Reviews
Helen Hawkins
French playwright Florian Zeller’s 2011 four-hander about infidelity and the deceptions it entails, translated by Christopher Hampton, returns 10 years after its UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory. A lot has changed in the personal communications world since its debut, but the play soldiers on with just a few appearances by early mobiles and no sign of social media.Does that matter? It makes the play something of a period piece, but its illicit liaisons are not dependent on technology. And at its heart is not so much deception as self-deception and the language we use to blank it out Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s the summer vacation and eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her three brothers have moved into a new house on Vancouver Island with their Hungarian parents. The kids trampoline, visit a wildlife preserve with their mother, walk on the beach, make paper boats and sail them in the kitchen sink. Dappled sunlight is filtered through trees. There’s a feeling of boredom and of time passing slowly. Their father (Adam Tompa) silently films everything on his video camera.Jeremy (an impressive Erik Beddoes, pictured below), a teenager, is several years older than the other three and a lanky, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During the calm evening before an apocalyptic London storm, trumpet virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger delighted the Barbican audience with not only the advertised two showcases for his peerless qualities of tone and expression, but a third as well. Neither Haydn nor Hummel could make it to applaud his deft and dashing accounts of their concertos; but the composer of the encore certainly did. Mark-Anthony Turnage, whose moody, bluesy “Nocturne for Trumpet and Strings” saw Hardenberger swap his classical dress almost for a Miles Davis vibe, gave a standing ovation from his seat (in my row) to his Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to imagine him – or indeed any fan of romantic screwball comedy – relishing Chelsea Walker’s elegant, sorbet-hued production in which Pippa Nixon’s flinty Beatrice and Ken Nwosu’s jocular, easy-going Benedick strike sparks from the off. Sometimes it takes a while for the banter to ignite in a Much Ado production, but Nixon’s wiry physicality and waspish delivery means that every insult lands with perfection. When the Messenger observes that Beatrice is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How much more can Jeremy Clarkson’s body take? The fifth season of his reality show about his Oxfordshire spread, Diddly Squat Farm and pendant pub, could have been borrowed from the Book of Job.Neatly winding up season four with an impending heart attack, this time, as headlines have announced, he calmly reveals to his team that he also has aggressive prostate cancer to tackle. But not until his drought-addled crops have been harvested, of course.The sheer fortitude of the man is compelling. As each sunny day prompts him to tot up his blessings, you just know a big “but” is coming, delivered Read more ...
David Nice
Bloomsday doesn't just celebrate James Joyce's odyssey through so many parts of Dublin that still teem with character; it's also putatively about the same 16 June 1904 when the budding writer first walked out with Nora Barnacle and she put her hand inside his trousers to "make me a man". Do all those folk who swan around in straw hats and frilly dresses know they're marking National Hand Job day too? Have any of them read his deliciously filthy early letters to Nora?No matter; let them have their fun, but let it also be of quality homage to the towering and frequently very funny masterpiece Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between June 1964 and September 1966, London-area R&B band Downliners Sect issued ten singles, one EP and three albums on EMI’s Columbia imprint. A lot of records. Especially so for a band which barely charted. Only one of the singles, their Columbia debut, a dash through Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What’s Wrong” got anywhere – 29 on the New Musical Express Top 30.Despite its meagre hit parade status, the single sounds irresistible – an unfettered headlong rush. But it, and subsequent releases, did not achieve the traction needed to take Downliners Sect to the level of their similarly minded Read more ...
David Nice
The conundrum of five women, three of them men, is the same as it was in the last Serse I witnessed, in the more intimate surroundings of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Paula Murrihy then sang the role of Arsamene, playing brother to Emily D'Angelo's Xerxes and lover to Lucy Crowe's Romilda. Now she's the imperious, capricious ruler to the life, totally different from D'Angelo's but just as valid. The only comparative shortcoming was that compared to Harry Bicket getting bite from The English Concert, Laurence Cummings had the Academy of Ancient Music play sprightly principal boy rather than fiery Read more ...
Matt Wolf
O Glengarry, where is thy sting? That's likely to be one response to the bewildering Old Vic revival of David Mamet's defining (and remarkable) Glengarry Glen Ross, which I saw in its 1983 National Theatre world premiere production when I first moved to London and have loved ever since. I missed its Broadway incarnation last year, a star vehicle for a then recently-Oscar'ed Kieran Culkin and directed by Patrick Marber, the Tony-winning Englishman whose own plays (Closer, especially) have more than a whiff of Mametian ruthlessness about them. So there was every reason to see what might Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
William Kentridge’s production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo marks a double début at Glyndebourne – neither the director nor the opera, considered by many to be the first proper example of the genre, have appeared here before. Kentridge – who made his name as an artist chronicling oppressive power structures in South Africa – now takes on the ultimate oppressive power of Death, turning the story of Orpheus into an account shimmering with anguished hopes and thwarted possibilities. Kentridge’s distinctive style of animation – a continuous process of drawing pictures in charcoal, then rubbing Read more ...
James Saynor
Nineteen-ninety-five was the dawn of the internet for most people, and the same year saw the release of the first Toy Story movie. Yet cyberspace and “tech” has rarely intruded into the frantic playroom of the Toy Story characters. Toy Story 3 (2010) was at one stage due to have them searching for one of their kin on the web until that script was ditched. (It was a brief time when the franchise was taken away from Pixar, the legendary outfit that pioneered cartoons done by computer chip.)Today, though, our zombieland of bleary eyes and stressed scrolling on small screens can no longer be Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Currently on show at the Barbican is a video that makes your hackles rise. Two “savages” are on display in a cage surrounded by punters who happily pay a dollar to pose for photographs with these exotic natives or else to watch them dance. These hideous interactions are being played out in museums in supposedly civilised countries including America, Spain and Australia.You don’t have to be Einstein to smell a rat, though; the signs are there for all to see. Along with her grass skirt, the woman wears shades and sneakers while the man’s Mayan-style breast plate and head gear are accompanied by Read more ...