Reviews
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The idea of producing a classic play in a mix of two languages is pretty odd. What kind of audience is a bilingual version of Molière’s best-known comedy aiming at, you wonder. Homesick émigrés? British francophiles with rusty A-level French? Neither constituency is likely to be satisfied by this curious dish that is neither fish nor fowl.Paul Anderson, best known as Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders but now affecting a dodgy southern-states drawl, is Tartuffe, redrawn in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation as a new-age guru. Proclaiming the spiritual benefits of celibacy and poverty, he has Read more ...
David Benedict
Question: is Consent, transferred from the National to the West End, a sharp-tongued comedy or an acute reinvention of a revenge drama? There are more than enough smartly placed laughs throughout the tart, increasingly taut first act, to make you think you’re watching an amusingly balanced, if increasingly vicious, exposé of the divide between the private and professional lives of lawyers. But at the top of the second act, playwright Nina Raine triggers a perfectly timed dramatic explosion blowing the niceties of legal language out of the water. As everything turns frighteningly personal, the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
2018 has become a year of farewells as a mighty handful of musicians who have, in their different ways, defined popular music bow out. Among them is Joan Baez, a star on the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene when she made her unannounced debut at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She was 18 and, it’s safe to say, never dreamed she’d be filling concert halls around the world 60 years later.Her latest album, Whistle Down the Wind, which brings her extraordinary career full circle, has enjoyed glowing reviews and demand has outstripped supply. So too has the clamour for tickets for her Fare Thee Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Would it be happy ever after for John and Kayleigh? Would they or would they not drive off into the sunset? By the end they weren’t driving off anywhere. Thanks to an errant hedgehog, the finale of Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC One) turned into Peter Kay’s Car Crash and blew the bloody doors off. So they went home holding hands on the bus.What a wonderful treat our last road trip with them was. For the nerdy #CarShare connoisseurs the street sign jokes came thick and fast. Old Trafford was handed over to Manchester City, there was an ad for My Big Fat Undateable Bake Off (“fancy a raspberry Read more ...
Chris Harvey
For the past decade, Victoria Park in east London has been host to the Field Day and Lovebox festivals, both homegrown and both still growing in size and influence. Last year’s headliners included rare appearances from Aphex Twin (Field Day) and Frank Ocean (Lovebox), bringing huge crowds to this vast and beautiful Victorian lung. This year, however, both were outbid and unceremoniously booted out to search for pastures new when the American organisers of Coachella decided to set up a new London festival.All Points East, a 10-day event, spread over two successive long weekends, boasts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too. Richard Eyre‘s new version for the BBC sets Shakespeare’s most remorselessly bleak tragedy in a pseudo-modern Britain where historic stately homes co-exist with urban squalor and a ruthlessly militaristic nobility, but despite its strength-in-depth cast it ends up as less than the sum of its parts.Although it’s unusual to find King Lear opening with nighttime scenes of a glittering, contemporary City of London, including the Tower thereof, it’s difficult to feel that this setting helps us to better understand Read more ...
Katherine Waters
I’ve forgotten my wallet. This is both embarrassing (where did the fun lush part between callow youth and irrefutable senility disappear?) and upsetting because by the interval of the Finborough Theatre’s revival of French symbolist writer Paul Claudel’s immensely prolix, indulgently semi-autobiographical, astonishingly declamatory and undeniably self-flagellatory play Break of Noon, I'm in need of a drink as stiff as the acting.How many adjectives can fit into a sentence? How many words can be used when one will suffice? Why say “fearful” when being “scared” and harrowed to the “pith” of Read more ...
Echo & the Bunnymen, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review – Mac and Will hit the road with added strings
Guy Oddy
This Echo and the Bunnymen gig in Birmingham is one that almost didn’t happen, on a tour to promote the soon-to-be-released The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon, their first album since 2014’s Meteorites. With their beloved Liverpool FC playing Real Madrid in the Champions League final, the band initially tried to shift the show to another day and put out a press release stating that long-stays Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant wouldn’t be able to put their hearts and souls into things with their minds firmly focused on events in Kiev.It seems that their fans in the Midlands aren’t quite so Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s four albums all centre around off-kilter pop and flirtations with distortion; their latest LP, Sex & Food, carries this tradition forwards in a more laid-back manner. Their current European tour in support of the album seems to have lined up nicely with the schedules of American acts Deerhunter, Black Lips and Sam Evian (as well as much-hyped British act Boy Azooga), with all five artists descending on the Albert Hall in Manchester for the six-hour Strange Waves III.Between the criminally early start time of 5pm and Transport for Manchester’s bus timetabling Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A body can be pushed to the brink, to the point where thoughts flatten to a line of light, and come back from death, but the heart is complex and the damage it wreaks barely controllable. For Grace, Lia and Sky, the three sisters of Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure, living by a discipline which tames their bodies and emotions to strict rituals is more than a matter of self-control – it is a matter of survival.They’ve been brought up by Mother and King, their father, in a sprawling dilapidated island hotel, away from the mainland where a toxic scourge to which men are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In William S, Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, a simopath was “a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army and discharge cures it.” Being in uniform, then, reversed evolution.In October 1967, a British band called Nirvana released their debut album. With its Burroughs-referencing title, The Story of Simon Simopath was a 10-track concept album telling the story of a boy longing for the wings of butterfly. Getting his wish, he flies away from reality, suffers a nervous breakdown and then boards a rocket, meets a centaur and a goddess named Magdelana who Read more ...