Reviews
aleks.sierz
War is morally acidic: it dissolves social rules, loosens inhibitions and gives permission to men to behave like animals. And the people who have to put up with this deluge of amorality and abuse are, of course, women. It is one of the strengths of Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s savage war play, Bad Roads, translated by Sasha Dugdale and part of the Royal Court’s autumn international season, that she shows not only what war is like for women, but also its corrosive effects on masculinity. Especially how conflict collapses the boundary between humanity and animality.Set in the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you’re hoping for an incisive look at Fifties American suburbia in this unappealing film, directed and co-written by George Clooney, you’ll be disappointed. It’s hardly worthy of the director of Good Night, and Good Luck, also set in the Fifties and co-written by Grant Heslov. It could have been much more satisfying if Clooney and Heslov had stuck with the original plan and explored the timely real-life story Suburbicon is partly based on – the racist riots sparked off by an African-American family moving into Levittown, an all-white suburb in Pennsylvania, in 1957. But instead, Clooney Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Before the age of photography, people and places were recorded in ink or paint or sound. The process of recording was not instant, could not be rushed, and produced by its nature an experience of layers. On the last leg of a brief UK tour, the Basel Chamber Orchestra brought to Cadogan Hall two landscapes and two portraits, in performances notably true to life and unified as harmoniously as a Rothko quartet by the ensemble’s own cultivated tonal palette.Timbres were applied neat and raw to Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, and Heinz Holliger had left the canvas unprimed: the effect was not a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Our universe seems to be in a state of equilibrium, neither collapsing in on itself nor expanding ad infinitum. The metaphor used by physicists to represent the delicate balance of forces needed to maintain this happy state of affairs is a pencil standing on its tip. In his sculpture Omega = 1, Steven Pippin miraculously turns the metaphor into physical reality.It took him 10 years to perfect a system that would keep a pencil balanced atop a steel rod without any support. The secret lies in the shadows cast by two lights shining onto the shaft; monitoring the shadows are sensors that respond Read more ...
David Nice
If you're not going to mention the imaginative genius of Stravinsky, Auden and Kallman within the covers of your programme, and the only article, by the director, is titled "Acting Naturally", then the production had better deliver. That remarkable actor Selina Cadell's eloquent words, both there and in a "First Person" piece on theartsdesk, promise more than actually emerges in a debut staging from the lavishly-supported OperaGlass Works which doesn't even have the curiosity value of going daringly wrong. Between them Cadell and her curiously un-buoyant conductor, Laurence Cummings, much Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Breaking up is hard to do, sang Neil Sedaka, and Mercedes Grower plays out that sentiment in a quirky, original and often funny film, which neatly subverts Hollywood romcom tropes.It's an episodic piece (with a stellar cast) that cuts between nine couples breaking up with resignation or despair, angrily or comically. There's some unbearably honest writing, but also some rather less accomplished scenes that have the feel of improvised material.And some stories work better than others, but there are a couple that stand out. Julia Davis is wonderful as Livy, a self-obsessed, talent-free actress Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura. This performance commemorated the 10th anniversary of Stockhausen’s death, but also marked the last ever appearance by Singcircle, a fitting end for a group associated above all else with this work.As with most of Stockhausen’s Read more ...
william.ward
It has long been a mystery why no new production of Semiramide should have been staged at Covent Garden since 1887: un offesa terribile considering that this splendid melodramma tragico should have been the inaugural production of the Royal Italian Opera House (our current theatre’s predecessor) in 1847.In fact much of Rossini’s repertoire, both comic and tragic, fell out of favour worldwide from about the time of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, partly as a disappearance of such star lead sopranos such as Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. So with the exception of a couple of propaganda-driven Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A fair few Edinburgh Fringe shows are just that – things that work perfectly in the “let's do the show right here” spirit that permeates the festival, in a tiny (and often grotty) venue that adds hugely to the vibe. That's all well and good during August, of course, but come later in the year when a show moves beyond the festival confines it can lose much of its spark.So it's a delight that Rob Kemp's The Elvis Dead, which was a word-of-mouth hit before it deservedly gained a best newcomer nomination in the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards, has made the journey south for a late-night Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The great and good of the London music scene were gathered at English National Opera last night for the unveiling of American Wunderkind Nico Muhly’s new opera, Marnie. Although it was commissioned by the Met in New York, somehow ENO managed to wangle the world premiere, which has been widely hyped and was ecstatically received by a packed house. But for all that there was much to enjoy, it hardly deserved such rapture, and there were problems with both piece and production.Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the Winston Graham novel of 1961. The opera looks Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
One of these years, Javier Marías will probably win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If and when that honour happens, critics may well discuss the Spanish writer’s fiction, in all its “intensity, complexity and power to convince”, in much the same terms as he applies to one of his favourite works of art. This evergreen marvel is “not just extraordinarily complex as regards narrative and time, it is also chillingly ambiguous; and it does not attempt to explain anything about the grave matters it touches upon: identity, being and not being, the real and the hypothetical, memory as not something Read more ...