Reviews
Gary Naylor
The kitchen sink drama has been a standby of English theatre for 70 years or more, but not always with an actual sink on stage. But there it is, in an everyday home that harbours a secret or two in Clive Judd’s debut play, the winner of the 2022 Papatango New Writing Prize. Matt, distracted and not wholly at ease, pitches up unannounced at the house in which he grew up, just outside Kidderminister, one of the more faceless towns in one of the more faceless regions of England. His cousin, Jess, seems listless, neither pleased nor displeased to see him some two years after last he was in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Why did Maui work better than Taormina? Mike White’s second series of The White Lotus, which has relocated for its second season from an upscale Hawaiian resort to the fleshpots of Sicily, is still a worthwhile watch, but it’s hard not to wonder where that special savour has gone this time. We know the drill now, for starters: a dead body turns up in an earthly paradise for rich people, and six episodes later we will know the who, why and when. Season one had fun misleading us about the perp; the second has opted for the trickier stunt of concealing exactly how many bodies there are, and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When most of us fall victim to things beyond our control, the impulse is to howl into the abyss, scream to the stars, wave our fist at clouds. Most of us, of course, aren’t Neil Young.While the raging wildfires that destroyed the singer’s home in 2018 are unlikely to be the sole driving force behind this collection of environmentally-focused songs (he hitched his horse to that wagon decades ago), they certainly seem to have focused his ire and given him a theme to roll with for World Record, his 42nd studio album.Following the success of 2021's Barn, Young sticks to familiar ground with Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In some ways the concerto da camera was the 18th-century music equivalent of the hatchback – only slightly larger in scale than a basic chamber work but with an ambition that allowed it to carry ideas associated with more substantial structures.At St John’s Smith Square, the dynamic ensemble El Gran Teatro del Mundo gave a diverting tour of this distinctive form, titled "The Art of Conversation", taking us from Germany down to the Mediterranean through Italy and Spain before circling back to Germany again.Telemann was the underlying link, and the concert began with a Sonata in B flat Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa dies off-screen of an undisclosed disease, suffering “in silence” notes sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), actor and role as one at the end. Lost after one, uniquely iconic full-length film, recasting and digital resurrection was rejected by shocked writer-director Ryan Coogler, even as he ripped his sequel script up.Mourning is intermittent in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, with a ghost-wind whistling over a Marvel Studios emblem given over to Boseman. The strength of Coogler’s initial Afrofuturist vision is shown by T’Challa’s funeral, led by white-robed women Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Only a Eurostar day-trip away, at least from London, the Louvre is hosting an exceptional exhibition, which makes the journey to Paris well worthwhile. Things – A History of Still Life (Les choses – une histoire de la nature morte) is one of those massive shows that explores a complex theme in a thoroughly original and adventurous way.The curator, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, has been given free rein to author a vast and very personal survey of still lives and artists’ representation and evocation of "objects" that ranges from Prehistoric Europe to contemporary work by artists such as Nan Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective ticks all the boxes of diversity and reaching out to all ages without needing to draw attention to it all. The answer is quite simple: the repertoire – in Saturday’s morning and afternoon concerts, French chamber music both known and unfamiliar – is beautifully chosen and programmed, the performers all born communicators as well as musicians at the highest level.Among the first and last artists to appear were recent BBC Young Musician finalists, horn-player Annemarie Federle (2020) and percussionist Jordan Ashman (2022; another, Laura van der Read more ...
Paul Rider
Donna Fleming’s exhibition at the Pie Factory Gallery in Margate is called Apocalypse, which is confusing because it has nothing to do with the end of the world. Fleming does not even watch the news because she “does not want to think about miserable things”. Instead the title refers back to the Greek word that apocalypse is derived from, apokalypsis, which means uncovering.At first it’s not exactly clear what is being uncovered. There’s a lot to take in. There is six years’ worth of work in the show and Fleming is prolific, working in a wild array of different media. She trained at the RCA Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very little points to anything specific. Parts of “Superseded” nod towards the 1968 Pretty Things’s track “Eagle’s Son”. Elsewhere in the set, a circular bass guitar figure is reminiscent of a motif from Spirit’s “1984”. But for a band so explicitly looking to rock’s psychedelic lineage, the influences are effortlessly subsumed into the whole to become mostly invisible foundations rather than noticeable elements of the superstructure.This London show by Nick Saloman’s Bevis Frond is nominally to promote last year’s album, Little Eden. The encore is its final track “Dreams of Flying”. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Every day there is bad news about the NHS — junior doctors are exhausted, nurses need foodbanks and the stats are hitting all-time lows. So a new play about a junior doctor facing the stresses of the job is certainly timely.In fact, Nathan Ellis was inspired to write Super High Resolution, now given a powerful and moving production at the Soho Theatre, because his sister, Dr Tamsin Ellis, almost quit her job. Yes, she was that desperate. And you can tell: the writing is personal and committed — this is a play that feels like it has been wrenched from the heart.In this story, which is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a disconnect between Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett on record and in concert. On record, especially on her latest album, her dryly-stated, touching emotional lyricism is to the fore, but in the live arena you’re as likely to be presented with a scorching rock goddess, playing with her fingers and no plectrum. Her grunge assault on 2013 single “History Eraser”, for instance, has proper garage heft, initially coming on like a Cobain firestorm then settling to something akin to fellow left-handed axe hero Jimi Hendrix. She doesn’t talk much between songs, but she sure Read more ...
Robert Beale
This was at first sight a somewhat ordinary looking programme for the BBC Philharmonic: Beethoven, Brahms … even Stravinsky doesn’t frighten a Saturday night audience in Manchester these days. They come for a good night out and quite a lot of them applaud after every first movement – even more if they can (and that means they don’t consider themselves high-brow, which is always a good thing for classical concerts).But the most notable thing was that there was an outbreak of affection and bonhomie which seemed to begin from the platform and spread out to the hall. Elena Schwarz was Read more ...