Reviews
Katherine Waters
In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.The authorities of the wider conurbation provoke distrust – kickbacks and dirty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The terrace beside the restaurant in Cologne’s Stadtgarten – the city park – is heaving. Agreeably so. A bar and a food counter facing onto it are fringed by rows of long tables. Overhanging trees unite in a canopy suggesting this might be forest clearing. And despite the amount of people of all ages and despite the amount of the local Kölsch beer and the Riesling you’d expect in Rhine-straddling city flying around, the atmosphere is relaxed.On the terrace’s bandstand, Tigger-ish Berlin band Champyons bounce through a mix of electro-inclined pop and guitar-focused songs suggesting a punked-up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Until now, hearing the extraordinary “Ratidzo” was all-but impossible. The original single is rare and has not been reissued before. It begins with a plaintive whistle which sets the scene for a hypnotic and beautiful rotating pattern of single notes possibly played on a gamelan-style instrument. Rhythmic accompaniment comes from a form of shaker. It is not instantly possible to place where this music is from. Eastern Asia? Hawaii? The next track is similarly mysterious, but the addition of a vocal suggests Africa. The singular talent responsible for these outstanding performances is Zimbabwe Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This was the first complete performance of Theodora at the Proms, one of a series of Handel oratorios initiated with William Christie’s Israel in Egypt last year. Theodora is more often performed today as a staged opera, most famously in the Peter Sellars production at Glyndebourne in the 1990s. But this performance demonstrated that it is just as effective in its original guise, the narrative related in brief recitatives, the better to allow the arias and choruses to shine.Theodora is a moralistic tale of Christians persecuted and martyred in Roman Antioch. (Fun fact: the novel on which it Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A starry and mostly American cast does well by The Seagull, Chekhov's eternally moving portrait of egomania run wild and self-abasement turned tragically inward. Combining two major players from the New York theatre world in director Michael Mayer (London's Funny Girl, Broadway's Hedwig and the Angry Inch) with a Tony-winning adapter in The Humans' Stephen Karam, the film suffers only from an occasional literalmindedness that exists at odds with the multi-layered nuance of the source material. Still, Annette Bening in full flow is always worth one's attention, and a distinguished supporting Read more ...
Heather Neill
The title of Tony Harrison's teacherly entertainment – it can't be called a play – refers to the square bullets invented by James Puckle to kill Muslims in the 18th century. This shocking morsel of information is provided by the brothers Hiram and Hudson Maxim, inventors respectively of the machine gun and smokeless gunpowder, who are two of the characters in Square Rounds.That apparent oxymoron might also imply attempts to square impossible circles, to the irony of scientific curiosity so frequently leading simultaneously to beneficial and destructive ends. Hiram Maxim (played energetically Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Desiree Akhavan’s second film, following on from her rather ironically titled Appropriate Behaviour of 2014. That was a coming-out drama about a bisexual, Iranian-American woman, whose story closely reflected the director’s own – and Akhavan played its lead role, too. With The Miseducation of Cameron Post, she has widened her perspective considerably, and her new film, while surely retaining gay community admirers, will also speak, it must be hoped, to a considerably wider audience. On which note, mainstream name Chloë Grace Moretz’s presence in the title role, as well as the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A day after John Eliot Gardiner and wandering violist Antoine Tamestit had converted the Royal Albert Hall into a sonic map of Hector Berlioz’s Italy, conductor Peter Oundjian and his full-strength divisions transported us to the Western Front. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, premiered in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen to speak, now as then, of fragile human understanding and affection in the face of overwhelming terror and violence. Yet its plea for the still, small voices of truth and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Transatlantic theatrical traffic is busier than ever, and now here at the Hampstead is not just Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play, first seen in 2015, but director Joe Mantello and his full Broadway cast. It seems fitting that they should travel together, since Karam’s work is so dependent upon a company – as they do here – capturing the intricate rhythms of family, until the rich naturalism begins to convey something profound.It’s Thanksgiving, and three generations of Blakes have assembled to bless the new Manhattan apartment of younger daughter Brigid (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend – not Read more ...
David Nice
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards away from the Hogarth Rake paintings in Sir John Soane's Museum, played to a half-empty house, last night, at least. Why is this, as Auden and Kallman's great creation Baba the Turk, bearded lady of St Giles' Fair, asks of her feckless husband Tom Rakewell? No idea, but I urge you to catch the last performance on Saturday to see what youth and Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Spider-Man is among the most popular videogame characters in the history of gaming. His swing and climb ability, plus a bit of meaty hand-to-hand combat, some nifty web shooter gadgetry, a slick repertoire of one liners and a cracking all-in-one body stocking encouraged publishers to serve up more Spider-Man games than pretty much any other character, bar the Bat bloke with the cool car. Dozens of Spidey iterations have graced the shelves over the years: some good, some terrible. The last one, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, released back in 2014, demonstrated just how diluted the licence had Read more ...
David Nice
How do you make your mark in a crucial last week after the Olympian spectaculars of Kirill Petrenko's Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic? Well, for a start, you stay true to recent principles by getting as many of your period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique players as can manage it on their feet – Gardiner did it earlier this year in selected items on his mostly-Schumann programmes with the LSO – to dive headlong into the spume of Berlioz's Le Corsaire Overture. Throw in two charismatic soloists, plan special spatial effects that make dramatic sense, and have your orchestra Read more ...