Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Although it was released as a single in November 1968, The Goodees’ “Condition Red” could – apart from a specific quirk – have been issued four years earlier, in the wake of The Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” hitting the US charts. Despite going on sale in the hippie, back-to-the-roots, heavier-than-heavy, burgeoning-bubblegum era, “Condition Red” is so in sync with “Leader of the Pack,” it can pass for a follow-up.However, the lyrics – that specific quirk – of “Condition Red,” while in line with the Shangri-Las’ tale of the demise of a ruff-’n’-tuff rebel boy after a vehicular mishap, are Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Though there are few starry, starry nights in Stockwell these days, nor flaming flowers that brightly blaze, you can find ragged men in ragged clothes outside the Tube station. One hundred and fifty years ago, when a fiery redheaded lad pitched up in SW9 asking for a room, something happened and, if we don’t know exactly what, we can have fun wondering can’t we?It wasn’t just Don McLean who was drawn to the legend of Vincent van Gogh. In 2002, Nicholas Wright used a fragment of fact and a whole lot of imagination to spin a play out of the youthful Dutch master’s brief sojourn in South London Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Hail Mary pass is a desperate act of sporting faith when regular tactics fail, and the world’s end is faced here by constitutional optimists on both sides of the camera: The Martian novelist Andy Weir and its film’s writer Drew Goddard, Lego Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord and Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, waking alone in a spaceship unreachable light years from home, beard and brain mangled as he remembers his suicide mission. Gosling’s cool charm, a blank slate which flips from Drive’s smooth killer to La La Land’s mild lover, here converts into raw film star fuel for Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Which crimes are the hardest to forgive? Violence; sexual assault; aggravated sexual assault? Yes, that kind of covers the territory. In Sarah Power’s new play, Welcome to Pemfort, currently playing at the Soho Theatre, this ethical and personal dilemma comes wrapped in an oddly discordant comedy about a countryside castle planning its first Living History event. You know the kind of thing: jousting, dressing up in medieval garb and serving olde English grub. But what about the crime? Set in the cluttered gift shop of Pemfort castle (actually just a fort with a bell tower), the play Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Over the years, Ronnie Scott’s, one of the premier jazz clubs in the world, has hosted some truly transcendental music. There’s something about the horseshoe layout of the seating that promotes exceptional intimacy. When the music zings and the audience feels it, there is a positive feedback loop which elevates the event beyond the merely ordinary.Steve Coleman and Five Elements, although still jet-lagged, in the early stages of an intense European tour, rose to the occasion, with an incandescent set that had the punters bewitched and – for Ronnie’s – unusually quiet. Unlike many other star Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tony Kiritsis (the excellent Bill Skarsgård; Nosferatu) is a nervy, paranoid oddball. Well, he would be. He has an appointment with a mortgage broker and in the long cardboard box that he’s carrying is a sawn-off shotgun.Gus Van Sant’s first feature film since Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) is itself something of an oddball project. Fraught and compelling, with Al Pacino as a very nasty businessman, it's based on the true story of a hostage crisis in Indianapolis in 1977 and is a tense, claustrophobic depiction of the little guy pitted against a corrupt banking system. Though Read more ...
David Nice
When the joyful energy at the final curtain - love briefly triumphant in the power-dominated world of Wagner's Ring - is as insanely high as it was at the end of a dizzying first act, that killer of a forging scene, you know this is a winner. Andreas Schager is a battle-hardened Siegfried, knowing no fear at full pelt but having to work harder on softer tones now, and his still-boyish enthusiasm learns all the febrile, physical lessons director Barrie Kosky asks of him in the third instalment of his challenging new Royal Opera Ring. It's a combustible meeting.We also witness Kosky developing Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you’ll forgive me the first of two tiptoes into Gonzo Journalism, a few weeks ago I found out that I have a faulty gene - not a romantically tragic Romanov one, but a defect on the double helix that had already manifested itself in a condition affecting my family and that I may have passed to my sons.That crucial medical knowledge leads to early diagnosis and allows for preventative treatment if required, but what if I had known about it 30 years ago, just before my DNA was shuffled at conception's roulette wheel? What if its impact were greater, life-altering, even life-threatening for Read more ...
Heather Neill
Gorky's satire is set in the summer of 1904, between the opening of The Cherry Orchard and Chekhov's death that year, and the first Russian Revolution early in 1905. Summerfolk has echoes of Chekhov, The Seagull as well as The Cherry Orchard, to which it could be a sequel. Gorky's folk, lazily holidaying in their summer dachas, might be inhabiting the new development which Lopakhin was to build in place of the cherry trees chopped down at the end of Chekhov's last play. The closeness of the relationship is explicit here: there is a reference to trees having been cut down to make space for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mother Pearl is not direct. While sixth track “Checking In,” with its rising-falling cadences and verse-chorus structure, is its most immediate, the dominant impression of the new LP by the Iceland-born Gyða Valtysdóttir is that it’s about creating an atmosphere and then nurturing it to generate an enveloping aural milieu.According to Gyða, quoted in the promotional material, “Mother Pearl is a seed, is potential, is a gift, is an aragonite, is a jewel created from an irritation from a grain of sand, is iridescent, contains all the colours, is vibrant, it is a fertile egg waiting to become.” Read more ...
Robert Beale
The members of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, on an intensive tour of the UK and Ireland which sees them right now performing daily after long journeys, are heroes by any standard.They are also musicians of high calibre and with a distinguished tradition. The programme they offered in Manchester was designed to link Britain and Ukraine symbolically, but it was – as with all its variants on the tour – built around Beethoven.For a symphony orchestra, their numbers on tour are modest, with 34 string players and 15 others, but it’s a contingent that works very well for Beethoven – Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course.
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If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...