Reviews
stephen.walsh
It’s always tempting, at curtain-up in La Traviata, to settle back, half-close one’s eyes, and soak up the familiar without the anxiety of the new. Not this time you won’t. David McVicar’s lavish 2009 text-true staging is being revived with a generally strong, stylish and dependable cast.But one particular performance will have you sitting bolt upright in your seat, hardly able to believe that this is the third or fourth or whatever revival of an elderly production of a repertory standard in (many Welsh believe) Verdi’s native town.I’ve seen and heard some fine Violettas in my time, and some Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are times when it’s best to know as little as possible before taking one’s seat for a show – this new production of Rebecca would be a perfect such example.It was once talked up as the new Phantom, the next smash hit musical that would do on Broadway in the 2010s what it had done in Europe in the 2000s. Mysterious backers sent emails from dubious addresses, one bearing news of the death of a key investor and, while real sets were built and real actors rehearsed, the money, like the deceased investor, was never real at all. More than a decade on, Rebecca, adapted from the 2006 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Must science always be dominated by politics? This question is most urgent when the stakes are high – climate change or nuclear weapons. And it is grimly true that the fact that audiences are still interested in the race for the atom bomb between the Allies and Nazi Germany in the 1940s says something about our current anxieties about Russia, North Korea and Iran.Billed as the “other side of the Oppenheimer story”, American playwright Alan Brody’s award-winning 2013 history play, Operation Epsilon, gets its British premiere at the Southwark Playhouse, and offers a solid, if pedestrian, Read more ...
David Nice
Britten’s biggest cornucopia of invention seems unsinkable, and no-one seeing his breakthrough 1945 opera for the first time in this revival will fail to register its forceful genius. David Alden’s expressionist nightmare of a production, though, has never seemed to me to hit the heart of the matter. And though musical values are strong, ENO music director Martyn Brabbins doesn’t always keep the tension flowing.This always has been and always will be a showcase for the English National Opera Chorus, projecting perfectly while semaphoring and hand-jiving, good enough to make us forget - as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to numerous arguments and disagreements over script, casting etc, nine years have elapsed since Expendables 3 hit the multiplexes, and Sylvester Stallone and his mercenary crew were perilously close to being over the hill even then. In Expend4bles, age has duly withered them even further, a fact wryly acknowledged by director Scott Waugh and his screenwriting squad. Dolph Lundgren, now vaguely resembling an ancient relic dug up from a peat bog in Jutland, has become a comic figure whose sniper’s skills are severely hampered because he hasn’t made that latest trip to SpecSavers.Jason Read more ...
Robert Beale
For someone who said when he first took the helm at the Hallé that he “didn’t do much Mahler”, Sir Mark Elder has a pretty good track record. He’s conducted all the symphonies except one over 20 or so years at the Bridgewater Hall, and two of them have been heard under his baton more than once.Those are no. 9 (it was also recorded, in 2014) and no. 5 – and now, in his final season as music director, he’s begun with the former and will end with the latter, both recalling memorable experiences from the past for those who witnessed them.The Ninth is, in his own words, a lovely way to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
An impressive performance by Samuel West as one of two warring hams stuck on-set in a trailer over a not-so-dormant volcano in Iceland, endlessly waiting to shoot their scene and go home, tended by a young runner whose woke values soon clash with their antediluvian ones...This Park Theatre debut sounds like the makings of a decent farce, with maybe a nod to Beckett. But Adrian Edmonson’s and Nigel Planer’s It’s Headed Straight Towards Us has ended up an incompletely digested mix of digs at the acting world and Young Ones-y excess. The action begins in blackout with what sound like Read more ...
James Saynor
If you think we’ve got culture wars, then welcome to Transylvania. This rugged Romanian region is home to a bewildering overlap of ethnicities and tongues – Hungarian, a bit of German and Romanian itself – such that Cristian Mungiu’s new movie offers subtitles in different colours to get the idea across.In a backwoods burg full of shotguns, bears, people dressed as bears, worrying things in the forest and an awful lot of barking dogs, the Romanian auteur shows us how different folks can rub along quite well – up to a point when bigotry unfolds that would make Enoch Powell blanch.Matthias ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can there be too much repetition? Is there a limit to the level of rhythmic insistence which can be tolerated? Judging by the enthused reaction to this sold-out show from Mexico’s Lorelle Meets The Obsolete where a heads down, no-nonsense pulse propelled their set, the answer to these questions is no.Central to this display of musical determination are drummer Andrea Davì and bassist Fernando Nuti. Both are Italian. Neither are full-time members of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete though each has played on their records, including this year’s Datura album. Whack, whack, whack goes Davì. Thump, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic reflection on Putin’s war on Ukraine?But there’s no doubt of the current war’s absolute relevance to Dmitri Glukhovsky and Maxim Didenko’s address of a hideous episode of World War Two, the murder of some 200,000 Polish Jews from Lodz by the SS, with help from Jews themselves.Normally Glukhovsky’s reputation rests on his bestselling Metro2033 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the decimation of the Amazon rain forests or the melting of the polar ice caps, Morris decided to spend a year filming the barley field that surrounds the 4,000-year-old Boscawen-Rôs East menhir, or standing stone, four miles north-east of Land’s End in Cornwall. According to the late earth mysteries writer John Michell, the so-called Longstone and Read more ...
David Nice
Many of us have perhaps grown too accustomed to the friendly face of My Fair Lady. George Bernard Shaw’s very original play is sharper, less sentimental yet ultimately more profoundly human. Its wit and wisdom zip along in Richard Jones’s symmetrical, perfectly calibrated production, with three astonishing performances and two climactic scenes, one in each half, which respectively make you (me) cry with laughter and bring a tear to the eye at choice moments.This isn’t the Cinderella story of the musical. There’s never any doubt that the huge emotional intelligence, spirit and quick learning Read more ...