Reviews
Nick Hasted
Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.This mystery at first seems secondary to its effect on six protagonists, whose points of view provide pieces of the puzzle. Alongside artfully creepy imagery and gorehound excess, Cregger relies on structure and characters to reel you in, till the central enigma is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Back in the day, when America’s late-night chat show hosts and their guests sat happily smoking as they shot the breeze for a growing audience, the most sought after guest was Oscar Levant. No longer a household name except to fans of vintage Hollywood musicals, in some of which, notably An American in Paris, he appeared, Levant (b 1906) was the Swiss Army knife of the entertainment business: a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, actor, a writer of hilarious memoirs, a raconteur with his own TV chat show. He was also beset with mental health problems, notably OCD, hypochondria and Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jacob Nussey, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Write about what you know, comics are told, and in Primed – his Fringe debut – Jacob Nussey does just that. He describes to great comic effect what it was like in the three years he worked in an Amazon warehouse.It’s not as bad as everyone thinks, he says, but his descriptions suggest otherwise, delivered though they are with a generous dollop of gags and smart observations.He paints a vivid picture of his time there, of his colleagues and how they enacted their revenge for the boredom and dead end nature of the work. Although, he says, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rob Auton, Assembly Roxy ★★★★ The stage is littered with 30-odd large white cards bearing words such as “love”, “believe” and “push”. Rob Auton comes on stage and tells us he’s CAN, a former motivational speaker, and in the following 60 minutes of CAN (An Hour-Long Story) we hear his tale.As ever with Auton, he draws us in, peppering the story with lots of clever gags and asides, and even the odd groaner. His shows are mix of performance poetry, spoken word and storytelling, and he has a knack of looking at things from a different angle, prompting us to look at things anew.For Read more ...
David Nice
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless night of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, from explosive A major to quietest C sharp minor. If not everything along the way was perfect, or even in one major case present, the outlines were bold and engaging.Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was the last major work I heard at the Pärnu Music Festival only a fortnight ago. It bears repeating that young Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Wilderness is the kind of festival where you can overhear a conversation about the philosophical implications of rewilding whilst queuing for Veuve Clicquot, or watch a man dressed as a vicar strip naked mid-cricket match without anyone blinking. It is, in every sense, deeply decent – equal parts bougie and bonkers, like a country house party that accidentally invited in the circus, the club kids, and a few stray shamans.This year’s gathering was a reminder of how the annual arable revel in Cornbury Park has become the gold standard for sophisticated summer merrymaking. And golden it was, Read more ...
Simon Thompson
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented in the arts. This Edinburgh International Festival concert marked their European debut, and they’re doing a miniature residency in Edinburgh that, in another concert, involves them playing alongside some talented young Scots. Whatever their age, they can certainly play. Perhaps the only concession to their inexperience came from conductor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor, Pleasance Dome ★★★★Henry Naylor doesn’t hold back in his latest Fringe offering, an entertaining monologue in which he examines The Sun’s treatment of Elton John in the 1980s, an era when tabloids reigned supreme in the UK media – and trust in them started to erode.Against an onstage projection of screaming tabloid headlines from the era, Naylor tells the tale through the eyes of a keen young reporter hoping to make his mark in his first week at The Sun, then edited by the abrasive Kelvin MacKenzie – “The most foul-mouthed man in Britain” as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.Johanne’s lengthy voiceover relates her romantic awakening first by a French novel then her new French teacher, the felicitously named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Johanne emotionally shoots up fast as she feels Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Even more perhaps than straight theatre, opera seems to draw attention to the meaning behind what may on the face of it appear a simple story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the story, with all its realistic impedimenta, can be simply ignored or reconfigured, as has alas too often been the case.In this 2021 production of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova, Damiano Michieletto took a middle road in the debate. He abandoned all suggestion of locale: no river Volga, no house, no garden, practically no weather, everything played in a uniform quasi-interior (designer Paolo Fantin) framed only by blank Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...