Reviews
Saskia Baron
It’s a big ask of an audience to watch a film which for most of its two hour running time, focuses on just two actors, even when they are doing their best work. It’s impossible to fault Woody Norman, the young British actor who first attracted praise on C’mon C’mon. Here he is playing 13-year-old Roy, a sensitive London schoolboy with a mop of unruly dark curls and expressive dark eyes. His parents’ relationship is long over when he takes up his estranged French father’s invitation to live for a year on an uninhabited island in the Norwegian fjords. There’s nothing like Read more ...
Springwood, Hampstead Theatre review - international politics revealed as a gentle comedy of manners
Rachel Halliburton
In 1939, the newspapers dubbed it the Hot Dog Summit. When King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Roosevelt, it was the first time a reigning monarch had visited a sitting president in the US. In the last year we’ve watched King Charles travel to the US to try and repair the tatters of Trump’s ties to NATO. By contrast this visit – in which King George sought the US’s support as World War II loomed – would prove to be the first step towards the Special Relationship which would underpin the formation of NATO a decade later.Yet Richard Nelson’s play – which began Read more ...
Sarah Kent
How to Live on Earth should be compulsory viewing in every classroom, boardroom, town hall and government office on the globe. Billed as a “how-to video” the documentary offers hope as well as a realistic view of the dire straits our planet is in.Director Fredi Devas worked with David Attenborough on seasons two and three of Planet Earth, recording the stunning beauty of nature so as to bring home what our gung-ho economic policies are destroying, but without suggesting any realistic alternatives.In How to... Devas takes the next step. Focusing on three key questions – How to value nature? Read more ...
David Nice
It was an awesome start, those three notes from the cellos even before Wagner's famous "Tristan" chord inspiring more deep emotion than the whole of the previous evening's Bellini I puritani. Somehow, though the end left me dry-eyed, and so did the rest of an undeniably impressive evening. Antonio Pappano gets magnificent sounds from his London Symphony Orchestra, but here felt like his predecessor Simon Rattle in hitting too hard at times, albeit with more flexibility. And with the Metropolitan Opera screening all too fresh in the memory, this Tristan and Isolde already had an impossible Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…Because I’ve never really got "The Chairman of the Board". I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened. Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.However, a word of warning: if the “loudness wars” of modern-day production get you down, you’ll need to Read more ...
David Nice
When it was last staged at the Royal Opera 34 years ago, 33-year-old Bellini's swansong felt like a baggy monster barely justified by some brilliant singing (chiefly from June Anderson and Dmitri Hvorostovsky). Lisette Oropesa now adds remarkable acting to the star vehicle, but even Richard Jones can't do that much with an unwieldy drama, despite his usual signature elements and symmetries. The verdict remains that theatrically one-dimensional bel canto museum pieces like this are best done in concert.Bellini did pull the drama off, with a concise series of dramatic confrontations, in his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lenny Henry’s latest foray into live performance takes him back to his comedy roots, after several years doing theatre and television work. Still at Large, which I saw at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, is part stand-up, part storytelling as he talks about his life and career.He starts by bringing us up to date with what has been happening since he last toured – including winning a BAFTA and being knighted by the late Queen. Not bad for a career which started with him doing impressions on the television talent show New Faces, and later included Henry co-founding Comic Relief and appearing in Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Violence against women – it’s horrible, and horribly familiar. Let’s make a list: everyday sexism, coercive control, physical attacks, mind games, casual cruelty, double standards, victim shaming, gaslighting, constant undermining, sexual manipulation, domestic abuse, gross neglect, femicide, grooming, harassment, unwanted touching, catcalling… It’s a long list, exhausting, but hardly exhaustive. So how can you dramatise this in a 90-minute play?Award-winning playwright Sophie Swithinbank’s gruelling new drama, Sting, which is currently playing in the Young Vic’s studio space, takes its place Read more ...
David Nice
There was so much to be thankful for throughout the three days I spent at the Aldeburgh Festival this year. First, of course, to have struck gold in so many of the concerts I caught was lucky enough in itself. But the context has never felt more vital as breezes cooled the beach at Aldeburgh and the Alde estuary at Snape while London sweltered in unnaturally high temperatures and a humidity quite different from the fresh airs of the Suffolk coast. My last afternoon, after an emotional workout in Aldeburgh's Jubilee Hall (see below), was simply magical: a walk from Snape towards Iken that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Fifty years since Benjamin Britten died, and his operas are still in repertory: half a dozen of them at least. It’s a tribute to his theatrical, as much as to his musical, genius that these works still punch their weight on the stage as much as on disc; and perhaps none of them punches it harder than Billy Budd, which Glyndebourne are reviving in Michael Grandage’s spectacular production from 2010.In Billy Budd, as in Peter Grimes, Britten’s tragic agent is the sea. But whereas in Grimes the sea is purely the mechanism behind events on land, in Budd it is all around, an image of life and our Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One sometimes finds oneself wondering whether Harlan Coben is an author or a set of AI procedures designed to manufacture plots of ludicrous twistiness. Whatever he or it is, it’s managed to infatuate Netflix and Prime Video, who can’t stop turning this stuff into TV wallpaper (The Stranger, The Woods, Shelter etc). Richard Armitage quite often stars in them.Armitage isn’t in I Will Find You, but most of the usual Coben-esque traits are in evidence. There are frequent enigmatic flashbacks to past events which have paved the way for the present-day action, there are missing persons and altered Read more ...