Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a clever decision to pair Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The first is all about happily-ever-after, while the second is all about what happens next. The optimistic grime and smog of 1950s London gives way to the shrink-wrapped brightness and professional happiness of the suburban American dream, smiles freeze into toothpaste-commercial grins and love curdles into quiet domestic despair.A Dinner Engagement wrestles its happy ending to the ground by sheer persistence and determination. The parents are poor, the dinner is burnt, the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A rambling portrait of 24 hours in the life of Double Whammies, an American sports bar where the waitresses entertain their TV-watching patrons by dressing in skimpy tops and tiny shorts. Apparently this is categorised as a ‘breastaurant’ (my spell-checker reels at this portmanteau, but there are several well-established chains in the US). Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, acclaimed as the godfather of the mumblecore genre after winning praise for Funny Ha Ha back in 2002, Support the Girls works best if you don’t expect too much story development or a lot of fast-paced gags Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As midsummer night’s dreams go, it would be hard to surpass the darkly enchanting collaboration between Sir Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars that will bring The Cunning Little Vixen to the Barbican again this evening and on Saturday. Janáček’s spellbinding vision of humans and animals caught up in the inexorable cycles of nature and time has its rough and scary side, of course. And you will probably hear and see gentler, more obviously charming, versions of the opera that in 1924 proclaimed Janáček’s late-life burst of untamed creativity.Sellars’s semi-staged production (originally mounted in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the middle of the current decade, there was a mild vogue for reviving a handful of the great plays of the 1990s, such as Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and Patrick Marber's Closer. Now the Donmar Warehouse's new artistic director, the energetic Michael Longhurst, has chosen David Greig's Europe, first staged at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1994, as his inaugural production. Because it's a kind of state-of-the-continent tone poem, this feels like a really excellent choice. After all, competing views about Europe loom large in the news every day, and in Longhurst's majestic production Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Red is the colour, mayhem is the name – along with pestilence and greed. In writer-director Peter Strickland’s exquisite fourth feature In Fabric, the first he’s made in his native England, middle-aged bank clerk Sheila Woolchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, main picture) is terrorised by a haunted scarlet dress she buys in Dentley and Soper’s, a Debenhams-like department store in drearily generic “Thames Valley-on Thames”.Miss Luckmoore, who oversees Sheila’s regrettable purchase, is no ordinary sleek, patronising sales clerk. She’s an Italian or Italianate witch (wonderful Strickland regular Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This well-meaning biographical jukebox musical about icons Gloria and Emilio Estefan, which did two years on Broadway and a US tour, is good summer scheduling, what with its Latin-pop bangers, infectious dance routines and “Dreams come true” messaging. Yet its awkward housing at the austere Coliseum exacerbates this 2015 work’s major flaw: reaching for profundity in a skin-deep, conflict-lite tale, instead of enjoying the party.Gloria (Christie Prades, reprising the role from the US tour) is a talented but shy songwriter. Her grandmother (Karen Mann) eagerly pushes her into the band – Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
This woman is a phenomenon. I’m not the first to write that and I won’t be the last. Yet the vast majority of the population won’t have heard of her. She’s the muso’s muso (BBC Six Music couldn’t lay any more praise at her door) and maybe the crazy name is a bit off-putting. But why isn’t she recognised as she should be? Day 16 on the Joanthology world tour finds Joan as Policewoman in arty Folkestone. Or Folk Stone as she laughingly admits she was pronouncing it until recently – "doesn’t that sound cool?". The eponymous three-CD album covers the first 15 years of her career and the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For a while, child abuse has been banished from our stages. After all, there is a limit, surely, to how much pain audiences can be put through. Now, however, the subject is back, thanks to the Almeida Theatre's new stage adaptation of the 2012 Danish film thriller Jagten, by Dogme 95's Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, and which memorably starred Mads Mikkelsen. The plot is about a male teacher who becomes the target of mass hysteria after being wrongly accused of sexually abusing a child in his infants school class, and this version by David Farr effectively turns the screw on our Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The price of fame and the value of artistic truth are among the topics probed in Danny Boyle’s irresistible comedy, a beguiling magical mystery tour of an upside-down world where The Beatles suddenly never existed. Richard Curtis’s screenplay features some of his characteristic trademarks, not least the protagonist’s slapstick sidekick Rocky the roadie, but it’s illuminated by his fascination with popular music and the emotional resonance it carries.The premise (Jack Barth gets a credit for “story”) is that the entire world has suffered a mysterious power blackout for 12 seconds, and when the Read more ...
Tom Baily
How could this story be told again? Director Todd Douglas Miller has found a way: strip away narrative and give the audience the purity of original record. The result is a gripping non-fiction experience that sits in a unique space between documentary, art, drama and dream.In collaboration with Nasa, Miller has unearthed hours of previously untouched film stock recorded during the first lunar mission in 1969. He has whittled the material down to a film of 93 minutes and combined it with Nasa audio recordings and an original synth-driven score by composer Matt Morton. No talking heads. No Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So theartsdesk on Vinyl reaches its 50th edition. That’s at least a novels’ worth of words. Maybe two! But we’re not stopping yet. The heat of the summer has arrived but the vinyl deluge hasn’t dried up, so check in for everything from Germanic electro to Scottish Seventies pop-rock to Japanese minyo music reimagined. And much more. All vinyl life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHQuantic Atlantic Oscillations (Tru Thoughts)Will Holland – Quantic – has spent the past few years successfully indulging in his penchant for South American, living there and recording a multiplicity of releases Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Emanuel Ax here celebrated his 70th birthday with an all-Schumann recital. In fact, it was an all-Schumann marathon, a three-hour concert at Wigmore Hall featuring solo works, Dichterliebe with Simon Keenlyside, and, with the Dover Quartet, the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet. Ax has an unassuming stage presence, and blends easily into chamber ensembles. Even so, he remained the centre of attention here, with the other performers softening their tone and applying an extra level of grace in order to match the supple flow of Ax’s Schumann.The Arabeske, op. 18, began the concert, and Read more ...