Reviews
Lia Rockey
Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.”I nearly – mentally – tweak that sentence to read “of conventional types of work”, but that simply wouldn’t be true: throughout Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, Giovannitti asserts that the problem is work itself, which brings us back to the selling of sex as a no-brainer solution for somebody who is actively disengaged with the entire system. Sex work is her unconventional – though no less valid – ticket Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hey-hey! Alright! The standard greeting of Kendall Roy will be much missed, along with all the other regular joys of Succession. It wasn’t always 100% perfect, thank goodness, it was all too human: changeable, moody, ultimately self-serving, just like its characters, especially as it powered to a climax.But its finale was television writing at its best, daring to slow down, even veer towards sentimentality, before hustling its audience to the finish line with a series of bruising twists and satisfying emotional contortions (a few spoilers lie ahead). Inside Waystar's glass palace the action Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Götterdämmerung is not only the grandest of Wagner’s Ring operas, it is also the most varied. Siegfried’s journey down the Rhine transports him in a short quarter-hour from the hieratic world of the Norns and the World Ash to the soap-opera of the Gibichungs and their anxieties about marriage and political standing (opinion polls?).The second act culminates in a revenge trio worthy of Meyerbeer. Siegfried’s squalid onstage murder – shades of Bizet’s exactly contemporary Carmen – is followed by a thirty-minute disquisition on the end of the world.I exaggerate, but only a little. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRahill Flowers at Your Feet (Big Dada)Rahill Jamalifard’s debut solo album somehow transmutes autobiography into gorgeous slow-pop. Of Iranian-American origin and best-known as singer of the band Habibi, she and FKA Twigs producer Alex Epton use home recordings and pensive, sometimes nostalgic lyrics to create something unique, lolling and amiable. Beck appears on one song, “Fables”, and the magpie spirit of his best work is a good reference point. It’s a lovely album that seems at once familiar, yet strange and new, a collation that includes elements of jazz, trip hop, hip Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Bond film theme plays and the lights go up at the Bush’s Studio space to reveal, not a tuxedoed superspy, but a slim figure in casual clothes sitting on a raised platform. He starts his first speech, then stops, makes asides to the audience, then restarts it. Then wishes it was a film, “which it isn’t”.The figure is Nikhil Parmar, writer of this 60-minute play, who peoples the little stage with a whole neighbourhood: his family, cousins, friends and fellow tenants. Usefully, he has given them all different ethnic accents to help us work out who is who. Scenes rapidly transform, cued by Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The circular form of the large turf-roofed round house at the Ancient Technology Centre in Cranborne, Dorset, is tailor-made for music in the round. The latest in the series of Jaminaround concerts made the most of the intimacy that the venue provides, with music that engaged the audience in a way that conventional staging makes difficult.On a conventional stage, performers are elevated above the spectators, and, even if they body-surf through the crowd, there's a certain distance, a show rather than a conversation. Expertly and sensitively curated by musician Olly Keen, whose father Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Sometimes a production which isn’t trying to do anything too clever can be quite refreshing. Sinéad O’Neill's revival of Annabel Arden’s 2007 Glyndebourne touring production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore is just that.It doesn’t attempt a retelling of the story, or provide any flashy visual trickery. Instead it’s slick, stylish and straight to the point - and tremendous fun to boot. With excellent performances from all cast members, this is classic opera buffa at its best. An uncomplicated production of this opera is apt for the story too. As we know, there is no secret love potion; no Read more ...
Simon Thompson
What’s better than having a star soloist on the billing for a concert? Three star soloists! The Royal Scottish National Orchestra billed this concert as its “All Star Gala”, and that’s more than just a shrewd marketing move (though it was that: this was the busiest audience they’ve had all season). It’s an entirely fitting title for a concert that features Nicola Benedetti on violin, Sheku Kanneh-Mason on cello and Benjamin Grosvenor on piano, all brought together to perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.While they’re here, however, the orchestra wisely decided to put their guests’ talents to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Kearns' comedy is what you might call niche; absurdist, surrealist, poetic – they all apply, underlined by his onstage uniform, or “mask”, of tonsure wig and oversize false teeth. But last year he took part in something very definitely mainstream – Channel 4’s Taskmaster – and knows that some in the audience are here to see not the performer who won best newcomer and best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in successive years (2013 and 2014), but the sweet, giggly comic seemingly incapable of lateral thinking, the contestant destined for last place. (Actually he came third.)Learns Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Gardener Narvel (Joel Edgerton) sniffs soil the way Blue Velvet’s Frank inhaled gas, finding erasure and release. Following Ethan Hawke’s priest in First Reformed (2017) and Oscar Isaac’s titular job in The Card Counter (2021), Paul Schrader’s latest driven protagonist verges on absurd, finding solace in pruning before deploying his secateurs with a prior, particular set of skills.Narvel is the head gardener at the plantation-style estate of aristocratic Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). He’s a middle-aged historian and philosopher of horticulture, keeping a journal at a monastic desk. “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tunisian lives unfold over a working day in Erige Sehiri’s debut Under the Fig Trees, with fig-picking the backdrop to furtive, sparking collisions between men and women. Love, liberation and oppression all take their turn under the sun as community is strengthened or challenged, and a society is subtly implied.Sehiri has a documentary background, and cast non-professionals from her Kesra setting. The naturalistic, improvised performances seem effortlessly real, but this isn’t prosaic non-fiction. The play of changing light and shade marking the day, the loving framing of beautiful faces Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke. When he’s called out to investigate a tip-off about a bank heist, he finds himself tumbling down a rabbit-hole where time, space and identity itself all get swirled in a kaleidoscopic blender.Already, things haven’t been going Read more ...