Reviews
Helen Hawkins
The finale of the Royal Ballet’s 2025-26 programming is an extraordinary sight. At the curtain call for Salle de danse, a world premiere from Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, there are so many dancers taking a bow that they have to take turns to come forward, in two different rows, each as wide as the stage. That’s before the conductor and creatives join them.León and Lightfoot’s visit is yet another canny – and generous – piece of scheduling by director Kevin O’Hare, a way to give a sizeable chunk of his company a piece to get their teeth into, with grandstanding turns in the spotlight for many Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Anybody who relished the blistering family rows of Bad Jews or Admissions might be surprised by what their author, Joshua Harmon, wrote next: a three-hander still based on a warring family, but this time one closely resembling his own.Hampstead Theatre has sensibly staged We Had a World in its Downstairs space, where the intimacy of its content plays directly to the onlooker. The audience here, more overtly than is usual in the theatre, plays judge and jury for what the younger version of Harmon, Joshua (Ryan Kopel), stages as a recreation of his past, aided by his “cast”: his brisk lawyer Read more ...
David Nice
Berlioz's intended companion for his Symphonie fantastique was Lélio, or the Return to Life - an assemblage of mostly magical earlier pieces strung together with an autobiographical narration. That's a rarity these days, but so is an all-Berlioz programme with a more familiar work to preface the iconoclastic Symphonie, and we should be grateful to Simon Rattle with a much-expanded Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment for such an imaginative choice.The concept, it seems, was for a gauzy, dreamy take on a less fantastical slice of autobiography, Harold in Italy - which despite its Byronic nod Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Enola Gay” is perfect pop, the ultimate party-uplift banger. It’s that rare song which only seems to grow better as the years, then decades pass. This is tricky to reconcile with the fact it’s about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (albeit opaquely). But, when Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark play it as the last song before their encore, the subject matter fragments amid its subversively joyous synth riff, as has been the case ever since it was a Top 10 hit, back in 1980. It’s greeted ecstatically, like the old friend it is.
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OMD’s set Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This beguiling “semi-staged” performance of Mahler’s First Symphony is the latest attempt in a growing movement to interrogate the relationship between classical music performers and their audiences. It’s strongly reminiscent of the point when theatre directors were ripping up the rulebook in the Nineties, whether they were staging their works in site-specific locations, plunging audiences into complete darkness, or subverting expectations with new uses of video projection and puppetry.Inevitably there were misses as well as hits, but thirty years on, there’s no doubt that the theatre scene Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s 1959. Trinidad is fighting for independence from British colonial rule, while the US is beginning to stake its own control over the island, whether through labour exploitation or crime. Some of the locals are finding themselves torn – between a desire to escape, or to have a piece of the action. And it’s driving them towards disaster. Trinidadian British actress Martina Laird has turned to playwriting with a confident, evocative, and boldly authentic drama, set in the place of her birth, Port of Spain, and enriched by its patois. It follows its premier at the RSC’s The Other Place, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall comeback concert on Sunday, 23 April 1961 has often been lauded as "the greatest night in show business history", though that judgment surely depends on where Garland sits in one’s personal pantheon. Elvis’s made-for-television 68 Comeback Special, the king lean in leather, must be up there, and likely Sinatra at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Whatever, the sold-out performance featured some 25 standards, Garland backed by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey. Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, and Julie Andrews were in the audience. The album, Judy at Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The world as we perceive it always has bits missing. This is either because your brain cuts bits out to avoid data overload, or because things are externally cut out before the data reaches you. Either way, this “missingness” is both essential to our being able to experience the world in a manageable way and also the cause of error and misunderstanding as we move through that world. Such is the thesis of this new book by mathematician and public scientist Kit Yates, You Don’t Know What You’re Missing (or, You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng, as it appears on the book’s title page – and I’ Read more ...
David Nice
Range, I decided on Monday night, was what makes for great performances: range of emotions, dynamics, pitches. It was as true of Abel Selaocoe and his fine fellow musicians (★★★★★) as it had been of the Belcea Quartet with Tabea Zimmermann at the Wigmore Hall last week. The Wigmore also welcomed this team on Friday, and you can be sure that the programme and approach were different; you could also add to the various ranges the gamut from timeless improvisation to the tightest of shared rhythms. Those of us who've followed Selaocoe's progress for some years now know there are regular Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Never have I had such a day,” sings the baffled Emperor Tito as he wearily forgives all and sundry for their conspiracies, treacheries, deceits, attempted murders – and, by the way, for trashing the Capitol long before Trumpian thugs had the same idea. At which point the Grange Festival audience, forgivably, laughs. Mozart’s farewell opera seria from 1791, La Clemenza di Tito presents such a high-minded tableau of imperial nobility and forbearance that we can lose sight of its closeness at some points to utter, Marriage of Figaro-level, farce. Tito’s breakneck shifts Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The fact that what’s now known as The Paper Factory – a disused paper and cardboard manufacturing plant on the west of Edinburgh – is soon to be demolished (for flats, obviously) gave this year’s Hidden Door festival an even more spooky, ethereal feel than previously. Whilst last year’s event – the first in that venue – felt weird and exploratory, this year the death of the space was very much to the fore, with the Hidden Door team giving it a blazing requiem to see it out in style. Again, the physicality as well as the history of the venue inspired much of the programming. One of the Read more ...