Reviews
Ian Julier
Who could have imagined the table-turning controversy that might have cast doubt on the inclusion of works by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky when planning this programme?Before raising the baton, Holly Mathieson expressed the hope that Russian music written before the current crisis would survive to be performed after it. Vociferous applause from the audience and bravo to the Association of British Orchestra and its members for their announcement of a measured approach and refusal to cancel Russian music. Let’s hope other arts institutions follow their cue. Completed in 1940 and bearing Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The terrain Holding occupies is well travelled, but this new ITV four-part drama travels over it really well. The landmarks are familiar: a quiet rural community, a cop with an unhealthy lifestyle and a secret sorrow, a feud between rival lovers of the local lothario, a long-buried trauma that’s suddenly unearthed. We could be in any rural location in the primetime drama of the past half-century.But as soon as elderly Mrs Meany (Brenda Fricker, pictured below) comes into shot on her mobility scooter, riding into town like a lone gunslinger with a perm, it’s clear this drama will be having its Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Mike Bartlett’s Cock invites suggestive comments, but the main thing about the play is that it has proved to be a magnet for star casting. Its original production at the Royal Court in 2009 starred Ben Whishaw, Andrew Scott and Katherine Parkinson. Now, this West End revival is performed by Jonathan Bailey, Taron Egerton and Phil Daniels. Reports that Rocketman star Egerton fainted during the first preview have raised public interest in a play whose explicit title, with or without an asterisk, seems particularly provocative in a commercial theatre setting. So what’s it all about?John, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
How do you make a film about death, love and loss that avoids being sentimental, maudlin or pretentious? Take your cue from Portuguese artist Catarina Vasconcelos.Her debut feature, The Metamorphosis of Birds unfolds as a series of exquisite vignettes. Each frame is a masterpiece composed with the beauty and exactitude of a Dutch still life. Meanwhile, on voice over, we are treated to a poetic meditation on grief.In close-up, we see her grandfather Henrique (José Manuel Mendes) telling his dead wife Beatriz that he has sold the house and moved to an old people’s home. He needs to set himself Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Mark Wigglesworth is a semi-regular guest with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and he’s hugely experienced in the opera world, which might explain why my expectations were so high for his Wagner in this concert. In the event, though, I didn’t love his take on Tristan’s Prelude and Liebestod.The sound from the orchestra was right, with tortured lower strings and clean, clear winds, but entries often sounded a little too “approximate”, and the overall sound only occasionally gelled. Admittedly, that’s a risk baked into performing this piece with its tortuous world of unfulfillable longing Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hindsight is everything. In the light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, political intrigues have suddenly taken on a far more menacing face, disbelief has been pulverised by reality – and theatre has become actuality.A few weeks ago, the Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe was listed at the Barbican as a psychological drama set in a dystopian near future, a “fantasy and political thriller about the dangers of looking away when authoritarianism takes root.” The thrill of doom art without doom reality.But at the weekend the production seemed to have been projectile-vomited onto the stage by Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The night after visiting Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders I dreamt that a swarm of wasps had taken refuge inside my skull and I feared it would hurt when they nibbled their way out again.If I painted a self-portrait with wasps escaping from my eyes, nose, ears and mouth it would be a striking image; but would it make me a Surrealist? According to this exhibition, the answer would be a resounding “yes”, since its goal is to chart how Surrealism spread across the globe and how, since the 1920s in Paris, this radical way of thinking has taken root in the collective unconscious ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart had a more eventful lockdown than most, as it marked the end of a five-year relationship and what she describes as a sort of breakdown followed. To add insult to injury, the break-up came not along after she and her girlfriend, fellow comic Sarah Keyworth (whom she doesn't name in the hour), had launched You'll Do, a podcast about – you've guessed – love and relationships.This Isn't For You describes the pain of that time, but Bohart is such a positive presence, and lands the gags so well, that it's rarely downbeat. It is, however, occasionally reflective as she questions Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can’t keep a great playwright down. Ron Hutchinson, whose award winning stage plays, such as Rat in the Skull (1984) and Moonlight and Magnolias (2005), are contemporary classics, has been absent from view for a while. But although he has fallen off my radar in recent years, perhaps it is because, as the title of his book on writing for a living says, he’s been “Clinging to the Iceberg”. Which is a neat segue into his newest play, Ghosts of the Titanic, which gets its world premiere in a coproduction between Park Theatre and Brill Productions. But although it’s an intriguing take on a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If like me you regard the ending of Janáček’s Jenůfa as one of the most moving scenes in all opera, you might care to consider how it would be possible to deflate it in spite of the best singing imaginable. You might, for instance, bring up a back curtain revealing a beautiful garden three or four years on with a sweet little boy gambolling through it, the future product, presumably, of Laca and Jenůfa’s love as opposed to the frozen product of hers and Laca’s half brother Števa’s, recently discovered under the river ice.No surely: too kitsch by half! But that is precisely what happens in the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The relative runt of the Godfather litter was hacked out in a Las Vegas casino, as Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo worked up scenarios for an assignment taken on for the money. Coppola the inveterate cinematic gambler, crippled by the dashing of his indie mogul dream with Zoetrope Studios, could no longer refuse Paramount’s sequel offer. Now that he’s reframing this renamed, subtle yet radical re-edit of The Godfather Part III as “a summing up, almost an illumination of what the first two films mean”, its ignoble, desperately hot-housed origin should be remembered. Much feels forced, as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2000, Broadcast’s first album The Noise Made By People entered the UK’s mainstream Top 100 and claimed the top spot on the dance charts. Three years later, their second album Haha Sound was in the Top Ten of America’s dance/electronic charts. It also went Top Five on the UK’s dance charts.Although this confirms Birmingham's Broadcast weren’t necessarily outsiders, their third album Tender Buttons did not chart. By this point, in 2005, they had slimmed down from a five-piece to core members James Cargill and Trish Keenan. Tender Buttons was followed by the 2009 collaboration album Broadcast Read more ...