Reviews
Florence Hallett
It takes nerve to throw a shadow across the face of your heroine, still more to banish to the margins the severed head that might so easily dominate the painting’s centre ground. Instead, in imagining the aftermath of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi wrings out the excruciating tension of a moment, and concentrates it in a candle flame. What in reproduction looks like a minor detail is revealed “on the wall” as the visual and emotional fulcrum of this monumental painting, in which we see Artemisia, by now a mature painter, much in demand, brimming with painterly bravado Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Classical music TV documentaries don’t often merit comparison to buses. So it was singularly bad luck that Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History hit the TV screens the day after a very different film, John Bridcut's profile of Bernard Haitink which virtually sanctified an already great and venerable conductor and sparked heights of ecstasy amid innumerable lovers of 19th-century standard concert repertoire. In the aftermath, The Forgotten History was nearly forgotten all over again.It offered a fount of tumultuous stories, ranging across three centuries of classical composers Read more ...
Charlie Stone
William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and film-makers, drawn from real life or entirely fictional, are regular patrons of his stories. Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, is no different. Taking place on a film set in Brighton during the summer of 1968, Trio follows the lives of its three protagonists as they encounter the usual – and unusual – challenges of life in showbusiness. Artistic creation is the watchword both for the setting and its inhabitants. Talbot, the film’s producer, Anny, its star, and Elfrida, a struggling Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stillness works like a stealth bomb in Nights in the Garden of Spain, in which Tamsin Greig further confirms her status as one of this country's finest actresses. Kicking off the final pairing in an indispensable series of Alan Bennett double bills at the Bridge Theatre that will be greatly missed once they depart our midst at the end of this month, Greig reprises the role of the softly spoken Rosemary that she first performed on the BBC this summer; her stage successor on this occasion is Maxine Peake's boisterous Miss Fozzard. But such was the mesmeric effect of Greig, hands clasped Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title comes from the lyrics of “Andy Warhol”: track two, side two of David Bowie’s late 1971 album Hunky Dory: ”Put a peephole in my brain, Two new pence to have a go, I'd like to be a gallery, Put you all inside my show.” The new pence reference recognised Britain’s recent adoption of decimalised currency. Whatever the album’s sales on release it was only in 1972 that Bowie hit the single’s chart with “Starman”, the proof he was more than 1969’s “Space Oddity” one-hit wonder.In 1971, Marc Bolan and T.Rex were cleaning up as a singles phenomenon. “Ride a White Swan”, issued in 1970, was Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What news on the rialto? Not much of particular buoyancy or light in the Peter Mackie Burns film Rialto, which takes a grimly focused view of a married Irishman's struggle with his same-sex leanings. Adapted by Mark O'Halloran from his 2011 stage two-hander Trade, the movie is anchored by superb performances from a trio of talents who will be known to theatre devotees. Even so, the result feels a bit of a slog by the time this story of feelings too-long inheld and then released has reached its nicely open-ended conclusion: a bit more tonal variety here and there wouldn't have gone amiss. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Salzburg, Verbier and other high-end festivals have scraped together reduced, still impressive programmes over the summer for consumption online. Not so starrily cast but hardly less engaging in situ is the adapted offering from Istanbul, mixing local and international artists, chamber and orchestral concerts with a flair that belies its reputation on the fringe of the major music festivals. In a series of pre-recorded concerts, streamed daily and mostly made available for a month thereafter (until mid-October), the organisers have taken the opportunity to range even further than their usual Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Like many musicians, Danny Driver had not given a recital since the pandemic took hold in March. His return to the platform took place in the intense spotlight of the Wigmore Hall, broadcast live in BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert and webcast to the world - for which he chose a programme that was demanding, exposed and imaginative and rose to its ferocious challenges as if butter wouldn’t melt. Driver’s selection focused on the idea of études, which the best composers can make into far more than technical exercises. First, an unusual choice: a sonata by C P E Bach, the ground-breaking Read more ...
Owen Richards
Barring a few outliers, British indies tend to follow the same formula: serious subjects told seriously. Whether it’s a council estate, a rural farm, or a seaside town, you can always rely on that trademark tension and realism we Brits do so well. What a shock to the system Eternal Beauty is then, filled with more imagination than almost anything else out this year.Sally Hawkins stars as Jane, a woman struggling to keep a grasp of her mental health. Her issues are compounded by her sociopathic mother (Penelope Wilton), narcissistic sister (Billie Piper), and a fiancée that dumped her at the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Getting dark," or so comments Irene Ruddock (a pitch-perfect Imelda Staunton) in passing midway through A Lady of Letters, and, boy, ain't that the truth? Both this monologue, and the one that precedes it (Playing Sandwiches, featuring the mighty Lucian Msamati), find Alan Bennett in fearlessly penetrating, ever-darkening mode. The Bridge Theatre's invaluable series of Talking Heads double bills enters its final phase of openings this week (the closing pair with Tamsin Greig and Maxine Peake has its press night this evening), and no praise is too high for the astonishing array of actors Read more ...
David Nice
There should eventually be a plaque on the outside of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Farringdon, to the effect that London’s musical life after lockdown re-ignited here. And how, in early July, with Steven Isserlis exuberantly stepping up to play Bach before a rapt small audience. Even now that so many venues have started cautiously opening up, it was still a physical and emotional jolt of the best kind to hear another of the greatest string sounds in the world, that of violinist Viktoria Mullova, and the double-bass thrumming in the resonant woody space of her son Misha Mullov-Abbado at the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Aaron Sorkin’s latest powerhouse drama couldn’t come at a more opportune moment. Rife with the director’s rapid-fire dialogue, this courtroom drama is set in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and bubbles (sometimes froths) with a raw energy, tackling the thorny subjects of justice, racial equality and war. The setting might be period but, as recent news stories show, the fight for democracy is as fierce as ever, and Sorkin uses his entire arsenal of staunchly liberal ideology, theatrical dialogue and hard-hitting monologues to deliver his message. Cutting Read more ...