young Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, whose playing blazed in the first half.Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, written for the composer himself to play and begun when he was little older than Malofeev is now, is certainly young man’s music. Malofeev responded to its Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North have a new pairing for Mascagni’s popular but clichéd Cavalleria Rusticana in this double bill: an early Rachmaninov one-acter, written when he was 19. The production of the former is a revival of the one seen in 2017 in their Little Greats season, and its director then, Karolina Sofulak, has returned to create this Aleko alongside it.So interest is inevitably more in what she has done with the new piece, and, intriguingly, how she has used the overlapping casting of the two to find striking resonances in their stories.Both are tragic tales of murder born of infidelity and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and in some ways the most surprising. Rarely encountered since its 1938 premiere which starred a young John Gielgud, Dodie Smith's leisurely play emerges as a real pleasure, not least for returning the wonderful Lindsay Duncan to a preferred address for a performer whom I first saw on this same stage - the National Theatre's Lyttelton - in Cat on a Hot Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It's been a decade since Lisandro Alonso’s last film, Jauja, which signalled the Argentine's first collaboration with professional actors, notably a magnificent Viggo Mortensen. The pair reprise their collaboration in Eureka, in the first of three stories tenuously connected by dashes of mysticism and the director’s customary interest in the fate of indigenous people.I’m a great admirer of this director, one of the brightest lights of the Argentine renaissance of the early Noughties, and a leading exponent of slow cinema. Alonso's films – from La libertad and Los Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Perhaps the most memorable of the stage designs Peter Pabst created for Pina Bausch is back in London after nearly 20 years: a sea of erect pink silk carnations, the Nelken of the title. It’s canonical that there are 8,000 of them, but only the backstage team know the truth of that. As the piece opens, dancers start to appear in formal attire, carrying chairs, picking their way through the flowers and sitting down in silence, expectantly. Then Richard Tauber sings Franz Léhar’s “Schön ist die Welt” (The world is beautiful). Over the next two hours the piece will turn that idea into a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Judy Chicago created Birth Project in the 1980s, recognising with typical perspicacity that the favouring of “the paint strokes of the great male painters” over “the incredible array of needle techniques that women have used for centuries” has implications far beyond the precedence of one art form over another. She saw that a gendered hierarchy of art forms had contributed to the erasure of female experience, and pointed to the “iconographic void” where images of childbirth in western art might be.Appearing early on in the show, Birth Tear/Tear, 1982, is an extraordinary evocation of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated Elvis misfire.However, turning the life and artistry of a “soul rebel, natural mystic” into a mainstream film biography was always going to involve compromises and over-simplifications. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who helmed the King Richard tennis movie) has corralled a batch of screenwriters including Terence The Sopranos Winter. They’ve Read more ...