Reviews
Robert Beale
The Stoller Hall, the modest-size auditorium inside Chetham’s School of Music, is really proving itself to be the venue Manchester has long needed this season. Two concerts on successive days, each the first of a series and both making something of a statement, proved that.On Thursday Psappha opened its Manchester season there (the remaining performances are at St Michael’s Ancoats) with three guest singers and a second half that was as much music theatre as concert. "Four iconic works from the 20th century" was the subtitle, but the initial focus was on two pianos and two pianists, as Paul Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
"I’m not a number, I’m not a grade, and I’m not a failure." The 17-year-old girl stands in front of the small class, who gaze at her goggle-eyed. "A robot factory. That’s all you’ve got here." The teacher’s response is caustically admiring. "Why are you here, Alisha, if that’s what you’re capable of? Why didn’t you do that last year?" This is the school - not so much of hard knocks as of tough skins – for those who have been treated badly by the world, and have a strong suspicion that things won’t get much better. Richard Molloy’s Every Day I Make Greatness Happen in Hampstead Theatre's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Writers need to write, or so goes the unimpeachable argument that underpins The Wife, which is being strongly touted as the film that may finally bring leading lady Glenn Close an Oscar in her seventh time at bat. Close is terrific, as she almost always is, but this film from Swedish director Björn Runge is in no way her match, and it would be a shame if the Academy were to honour the screen (and stage) veteran for purely sentimental reasons, having bypassed her in far-superior movies along the way. The source is a novel by the American writer Meg Wolitzer, but much of The Wife Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There are some wonderful things in Space Shifters, the Hayward Gallery’s autumn exhibition. The selection of work plays with one’s perceptions of space and everything in it. You look through, round or over these sculptures and installations rather than at them, since they direct attention more to the act of seeing than to the work itself. Some date back many years and are as inspiring as the day they were made, but others have been eclipsed by their many offspring.Richard Wilson’s 20:50 was on display in London almost continuously from 1991, when it was installed at Charles Saatchi’s Gallery Read more ...
Heather Neill
Ten years after Harold Pinter's death, Jamie Lloyd has set about honouring the 20th century's outstanding British playwright in an ambitious West End season of his shorter works at the theatre which now bears his name. Lloyd, already recognised as a skilled Pinter interpreter, has grouped the 20 pieces into seven programmes and attracted a starry array of actors to the project. Still to come are the likes of Tamsin Greig, Martin Freeman, Penelope Wilton, Mark Rylance, Janie Dee, Rupert Graves, Danny Dyer, Jane Horrocks and Celia Imrie.Pinter 1 and Pinter 2 are already launched, featuring Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You always wonder about those final scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Are they really needed dramatically; do they work? We understand, of course, that a closing exhalation may add impact to high passions just witnessed. But is it just a romantic idea that tragedy might be better ending with the real bang of (multiple) death, rather than the relative whimper of a new order being established?In his new Antony and Cleopatra, Simon Godwin gives us a double whammy, playing the final scene – the closing tableau, at least, with its pronouncements over the dead heroine – as prelude to the action as Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Perched alone and fearful in her hut as the curtain rises on Die Walküre, Sieglinde clutches and then throws aside a grimy teddy-bear. Story time is over. The nymphs and gold and bickering gods all belong in the past, to the ‘preliminary evening’ of Das Rheingold, or so Sieglinde might think. The real drama of Wagner's Ring begins here. It’s a nice metaphor, one of many that Keith Warner throws into the pot for his Royal Opera staging on its final appearance.Other false comforts and dreams of dominion bind the Victorian age of the Ring’s composition to subsequent eras of industrialised Read more ...
David Kettle
“Well, that was really sweet,” one young audience member in front of me remarked on his way out of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. And yes, there’s no denying that director Wils Wilson’s colourful, psychedelic, summer-of-love-set Twelfth Night, the Lyceum’s season opener in a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, is warm and generous, lovingly crafted, and – yes, touchingly sweet.More interestingly, perhaps, it’s enjoyably playful – and gently provocative, too – in its approach to gender. Shakespeare’s original sets the gender-fluid tone – with Duke Orsino falling for the aloof, recently Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years. Concept sketches and art show the games developing as they gradually take their final form. The exhibition also looks at how videogames could be more life-like and give a new perspective on the world.Some of the games cover topics never really seen before in games. Mafia 3 is set in 1968 USA, and addresses racism as an integral part of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. The wholly avoidable tragedy (Ireland exported huge amounts of grain, butter and livestock during the famine) resides still in the modern Irish psyche; it is no coincidence that of all the nations that contributed to Live Aid in 1985, Ireland’s contribution, per capita, was the greatest.Lance Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park.Crystal Moselle’s first feature film (her extraordinary 2015 documentary The Wolfpack, about some Lower East Side siblings whose father closeted them in the family apartment for years, is a hard act to follow) homes in on eight teenage girls who bond through skateboarding. Very different Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There was once a time when grime music was very angry, and very threatening, but that seems a long time ago now. Today, Dizzee Rascal is less a herald of riot and revolt, and more of a national treasure, exuding charm from every pore, even if his music has become increasing predictable and safe. But, as wordsmith and dancer Debris Stevenson proves in her debut play, Poet in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal still can change minds and influence people. Now on the Royal Court's main stage, the electrifying semi-autobiographical show features Stevenson herself, as well as grime MC Jammz and music by Read more ...