Reviews
Jasper Rees
There have been plenty of films about mountains, and they are mainly about men. The plot tends not to vary: man clambers up peak because, as Mallory famously reasoned, it is there. Whether factual or scripted, often they are disaster movies too: Everest, Touching the Void, the astonishing German film about the race to conquer the vertical wall of the Eiger, North Face. So Edie, in which an octogenarian woman determines to hike up a Scottish mountain, is quite out of step with the rest of the genre.Edie, as played by Sheila Hancock, is a bit of a forbidding crag herself. She has spent her life Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I thought she maybe had superpowers to go that high.” Emilia Senior, 12, watched her sister Eve, 15, thrown into the air by the force of the explosion. When Eve came to earth her own perception had tilted on its axis: “I saw my legs on fire,” she remembered, “and then I was unconscious.” Short of targeting a kindergarten, a terrorist could not have chosen to decimate a more blameless demographic than teen fans of Ariana Grande. It was the details that broke the heart as some of these thousands of girls remembered the aftermath of the terrorist attack a year ago at the Manchester Arena. ( Read more ...
David Nice
If Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto for Richard Strauss in their joint "comedy for music" is the apogee of elaborately referenced dialogue and stage directions in opera, Richard Jones's realisation - for all that it throws out much of the original rulebook - may well be the most rigorously detailed production on the operatic stage today. Seeing it live a second time after its dizzying 2014 premiere as resurrected by his trusted movement director Sarah Fahie leaves me reeling with surprise, admiration and perplexity for how much more there's still to discover in its symmetries and ambiguities Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in Paddington 2, and he’s brilliant in A Very English Scandal (BBC One) as smooth, treacherous Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. At moments, he even manages to look uncannily like him.Thorpe himself would doubtless have dreamed of pulling off a similar feat of reinvention, but for all his success as a revitalising force in the Liberal Party, his goose was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie tells us at the top of the show that she is a heterosexual, able-bodied, privileged white female – so why is she feeling so discontented? As she explains with great verbal dexterity in What Now?, it is living in a post-EU referendum world that has made her feel so discombobulated; left and right have no meaning any more, and – like so many British voters – she doesn’t know where her political home is.The Brexit vote has created some odd bedfellows, she says; it came as a big shock when lap-dancing club owner Peter Stringfellow said he was a fellow Remainer – because he didn’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not the least startling element of Bishop Michael Curry’s house-rockin’ sermon at the royal nuptials was his quotation from the old spiritual “There is a balm in Gilead”. Evidently the Bishop was not referring to the endlessly looping nightmare that is The Handmaid’s Tale, where “Gilead” means not balm, but torture, terror, misery and misogyny.The first series used up Margaret Atwood’s source novel, so series two relies on showrunner Bruce Miller and his team of writers to take the narrative onwards, while also filling in background information about how the Gilead Republic came into being, Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It was no matter that journalist Daniel Hahn dropped out ill at the 11th hour of this "audience with" event. Author Philip Ardagh's deep knowledge and unflappable demeanour comfortably carried the hour-long talk about the inhabitants of Moominvalley. We heard detail of characters, themes, metaphors, changes from books to the TV cartoons and detail of Tove Jansson and her family, who wrote the original books.We coursed through the journey of a boy who saved his book tokens to buy the novels of Jansson, his favourite author, and eventually came to write a 380-page book about the world of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An Irishman who spent more than half a century in London and then Devon, and a prolific writer – nearly 20 novels and novellas, some 20 collections of short stories in varying combinations – William Trevor (1928-2016) is often eulogised as a modern Chekhov. He is invariably characterised as the master of the short story in post-Joycean times, rightly revered, esteemed, admired, awarded. Several of these last 10 stories were published in The New Yorker, where much of his finest work in this form has appeared, while several iterations of his Collected Stories published previously have run to Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Puccini’s heroines and the rough treatment he hands out to them have come in for plenty of opprobrium over the years. But just occasionally they fight back on his behalf in the person of an outstanding singing actress; and this is exactly the case with Glyndebourne’s initial offering of their new season, a revival of Annilese Miskimmon’s Madama Butterfly, first seen as part of the company’s tour in 2016, and given a somewhat dusty reception on The Arts Desk.The production itself, in Nicky Shaw’s designs, seems not to have changed much. There remains the modish and apparently pointless update Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ian McEwan has said that he decided to adapt his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach for the screen himself at least partly because he did not want anyone else to do so (with earlier works, including Atonement, he was glad not to have taken on the adaptation). The sensitivity of the original lies in its interiority, a quality that moves medium with far more difficulty than most. It’s a moot point whether the challenge could have finally been met by anyone, but somehow Dominic Cooke’s film, his screen debut, never quite attains the perfect, lonely poignancy of the book.That said, Cooke has made a film Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
African Scream Contest 2 opens with a burst of distorted guitar suggesting a parallel-world response to The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today”. Then, the song beds in and a James Brown groove plays off against spindly lead-guitar lines also evoking California in the psychedelic era: the extemporisation of Jefferson Airplane. At 3.06, the vocalist and percussionist are left to get on with it for 30 seconds. Next, a wheezy organ comes to the fore and injects some “Light my Fire” vamps.The track is “A Min We Vo Nou” by Les Sympathics de Porto-Novo. Recorded in 1973 or 1974 in Lagos, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
To readers of newspapers and magazines, the name Clancy Sigal will be very familiar, probably as a film reviewer. Addicted to writing, and to his old Smith Corona #3 portable typewriter, “Hemingway’s preferred machine”, he was a version of the man who came to dinner. He arrived – inevitably, for this was the early 1950s – off the boat in Dover, intending to spend a weekend exploring before returning to the US. He stayed 30 years.“Kicked out of Paris by the French police for having a cancelled US passport and no visa” – years later, he would discover the FBI had branded him SUBVERSIVE – he Read more ...