Reviews
Katherine Waters
When in 2004 Frida Kahlo’s bedroom – sealed on the command of her husband Diego Rivera for 50 years from her death – was opened, a trove of clothes and personal items was discovered. They shed new light on the life of this iconic Mexican painter and female artist, who, born in 1907 to a German father and Indian-Spanish mother, lived through the Mexican Revolution, the emergence of Communism and the accession of America to the position of world power. In the V&A’s exhibition, these personal effects act as a prism through which to understand how she placed herself within this Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Essaouira, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, is the place of winds. Day or night, hot or cold, year in, year out, the “Alizee” blows, and it blows. In the local folklore it is not from the ocean but a grumbling resident of the medina – perhaps protesting the town’s rapid recent expansion, its port’s modernisation and the loss of legendary Chez Sam, the restaurant once beloved by an Othello-filming Orson Welles.But for the 21st edition of the Gnawa Festival in Essaouria the Alizee drew breath and slept, if fitfully, through four days and nights of intense trance music featuring the ghimbri bass Read more ...
David Nice
Pierre Boulez simply crystallised the obvious when he described Debussy's unique masterpiece as "theatre of cruelty," despite its enigmatic beginnings. Richard Jones, when I asked him to talk about its plot, declared "it's about two men who love the same woman, with disastrous results". Productions by Jones, Peter Stein with Boulez conducting and Vick at Glyndebourne have all had us shaking with fear and weeping with pity. By going much further in symbolic abstraction than even the playwright of Pelléas et Mélisande, Maurice Maeterlinck, could have imagined, Stefan Herheim serves up a frigid Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There’s undoubtedly a memorable film to be crafted from the life of guitar legend and grand old survivor Eric Clapton – for instance, Melvyn Bragg made a very good South Bank Show about him in 1987 – but the longer this one goes on, the less it has to say. Nor is it obvious why it has been made now.Director Lili Fini Zanuck, who used Clapton’s song “Tears in Heaven” in her 1991 movie Rush, has assembled the piece from a patchwork of archive material with interviewees (including Clapton) present only in voice-over, identified by captions. This seems to have become customary documentary Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The most intriguing aspect of the mid-Seventies, Memphis-based band Zuider Zee isn’t that they took their name from a geographic feature of the Netherlands or that they dealt in against-the-grain Anglo-centric pop rock or even that the new compilation Zeenith features top-drawer music which was never released at the time. It’s that their path never crossed that of the similarly minded and perennially lauded local outfit Big Star.In the liner notes to Zeenith, Zuider Zee’s Gary Bertrand says “We had no interaction with Memphis groups, none at all.” His bandmate Richard Orange goes further: “We Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"All this fuss over a bookstore?!" That's likely to be a common reaction to Spanish director Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop, which adapts a slender if much-admired 1978 novel by the quintessentially English Penelope Fitzgerald in order to cock a Continental snook at her English compatriots' mean-spirited ways. Following hard on the lamentable Book Club, here's another film that appears not to know what to do with the landscape of the printed word. Poetic justice would have sent both straight to the DVD pile. A drawn-faced Emily Mortimer plays Florence Green, a gentle-seeming war widow Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Forty years on. You could have got attractive odds on Duran Duran still being here when, on a yacht carving the seas off Antigua, a cream-suited Simon Le Bon mimed “Rio” astride an unapologetically phallic bowsprit. “A ripple in a stagnant pool,” sniffed the NME upon first catching them live. But that was then and this is now and four of the original five, having spent many years as a three, are still at it, 14 albums down.Naturally, therefore, they were due a BBC Four homage, which came in the form of not one but two films: There’s Something You Should Know was a bog-standard soup-to-nuts Read more ...
David Kettle
With – unusually – no visiting orchestra at this year’s St Magnus International Festival in far-flung Orkney (the fall-out from delayed funding confirmations, we’re assured), there was a danger that the annual midsummer event might have felt a little – well, quiet.Not a bit of it. In fact, if anything, this year’s festival felt more densely packed than ever – perhaps with events that were smaller in scale, admittedly, but they were no less ambitious and captivating for that. Famously founded by Orkney’s most famous musical resident – Peter Maxwell Davies, who died two years ago – all of 42 Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Faction’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a production in which women are more likely to kick ass than sleep with one – a muscular, mischievous take on the Bard’s most light-hearted play about forbidden love. As might be expected, this boldly dynamic theatre company takes all that is most sinister and subversive about the work, and spins a stereotype-smashing evening of pagan delights.Allusions to the moon weave themselves like a silver thread through A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s text, as both a harbinger of change and of the lunatic merriment that prevails. How apt, then, that Eleanor Field’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is something irresistibly haunting about tales of epic sea voyages and the perils they entail. Recently we’ve had two versions of the tragic saga of lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst (not to mention the excellent documentary Deep Water from 2006), and you could lob into the mix the Robert Redford vehicle All Is Lost, Kon-Tiki, White Squall and… er… many more.But never mind the competition, because Adrift can stand proud as one of the finest specimens of this watery genre. Based on the true story of Tami Oldham and Richard Sharp, which Oldham later set down in her book Red Sky in Mourning Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective is a new and enterprising group of musicians determined not just to create performances of high quality but to offer a new way in which the performances themselves are done. They started from scratch at the end of 2016, and I saw one of the first of their efforts, given at Islington Mill – a laid-back space in the basement of an old industrial building in Salford – in March last year. It was a place well used to commercial music performance, but not of Janáček… coupled with a brand-new dramatic piece for voice and string quartet commissioned from composer Huw Belling.It Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We are now pretty familiar with the idea that human reproduction (making babies) has been turned into big business, and there have already been several good recent plays about desperate couples and surrogacy – Vivienne Franzmann’s Bodies and Satinder Chohan’s Made in India – so is there any more to be said about giving nature a helping hand? This Hampstead Theatre certainly thinks so. In the 40th anniversary year since Louise Brown became the first test-tube baby it is marking the occasion by staging Jemma Kennedy’s large new comedy about giving biology a boost. And it gets its own Read more ...