Reviews
Thomas H. Green
We return, after only a week away, with Part 2 of Volume 49. Starting out with an amazing comeback from Adrian Sherwood’s Pay It All Back compilation series as Vinyl of the Month, this edition takes in everything from Prince to death metal to ambient classical. From reissues to spanking new fare, all life on vinyl is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Pay It All Back Volume 7 (On U Sound)To ancient music warriors who recall prehistory, before ’88 and acid house, one of only places in Britain where electronics splurged into brain-frying psychedelic dance music was On U Sound. Their Pay It Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s 15 years since Benjamin Grosvenor first strolled onto our TV screens as a prodigiously gifted child in the BBC Young Musician Competition. Today he is a self-possessed young man of 26, in his element on the concert platform, yet without a hint of affectation; and unlike certain musicians who play the same type of music all the time, he ventures constantly into new and sometimes surprising musical territory.This recital was part of a Barbican series that also includes two chamber music concerts with the Doric String Quartet at Milton Court (the next is on 26 May). Grosvenor tackled an all Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.The narrative picks up where 2017’s John Wick: Chapter 2 left off, with Wick declared “excommunicado” by the crime lords of the High Table and running for his life through New York City as massed assassins queue up to kill him and collect the $14m reward. Drolly, the killers Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In the week that the Jeremy Kyle show has been yanked permanently off air after the death of one of its vulnerable guests, the timing couldn’t have been better for the BBC to show how sensitively the old-school broadcaster handles contributors with mental health problems.On Wednesday night, Bake Off star Nadiya Hussain movingly explored her daily struggle with panic attacks without being forced to expose too much detailed information about the childhood traumas which lay at the root of her anxiety disorder. The producers didn’t feel the need to track down and drag onscreen the schoolmates who Read more ...
David Nice
Leaving a revival performance of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend asked Hans Werner Henze, also in the audience, that dreaded question: "what did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the answer. What snap judgment can one form about Phaedra, his own late mythological fantasia, which also features a bass as the half-man, half-bull, but keeps its labyrinth – in this production, at any rate – to the music and the bizarre wraps around the story of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus? Extremely well sung and played by superb young artists, jury out Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone's commitment to staging a diversity of new voices is very laudable, and with White Pearl she has found a show that is original in setting, if not in theme. Written by Anchuli Felicia King, a New York-based, multidisciplinary artist of Thai-Australian descent, this international playwriting debut is a comic satire on the cosmetics industry and race in a South-East Asian setting. Part of the Royal Court's promotion of previously unstaged writers, the show has a freshness and clarity even if it is not entirely successful.In the Singapore office of Clearday, a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
My Left Right Foot tiptoes right to the precipice of massive offense. For some, it tumbles right in. During the interval audience members can be heard tutting at the amount of times “the c-word” is casually thrown around. But it’s not just the swearing. The play makes mayhem over our awkwardness around disability while also ruthlessly sending up institutionalised inclusivity. Much of the humour derives from crossing lines not usually crossed.The action takes place in a municipal hall, with the set detailed and realistic, blandly grubby, right down to the ancient radiator and cork board of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When critics praise a first-rank string quartet, convention demands they claim that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. True enough, maybe, but with the Takács Quartet, each separate element really does blaze with a soloistic, virtuosic flame. From the first bars of last night’s opener at the Wigmore Hall, as Haydn plays pass-the-parcel with an apparently straightforward tune at the start of his G major quartet Op.76 no. 1, the sheer class and distinctive voice of each instrumental contribution grabbed the ear.Remarkably, this group – first mustered in Budapest in 1975 but Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Where would Tennessee Williams's onetime flop be without the British theatre to rehabilitate it on an ongoing basis? Arriving at the Menier Chocolate Factory in a co-production with Theatre Clwyd, where Tamara Harvey's production has already been seen, this marks the third London outing for this lesser-known title in as many decades: Orpheus, too, has played elsewhere around the country (Manchester in 2012 for one) even while languishing largely unperformed Stateside. What, then, does Harvey add to our understanding of a work that Peter Hall rescued from obscurity in 1988 in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is a cliché that never grows old. From Fawlty Towers via The Office all the way through to (so we are told) Fleabag, a great half-hour comedy that bows out after two series cements its place in the pantheon by ensuring posterity wants more. Twelve episodes seems to be the platonic ideal of the perfectly proportioned sitcom. When Stefan Golaszewski’s Mum (BBC Two) ended last time round there was thus a case for stopping there. It finished on a moment of such exquisitely subtle optimism. Parting from Cathy (Lesley Manville) and her daft coterie would have been a sweet sorrow that made Read more ...
Heather Neill and David Nice
Henry IV Part One (***)Women as Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff? It's been done before, and superlatively well, in Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare-in-prison trilogy (Henry IV Part One, with several crucial scenes from Part Two, between Julius Caesar and The Tempest). Loyalties need some shifting from lock-in with an all-female-cast to Wooden O with men in the picture too. The different values of Shakespeare's Globe - which is all about communication, too, but of an even more direct sort - as well as the knowledge that the best woman standing, the supremely charismatic Sarah Amankwah, will make it as Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Virtues (Channel 4) sees director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England) reunite with actor Stephen Graham in what is certainly their most raw and emotionally bruising project to date. Meadows returns to familiar territory, with themes of disaffection and familial separation mapped over a small cast of characters who are grappling with emotional turmoil. Graham, in a career standout performance, has never seemed so bare – or so dramatically powerful – as he is here. It is a supremely controlled display of a man in chaos, grasping for redemption.He plays Joseph, a middle-aged Read more ...