Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
The world of the 17th-century tavern is a long way from the contemporary concert hall. A quick glance at the scene in paintings by Jan Steen or his contemporaries shows us a joyful tangle of men and women, dogs, cats and small children, all engaged in a riot of drinking, dancing, brawling, music-making and love-making (occasionally even napping) while hens stroll officiously across the floor pecking up crumbs. It looks noisy, dirty and a jolly good time.There were no dogs or hens (or napping, that I could see) at Bjarte Eike’s latest Alehouse Session at the handsome Middle Temple Hall. But, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Well, this is a first: a comedy show with footnotes. Alfie Brown tells us at the top of the hour that he'll be stepping out of his routines from time to time to explain why the gag he's about to tell, or has just told, isn't offensive. It's a clever touch, one of several in Sensitive Man.Brown is perhaps taking a sensible precaution over being misunderstood because he's a contrarian comic who is happy to tackle sensitive subjects – unplanned parenthood, racism and paedophilia in previous shows – and here he delves into mental health and white male privilege.There's more material about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult to know if this biopic of Richard Williams – father of Venus Williams and Serena Williams, two of the greatest tennis players ever (perhaps the greatest in the latter's case) – is true to the facts, or just a version of them.The women are listed as executive producers, so it was with a cynical reporter's eye and someone who has a little knowledge of the subject (I've interviewed Richard Williams several times over the years, and attended numerous press conferences given by his daughters), that I watched King Richard. It's an enjoyable appreciation of his role in their success Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Korean-American writer Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, currently enjoying its UK debut at Southwark Playhouse, is presented within a frame that cleverly and radically alters what’s inside it. That would be a sparkly prologue provided by two Persons in Charge: cabaret performers of colour in glittery outfits and spiky headgear that references the Statue of Liberty and African tribal collars; one uses the pronouns he/his, the other she/her. They coquettishly reveal that all the other characters onstage will be straight white men, and each will stay in character for the whole Read more ...
peter.quinn
A fascinating song list that juxtaposed originals with musical theatre, pop songs, Brazilian music and more. An inventive, listening band – take a bow Glenn Zaleski (piano), Alexa Tarantino (flute), Marvin Sewell (guitar), Yasushi Nakamura (bass) and Keito Ogawa (percussion) – who supported singer and song in the most empathetic way possible. And a central performance that combined strength and vulnerability, humour and irony, a strikingly beautiful timbre, and an absolute focus on the lyrics and the story.Vocalist, composer and three-time Grammy winner Cécile McLorin Salvant, together with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A classic specimen of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school, Bruised is Halle Berry’s directorial debut. It was back in 2002 that Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and Bruised suggests that, at 55, she may have found a way to sustain a career in Hollywood long after the age when the industry likes to throw its leading women on the scrapheap.She plays Jackie Justice, a successful MMA fighter (that’s Mixed Martial Arts, otherwise known as cage fighting) whose career has disastrously stalled as her personal life has fallen apart. We meet her while she’s living in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What’s in an article? Director Bill Alexander has titled his new production A Merchant of Venice, leaving us to ponder the implications that arise from his avoidance of the standard “the”? Is it a hint towards generality, broadening the focus of Shakespeare’s story of the treatment of a single character, Shylock, within his community, towards something more representative?Perhaps. The anti-Semitism of the Venetian bourse is certainly pronounced in Alexander’s updating of the action to a contemporary Rialto, in which the mobile phone has taken on plenty of the lifting in terms of dramatic Read more ...
Richard Bratby
"Nature is healing," declared the social media meme, back in the early days of lockdown when humanity had temporarily retreated to focus on its banana bread. There were pictures to prove it, apparently. Dolphins sported in the canals of Venice; city gardens filled with newly emboldened songbirds. Didn’t a herd of goats colonise Llandudno at one point? Something like that, anyway.What’s certain is that the aftermath has seen a boom in the population of operatic foxes. Vixens were sighted this summer in Longborough and Holland Park; there’s one due at ENO in February. They’re less common in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A persistent moan of this writer in recent years, about gigs attended by those his own age (54) and up, is that, however good the band is, the audience are stationary, staring, semi-catatonic. They don’t twitch or move, facing stage-wards earnestly, silent, as if watching Chekov at the theatre. Their joy, if it exists, is internalised, unreleased. Dancing something forgotten long ago. Such gigs are flat, disappointing, like the airless, staid classical concerts I was taken to as a boy, contemplative and half-asleep. It is, then, a blissful surprise to find Eighties synth-pop outfit OMD’s Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In late 1894 an unknown 28-year-old science tutor and wannabe writer finished a story in his dismal lodgings just north of Euston station. Divorced, after a brief, calamitous marriage to a cousin, he lived with a new lover even though the hostile landlady cursed them loudly to her neighbours. Meanwhile, bankruptcy loomed and rattling trains billowed filthy smoke through their rooms. But this supreme artificer of far-fetched yarns was about to star in one himself. In the frozen new year of 1895, a magazine began to serialise an outlandishly original tale that wedded ideas drawn from Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike has taken eight years to reach the London stage, which is surprisingly long for the Tony Award winner for Best Play of 2013: the pandemic, unsurprisingly, didn't help. But in a burst of somewhat un-Chekhovian confidence, here it now is re-cast from a previous run in Bath, and the wait has been worth it. Vanya and Sonia live in a rural Pennsylvania idyll with nothing to do except bicker about morning coffee and wait for the blue heron to land at their pond and demonstrate the urgent purpose that they have long abandoned. Their idle lifestyles are Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Macbeth has been in rep at the Royal Opera since 2002, and it is a solid performer. The setting is slick and vaguely period, with lots of iron weaponry, smart, pony-tailed warriors, but not a kilt in sight. The set (designer Anthony Ward) is a foreshortened metallic box, from which the back often rises to reveal a stormy sky (for the witches) or to introduce large scale props. The most memorable of these is a gilded cubic cage for the throne of Scotland, a symbol for the how power imprisons. There are a few other symbolic ideas throw in along the way, but Lloyd Read more ...