Reviews
Saskia Baron
This well-crafted addition to the films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is subtler and less commercial than last year’s The Hate U Give but covers similar terrain. Writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green sets Monsters and Men in Brooklyn and structures his narrative into a triptych, following three young men’s different reactions to the same police killing. In the process he sets the audience questions about complicity and loyalty. Drawing on the death of Eric Garner, choked by police officers when they caught him selling loose cigarettes in 2014, Green’s approach is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The multi-costumed Lucy Worsley is television marmite, loved or loathed: her gesticulating enthusiasm can grate, as can her stream of bland platitudes. Typically the title is Worsley-twee, evoking fibs instead of lies and falsehoods; are we in the nursery, as smart Nanny Worsley seems to think?Ms Worsley’s thesis was that history is the knitting together of rival interpretations. But every assertion where the viewer might flinch was accompanied with startling facts, in a narration filled with enough surprises and new emphases to be worth your time. The underlying theme emerged at the climax, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As the January chill began to bite around the Barbican, Sir Mark Elder and the Britten Sinfonia summoned memories of spring and summer – but of sunny seasons overshadowed by the electric crackle of storms. On the face of it, they offered us a pleasing, even serene, pastoral spread to mitigate the chill outside. It began with Britten’s late folk-song suite and continued through early Mahler songs to conclude with Brahms’s bucolic Second: one of the cycle of Brahms symphonies that Elder launched last year with this tight-knit and fine-toned ensemble. Although Elder – whose unfussy authority Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast. On the road to his second consecutive Oscar nomination following his breakout performance last year in Call Me By Your Name, Timothée Chalamet confirms a degree of sensitivity rare in actors of any age, and Steve Carell finds numerous ways to furrow his brow even when the film as a whole leaves you checking your watch. Based, unusually, on a pair of memoirs by a father and son, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Nadia Fall is a good thing. Her appointment as the artistic director of this venue, with her first season having begun in September last year, has been widely seen as part of a new wave of cultural leaders who are expected to shake up the country's theatre. Already, her building has enjoyed a hipster-inspired cool facelift. And this visiting show, produced by Frantic Assembly and Theatre Royal Plymouth, takes up one of her favourite themes: youth. The play takes a broad view of war, men and home. But does it have anything new to say about the rather familiar theme of agonised masculinity?The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Wigmore Hall audiences really ought to know, silence can be golden. Especially at the close of Schubert’s Winterreise, as the uncanny drone-like fifths of the hurdy-gurdy in “Der Leiermann” fade away into – well, whatever state of mind the singer and pianist have together managed to communicate over the preceding 24 songs. So much remains ambiguous – and open to plausible re-interpretation – in this cycle that the traditional pause for reflection as it ends makes good sense. Last night, however, the star (even, perhaps, cult) status of the German Lieder virtuoso Christian Gerhaher Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a stark power to Jack Gamble’s production of DH Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law, which has transferred to the Arcola’smain stage after an acclaimed opening run in the venue’s downstairs studio last May. It still plays with a concentrated darkness in this larger space, heightened by the colloquial vigour of Lawrence’s language (wonderful phrasings like "th' racket an' tacket o' children"), and the heady dialect of the Nottinghamshire mining area where he grew up; you don’t assimilate it immediately, but it certainly grows on you with its sinewy expressiveness.There’s as little Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps inspired by the success of the revived Hawaii Five-O, CBS and Universal have gone back to the Eighties, and back to Hawaii, to see if the venerable Magnum P.I. could benefit from a similar overhaul. Early evidence suggests that as formulaic American dramas go, it’s… sort of business as usual.Tom Selleck, in Hawaiian shirt, tight jeans and a moustache crying out for a Flymo lawnmower, was the original freelance investigator, Thomas Magnum. The new guy is Jay Hernandez, last seen on the big screen in Suicide Squad and here looking very relaxed tooling around Hawaii’s mountain roads and Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
A road tunnel through the Alps, stretching underneath Mont Blanc: Tel (Shaun Mason) is ploughing home to London in a borrowed Merc, strung out and sleepless and having been to see his other girl in Monte Carlo. The Arcola Theatre premiere of Stop and Search finds this white van man incarnate returning to his trouble and strife with a bizarre cargo of beaver hats in the back. The opening scene of Irish-Nigerian playwright and poet Gabriel Gbadamosi's latest play finds two men in the front of Tel's car as the explosive loudmouth drives dangerously toward the Channel in the rain. His Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's a story in James Acaster's superb new show at the Phoenix Theatre which hangs on him being the first UK comic to shoot several Netflix specials. He doesn't tells us this to boast; far from it. It's to set up another long-form gag, one of several lengthy and interconnected stories he tells in Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, the two-part tale of the best and worst years of his life.Previous shows by Acaster – for which he has received five nominations at the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards – have been surreal inventions, with few personal references (or at least those you could Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Theatrical alchemy is eternally slippery. On paper Rosenbaum’s Rescue at the Park Theatre looks like an excellent proposition – a play that switches between 1943, when seven and a half thousand Jews were rescued from the German occupation of Denmark, and 2001, when two old friends dissect their conflicting memories. Yet A Bodin Saphir’s drama - which combines family secrets lurking like landmines with debates about the fallibility of history - is a curiously solid affair, in which revelations that should be toxic feel little more than tepid.Is this to do with the pacing of the production, a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony: few other conductors could get away with programming two such monolithic works, but Simon Rattle has a lightness of touch that can leaven even the weightiest musical utterances. Bartók dances, Bruckner sings. It’s a quality that he communicates easily to the players of the LSO, who responded with vibrant rhythms and clean, transparent textures.When arranged around the piano, celesta and harp, the LSO strings comfortably fill the Barbican stage, making for large-scale Bartók. But the precision of the ensemble, as Read more ...