Reviews
Bernard Hughes
What a difference a few years make. In 2019 I reviewed composer Dani Howard’s first opera, Robin Hood, also produced by The Opera Story, and commented on the fundraising success that enabled a cast of six and an ensemble of 10.Fast forward through five years of drought for the arts in Britain and her second stage work is scored for a single voice (plus a dancer) accompanied by just two instruments, cello and piano. Howard’s subject matter, the 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper, suits this more intimate approach, but I definitely missed the enterprising scoring of the earlier work. Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
From the moment that the blood-stained Nathuram Godse rises out of the floor of the National Theatre's Olivier stage and demands ‘What are you staring at? Have you never seen a murderer up close before?’, we are locked into a queasy, teasing relationship with the man who killed Mohandas Gandhi, the latter renowned throughout the world for his passive but effective resistance to British colonial rule in India. Returning for a second run, Indhu Rubasingham’s production has several new cast members, including Hiran Abeysekera as Godse. Playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar was the National’s first Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Zurich International series at Cadogan Hall has turned into a horizon-expanding stage on which to catch those visiting orchestras that don’t always claim top billing in bigger venues. The hall’s welcoming acoustic shows off the sound and style of its guests as the grander barns might never do.After an acclaimed debut UK tour in 2022, Thursday night saw a return engagement for the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra: not, at present, Hungary’s most fêted ensemble but one that, on this form, more than deserves its loud hosannas. Founded (as the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra) before the Read more ...
India Lewis
Less than ten days after (surprise) releasing her new album, trip9love…???, Tirzah took to a small stage in Hackney Wick to play it through (in order), wreathed enigmatically in dry ice. The space itself felt like it matched the music well, a laid-back intimacy enjoyed by a packed, relaxed audience. Warming up beforehand, the floor was filled with smoke (a harbinger of the gig to come), lit with soft, coloured light, and soundtracked with gentle piano. A DJ began mixing glitchy beats over slowed Drake and Bjork-adjacent tracks as more people started filling in towards the main Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s set aside, to begin with, the question of the concept, other than to praise it as consistent. Most vital about this brave new Rheingold is the vindication of director Barrie Kosky’s claim that “what makes a Ring production interesting is the detailed work within the scenes between the characters”. With a conductor as intent on clarity and meaning as Antonio Pappano, and a true ensemble of performers willing to go along with him and Kosky, the battle is three-quarters won.The close co-ordination gives us plenty of new musical-dramatic insights in Wagner's half-joky, half-deadly " Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Polly Stenham MBE had a meteoric rise with this play, her award-winning 2007 debut which she wrote aged 19 and whose original Royal Court cast featured Lyndsay Duncan and Matt Smith, and earned a much-lauded West End transfer. I remember it as a punky and powerful in-yer-face experience so I’m not surprised to see it being revived, this time starring Niamh Cusack, at Tom Littler’s ever enterprising Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. But, since meteors – however bright – tend to pass quickly, can this drama still light up the contemporary sky?The answer is yes and no. It’s a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Towards the end of the 18th century, Lady Emma Hamilton (like so much in this woman's life, hers was a title achieved as much as bestowed) was the “It Girl” of European society.They’ve always been around – women who have the combination of looks, intelligence and transgressive confidence fused by a rare alchemy into a concoction that a certain kind of powerful man cannot resist (and plenty of not so powerful men, too). Then, as now, such women were dangerous and the patriarchy exacted a price for the challenge not so much to its norms but to its hypocrisy. Such people burned bright, but Read more ...
AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T Rex review - musical doc falls between two stools
Adam Sweeting
Seeking to be both a documentary and a musical tribute to Marc Bolan, AngelHeaded Hipster doesn’t quite pull it off on either count. It’s based around the making of an album (whence the film gets its title) of versions of Bolan’s songs by an interminable list of artists including U2, Joan Jett, Devendra Banhart, Macy Gray, Beth Orton and many more, produced by Hal Willner and released in 2020. Willner, who died shortly before the album's release, made his name by creating multi-artist tributes to such fabled names as Charles Mingus, Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen, but one might hesitate to put Read more ...
Heather Neill
There is a grainy piece of black and white film on YouTube featuring Noel Coward as the celebrity guest on a 1964 edition of the popular television panel show, What's My Line. He signs in with panache, paying careful attention to the diaeresis over the e in Noel and enveloping his first name with a stylish C from the second. Artifice, self-invention, elegance – these are qualities inseparable from the Coward reputation. If they applied to his own persona, so they frequently do to the characters in his plays. An underlying sadness in the man himself is now acknowledged and, similarly, the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Older fans of T Rex will get pleasure from hearing the band’s tracks and reliving some of the buzz of being a dino-rocker, but, despite the title, this isn’t strictly a fan film. Describing what kind of film it is, though, would involve a serious spoiler, which points to its wonky narrative ambitions. It expends a lot of screen time building up to an unsurprising reveal (more on that below).The film opens with a charabanc of children from a Liverpool care home on an outing to a T Rex gig in Manchester in 1976. We meet some of them en route to the concert, all with sparkly face paint and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The show begins before the audience troops into the theatre; the walls of the staircase leading to it are plastered with images of Kate Berlant, its writer and performer; we file past her (sitting by the doorway with a sign saying “Ignore me”) and a long word-salad statement by her; and then, before she appears, we watch a film on the onstage screen in which – in arty black-and-white, quoting Stanislavsky and Oscar Wilde – Berlant preens and pouts and Looks Very Serious.It nicely sets up Kate Berlant Is KATE, her one-woman show (already a hit off-Broadway), in which the American stand-up and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I find it hard to know quite what to make of Ainadamar, Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s one-act opera about the life and death of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in unknown circumstances – probably by Nationalist militia – in the early months of the Spanish civil war in August 1936.Composed in 2003, Ainadamar is described (anonymously) in the Cardiff programme as “a ground-breaking opera for the 21st century.” But in many ways it seems to me something of a throwback, not just to “portrait” operas like Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer or Glass’s Einstein/ Gandhi/ Read more ...