Reviews
David Kettle
As shockingly beautiful as it is horrifyingly brutal, actor Armando Babaioff’s deeply Brazilian adaptation of thriller Tom at the Farm leaves a rancid taste in the mouth and harrowing images seared on the retina. It’s a show to shock and provoke, but also to deeply disorientate, blurring the boundaries between pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion in a way that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.And it’s quickly become something of a classic text, beginning life in 2011 as a play by Canadian Michel Marc Bouchard, before being filmed by Xavier Dolan in 2013. Babaioff returned it Read more ...
David Nice
The craft heads to Mars, the music remains below on earth. Which is partly intentional: composer Jennifer Walshe tells us she listened to “synth heavy music” uploaded by astronauts (“a lot of Mike Oldfield and Vangelis”), so we veer from pop to sound-effects, some good (the sparkler held close to a microphone), some ordinary (a chain thrown to the ground sounds exactly like that). It’s a well-executed whole, though, and will be a hit whatever I write about it.If you witnessed Walshe's The Site of an Investigation at the 2022 Proms, you'll know what to expect. Maybe, though, it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Desiree Burch, Monkey Barrel ★★★★Desiree Burch is a bundle of energy as she comes on stage and gives us a warning about the subterranean venue she’s in. It’ll get hot, the Taskmaster favourite tells us – but maybe that’s just her as she going through the perimenopause, and in The Golden Wrath she’s going to tell us all about it.She starts by running through the differences between the various generational groups in the room. At 46 she just falls into the Gen X group, who went through AIDS, drugs culture and serial killers – the very things that Millennials now do podcasts about, she says Read more ...
David Kettle
With the sheer density of theatrical creations jostling for attention across Edinburgh’s festivals, there’s no shortage of arresting stagings, innovative visuals and powerful, memorable design. (Just take Cena Brasil Internacional’s shocking Tom at the Farm as one particularly epic, raw example.)The sheer scale of the theatrical ambition on display in Works and Days from Antwerp theatre collective FC Bergman, however, might just make your jaw drop again and again. But it’s a fitting theatrical response to a particularly epic subject: nothing less than the history of civilisation itself, told Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof ads they concocted.There are no commercials for Cheezy Peaz in this documentary, a mad montage of Romanian commercials from the 1990s, after the socialist regime and its autocratic leader had been despatched, but there are ads for almost every other category of goods you can think of, from high finance to laxatives. The fun is watching what the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The booklet coming with Just Like Gold - Live At The Matrix frequently refers to the band as “The Solution.” It will be the same here.With respect to the name this pioneering San Francisco psychedelic outfit did choose, their drummer John Chance is quoted in the booklet as saying “My mother was really upset about it [the band’s name], and I knew why.”Lead guitarist Ernie Fosselius adds “We knew vaguely somewhere back in history it was heavy. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t realise how much the name could mean to a Jew.” Or, Ernie, anyone else.One person who realised the resonance of the Read more ...
Every Brilliant Thing, @sohoplace review - return of the comedy about suicide that lifts the spirits
Helen Hawkins
The Fringe piece Duncan Macmillan devised with Jonny Donahoe in 2014 has since been round the world and back, finally landing in the West End. It feels as freshly minted as ever.The premise is simple: a performer takes an audience through the story of his mother’s three suicide attempts, the last one fatal, calling on them to participate when he gives his cues. An assistant director has cased the joint before curtain up, choosing people and giving them numbered cards; some will play a significant part in the story. For the play’s current run, five different performers are leading the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lily Phillips, Monkey Barrel ★★★★Lily Phillips is keen to tell us at the top of her show that she’s not that Lily Phillips. There’s no OnlyFans content in Crying but, dealing as it does with her experience of having a baby, it’s graphic in a different way. So strap in.She tells the story from conception to childbirth and also talks about IVF and being part of a National Childbirth Trust group – or a “diverse group of white, middle-class women”, as the comic drily describes it.It takes real skill to tell a personal story like this and keep everyone, male and female, parents and non- Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so.While depicting Mafia violence as a pestilential evil, The Kingdom allows that crime families’ blood ties and Old Testament revenge ethos prevent insiders from walking away and starting their lives elsewhere. Such Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you have never watched a single episode of the BBC period gangster drama Peaky Blinders, I am not sure what you would make of Rambert’s two-act ballet version. I have watched all six series, and I still left confused. Confused, but also impressed by the five-star standard of the dancing, by the inventive stage pictures created by designer Moi Tran and by the three onstage musicians. Led by lead guitarist/vocalist Mitchel Emms, this trio blast out a score specially written for the piece by Roman GianArthur, alongside tracks featured on the TV show by Radiohead, Frank Carter and the Read more ...
India Lewis
Running as part of the South Facing Festival in Crystal Palace Bowl, Thursday’s headliners, Mogwai, and their friends across the water, Lankum, were an excellent pairing, both atmospheric, wonderful musicians whose instrumental (and vocal, in the case of Lankum) virtuosity, were a real joy to listen to.Confessionally, although I had wanted to arrive earlier to watch Caroline (much lauded by friends who also came to the festival) and The Twilight Sad (glorious Scottish misery), this was the first time that we had left our three-month-old with a babysitter, so we got to the park in time to get Read more ...
David Kettle
The Beautiful Future is Coming, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★Flora Wilson Brown’s epoch-straddling, climate change-themed six-hander had a run at the Bristol Old Vic before transferring to the Traverse Theatre for its Fringe residency. It shows: this is a rich, assured production, deeply bedded in, and as fluid in its performances as it is clear-headed (sometimes harrowingly so) in its themes.And those themes are pretty weighty ones. In 1850s New York, hobbyist scientist (as she’s patronisingly called) Eunice Foote has made a shocking discovery about carbon dioxide, air and heat, but expresses her Read more ...