Reviews
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I appreciate the irony of me singing this in my mum jeans,” says Emmy The Great, whose five-month-old is travelling with her on this tour, before playing “We Almost Had a Baby”. Despite its jaunty little riff the song, from her 10-year-old debut album, is a desperately sad one, about a pregnancy scare.Emma-Lee Moss was in her early 20s when she wrote the songs that would become First Love and the record is a time capsule packed with broken hearts, dramatic short stories, pop culture references and the intense, deep love for this person, and that song, that feels all-consuming in one’s youth Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Flirtations and fragile alliances, lies, betrayals, schemes and the ever-present promise of sex – Love Island may be back on our screens next week, but it has nothing on Handel's Agrippina. Imperial Rome is the backdrop for one of the composer’s most deliciously cynical comedies, where love is an afterthought and power is the only game in town.Agrippina is the original tiger mother, conniving to put the Imperial laurel wreath on her son Nero’s head. Kingmaker, ringmaster, seductress, éminence grise – it’s a gift of a role, and one seized with both hands by mezzo Joyce DiDonato, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is a painful and poignant study of character-disintegration, and a triumph for its writer, director and star Jim Cummings. He plays small-town police officer Jim Arnaud, a man trying to do his best while a rising sea of troubles threatens to drown him.Thunder Road is based on Cummings’s original 12-minute film, which won him the Short Film Grand Jury prize at the 2016 Sundance Festival. This provides the material for the opening scene, a daringly extended single shot in which Jim delivers the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. Despite looking pressed and formal in his police uniform, inside Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage. Reuniting the two-time Tony-winner with his lifelong chum Kenneth Lonergan, who since this play's premiere has become an A-list Oscar-winner, Sam Yates's production is equal parts intriguing and irritating, and Broderick's singular theatrical deadpan may alienate as many people as it attracts. It may not help this play's cause that Lonergan has been represented in successive Broadway Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Alexa, play Mélanie De Biasio”... and you know exactly where you’re headed. The Charleroi-born singer has created a sound-world, a place which is instantly recognisable. Everything is slow-moving and half-stated, hinted at rather than fully expressed; hypnotic grooves from the trio who are often required to thud, to trudge heavily, to move effortfully, reinforcing the contrast with her light but well-placed voice or her clear-toned flute; the occasional unvoiced breath, maybe repeated as a rhythmic device.She has talked in recent interviews of how devoted she is touring, and to keeping Read more ...
David Nice
Need Shakespeare 's Falstaff charm to be funny? Those warm, indulgent feelings won by Mrisho Mpoto in the amazing Globe to Globe's Swahili Merry Wives and by Christopher Benjamin in a period-pretty version are rarely encouraged by this season's Helen Schlesinger (in Henry IV Parts One and Two ) and now Pearce Quigley for Ellie While's 1930s romp. Both cut handsome figures with padding, not puddings, in their bellies; Quigly's not-so-fat knight is a tenorial Northerner to whom melancholy seems to come more readily than mirth - sometimes amusing in itself, as in the cued-then-cut laughter of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Booksmart is perfectly scheduled for half term, this high school buddy comedy is guaranteed to tempt youngsters away from their exam revision. It’s fast and funny and packed with squirm-inducing sex gags and a peppy soundtrack. Its heroes are Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and her best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Deaver), the class swots who forswore all extra-curricular fun in order to study hard and get into top universities. They are the teens who got fake ID not to go drinking underage but to use the 24-hour library. Molly corrects the punctuation on the graffiti in the toilets Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is a commonplace to describe Leonardo as an enigma whose genius, and perhaps even something of his character, is revealed through his works. But as his works survive only in incomplete and fragmented form, it is drawing, the practice common to all his various endeavours, that brings coherence and perhaps even a comprehensive view of a lifetime’s labours.The 200 drawings on display at the Queen’s Gallery are a selection from the Royal Collection’s peerless Leonardo holdings. They were left to his pupil Francesco Melzi on his death and have remained together ever since, having been acquired Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic) is the most unmissable show on TV. Perhaps it’s because the Soviet nuclear catastrophe in 1986 was so blood-freezingly horrific that the filmmakers didn’t need to fictionalise or exaggerate.This penultimate episode was bad news for animal lovers. It opened with an elderly woman trying to milk a cow, only to be ordered at gunpoint to leave her home right away, because of the morbid threat of radiation. She reeled off a litany of historical famines, wars and invasions that she’d lived through, and concluded that she’d be damned if she was going to leave because of some Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Githa Sowerby is the go-to playwright if you want a feminist slant on patriarchy in the industrial north in Edwardian times. Her 1912 classic, Rutherford and Son, has been regularly revived over the past 30 years, and now the National Theatreis staging it yet again, this time with the ever likeable Roger Allam in the title role. We know that he's a commanding actor and that this traditional three-act play has a lot to say about fathers and families, but can director Polly Findlay give this old tale of a domineering capitalist and rebellious children a contemporary twist? From the first, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Professor Brian Cox, still looking cheekily boy-band-ish at the age of 51, has made himself a child of the universe. His day job is professor of particle physics at Manchester University, but turn him loose with a camera crew and an unfeasibly large budget and he turns into a starry-eyed cosmic hippy.In his new series for BBC Two, the Prof is taking a survey of Earth and the other seven planets which make up our solar system. His thesis is that each of these – Mercury, Venus, Mars and the rest – experienced a period when they enjoyed conditions in which life could develop, but for various Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neneh Cherry’s matchless bohemian life has perversely secured her pop position. The crowd tonight is maybe three-quarters female, and as unconcerned by a setlist almost wholly drawn from new album Broken Politics as Cherry is by the long lacuna in what you could hardly call a career.From a Swedish commune childhood to an adolescence collaborating with the Slits, from helping start the Nineties with 1989’s Raw Like Sushi to lending Massive Attack a room to make Blue Lines, from taking time to bring children into the world, ease parents out of it and grow a 29-year marriage to co-writer Cameron Read more ...