Reviews
Florence Hallett
Might a painting ever achieve the veracity of a sculpture, a "real" object in space that we can walk around and view from every angle? Could the documentary quality of an engraving ever be equalled by a painting? And how could painting respond to photography – drawing with light – an invention that in the 19th century prompted a thorough reconsideration of painting’s purpose.From the paragone debate of the Renaissance, in which the relative merits of painting and sculpture were considered in a spirit of fierce competition, to more recent challenges presented by new and changing technologies, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American servicemen which premieres at the Hampstead Theatre in north London, effortlessly evokes the world of the Home Front deep in the middle of total war. Yet adapting novels is a risky business, mainly because their tone is so hard to convey without using paragraph after paragraph of prose, and Wright struggles to give us a convincing stage version of a Read more ...
David Nice
Fancy that: the day after the last major Menotti staging I can remember in the UK, The Medium at the Edinburgh Festival, "splendid piece of post-Puccinian grand guignol" turned up in two different reviews (moral: don't discuss the performance with your colleagues). "Dated piece of post-Puccinian absurdist melodrama" might be a bit harsh but not so wide of the mark in the case of The Consul, his late 1940s fantasy rooted in the horrors of totalitarianism and western bureaucracy. Certainly the Guildhall School students, conductor and production team gave it the best possible chance, making it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the recent death of the band's co-founder Walter Becker, it seemed faintly remarkable that Steely Dan went ahead with this O2 show at all – it was the closing night event of Bluesfest 2017 – but Becker’s absence wasn’t allowed to detract from the sustained brilliance of the performance. The Dan’s surviving guru, Donald Fagen, has announced that “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band”, and surely it has never sounded better.Becker and Fagen always loved the idea of the great jazz orchestras, not least Duke Ellington’s band, and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Some 50 portraits by Paul Cézanne – almost a third of all those the artist painted that have survived – are on view in this quietly sensational exhibition. Eye-opening and heart-breaking, it examines his art exclusively in the context of his portrayal of people for the first time.It is that proverbial once-in-a-lifetime show: half a dozen or so works have not been seen in public for decades, and several have never been shown in the UK. In microcosm, too, this selection shows us essential Cézanne: exactly what made him different from his peers as he took what, say, the Impressionists were Read more ...
David Nice
A legendary name and the chance to change the face of a cruel condition set the stakes high for what Prince Charles, in his programme preface for this Southbank spectacular, told us was called the Stop MS Jacqueline du Pré Tribute Concert. There she was on the screen (and in excellent sound) before any players appeared on stage, the vital cellist whose career was cut short, being celebrated by, among others, John Barbirolli for the splendid emotional excess of youth and by her husband Daniel Barenboim for the way she would hold a conversation in everything, the perfect chamber player. Those Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Terry Johnson's award-winning 1982 play Insignificance hasn't been seen in London since the playwright directed a 1995 revival at the Donmar (though Sam West staged his own production a decade later in Sheffield). But even the intrigue inherent in finding Johnson's own daughter, Alice, in the pivotal role of the unnamed actress who is clearly Marilyn Monroe can't steady director David Mercatali's reckoning with the play this time out.Four hugely distinct icons of American history are thrown together during one eventful 1950s night in Albert Einstein's New York hotel room as he finds himself Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oliver Sacks was the neurologist – and historian of science, and naturalist – whose exceptionally elegant, clear and accessible prose has captivated that almost mythical creature, the general audience, through more than a dozen books as well as many essays. Who could resist his narratives of patients who had, to say the least, unusual brains: the subject of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the astonishing musical savants who could communicate only through music in Musicophilia, or Awakenings about brain-damaged people affected by the infamous “sleepy sickness” (encephalitis lethargica Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
At first glance, Susie Boyt’s sixth novel seems in danger of echoing her half-sister Esther Freud’s Lucky Break, another story about actors. But how unfair – of course Love and Fame has its own distinctive, witty brilliance. Eve Swift comes from an acting dynasty but she is a failed thespian after nerves – “She’s as highly strung as a violin factory” – force her to pull out of playing Nina in The Seagull. For four weeks of rehearsals she doesn’t eat, apart from monkey nuts, or sleep. At first the intensity of her performance works – “You do lost so well, Eve” – but then it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”Porter delivers his existential, melancholy contemplation in a voice brimming with defeat. He sounds as if he is about to lay down and surrender to the void; to an eternal abyss from whence he will never Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Marcel Proust was a prolific letter-writer. He wrote tens of thousands of them, and at speed, as can be seen from the two facsimiles which are included with the text of Letters to the Lady Upstairs (there are quite a few more in the original French edition).It is no surprise, given the pace at which he wrote, and the quantity produced, that the occasional batch of previously undiscovered letters should turn up. This new translation comprises 26 of them. Proust wrote 23 letters to Marie Williams, a harpist, a woman who was très distinguée, très parfumée, according to Proust’s loyal maid Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Perhaps Sibelius did the right thing, signing off Tapiola in 1926 and then all but closing his account, spending the next three decades sitting and drinking. Over in Paris, his near-contemporary Florent Schmitt carried on, beavering away not only as a composer but a critic, in which capacity he availed his readers with pearls of wisdom such as Beethoven’s Violin Concerto being "utterly devoid of musical interest".Dating from the year before his death in 1958, the Second Symphony is Schmitt’s last major work. It's cast like Sibelius’s Third in three movements, but there the resemblance ends. Read more ...