Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Goodness the BBC Philharmonic plays well for John Storgårds. The orchestra’s chief guest conductor has a lovely easy manner on the podium – all curved gestures and loose arms, and the result is a partnership that brings the absolute best out of the BBC’s Manchester-based orchestra. Here, in a programme dominated by the Nordic music in which he excels, they carved glossy, oaken shapes out of Grieg and Sibelius, bringing some sophisticated rusticity to the gilded Royal Albert Hall.It was the solo viola that set the tone, thrusting its way through the orchestra at the start of their sequence of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A Ghost Story must be the first film with a sheet – a very expressive one – in the leading role. Beneath it is C (Casey Affleck), with two holes for eyes. It’s funny at first, but the Halloween cliché is rapidly transcended. C, a musician, haunts the faded ranch house in Texas where he lived with his wife M (Rooney Mara) before his death in a car crash nearby. A simple plot line, but this, David Lowery’s fourth feature (St Nick, Pete’s Dragon, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which also starred Affleck and Mara) is a complex and beautiful movie about time, loss and impermanence. After seeing it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
August is often a quiet month on the release front but theartsdesk on Vinyl came across a host of music deserving of attention. Now that even Sony, one of the biggest record companies in the world, are starting to press their own vinyl again, it’s safe to say records aren’t disappearing quite yet. On the contrary, the range of material is staggering in its breadth. So this month we review everything from spectral folk to boshing techno to the soundtrack of Guardians of The Galaxy 2. Take the plunge.VINYL OF THE MONTHFOS Captain Free (Near The Exit Music)London-based Greek artist Katerina Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Finnish director Dome Karukoski has made a sympathetic and quietly stylish biopic of Touko Laaksonen, the artist who did as much as anyone to define 20th century male gay visual culture. There’s a degree of irony in the fact that we know him by his national pseudonym – he started signing his work “Tom” for anonymity, while “of Finland” was thought up by an American publisher – given that post-war Helsinki is depicted here as about as repressive an environment for a young man exploring his sexuality as could be imagined. Asked at one point whether he has published his work in his homeland Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tiff Stevenson ★★★★“I identify as a 10!” Tiff Stevenson tells us in Bombshell. It’s a strong opener, particularly as she follows with: “And if you don’t agree you’re beauty-phobic.” It’s not to boast, though, more marking her territory in a show about the shifting sands of modern sexual politics. Why should women identify with a male view of the world?She playfully sets up the seeming incongruity of loving to dress in leopardskin while being able to talk about the semiotics of feminism - the two aren't mutually exclusive, after all, and how you see yourself is not necessarily how others Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are two approaches to a triple bill: make all three pieces similar so you get one crowd with definite tastes, or make them very different so you have a chance of pleasing everyone. The Contrasts bill that the Mariinsky ballet showed at the Royal Opera House was, as its title suggests, firmly in the latter camp. Its three pieces spanned over a hundred years of ballet history, from the Imperial classic Paquita via a stylised 1960s Carmen all the way to Wayne McGregor's 2008 Infra.Carmen was created as a vehicle for Maya Plisetskaya, the great Soviet ballerina who died in 2015, and it Read more ...
David Kettle
Eve ★★★★Transgender issues are high on the agenda at this year’s Fringe, with the energetic Testosterone at the Pleasance and the breezy You’ve Changed from Northern Stage at Summerhall among the stand-outs. In addition, the National Theatre of Scotland brings two trans-themed shows to the Traverse Theatre. Eve is a deeply personal, autobiographical work from playwright Jo (formerly John) Clifford, co-written with Fringe regular Chris Goode, that reflects on the challenges and joys of her life from a fearful young boy – before being transgender was even considered as a concept – to the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When you’re next strolling through Washington Square Park, or SoHo, or the West Village, you can thank Jane Jacobs that those New York neighbourhoods have survived (though she'd blanch at the price of real estate). Four-lane highways almost dissected and ruined them in the mid-Fifties, but her grass-roots activism saved those higgledy-piggledy streets. This film has some great archival footage that brings those days to life, though it could have done with fewer talking heads and more detailed interpretation.Vanity Fair writer and director Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for Read more ...
David Nice
The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend. John Eliot Gardiner proved better than anyone in last night's Prom that this splendidly lopsided "dramatic legend" can only be weakened by its many stagings; all the drama is in the music, and especially in the orchestra, from rollicking country dances and fanfaring Hungarians through to the shrieking night birds on the ride to the abyss and the six harps dappling the plains of heaven in what for modern tastes is a quite unnecessary "Epilogue in Heaven" for redeemed Marguerite.Gardiner is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” plays as Charlize Theron’s Lorraine Broughton makes her entrance. She’s the last Cold War super-spy, a female Bond sent to Berlin as the Wall crumbles. “Killer Queen”, prominent on early trailers, would have done just as well. Daniel Craig in Casino Royale is the last time an action star made such a startling bow.We meet Broughton before her post-Berlin debrief from suspicious spooks including her harassed MI6 boss Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and CIA counterpart Kurzfeld (John Goodman). As she immerses her bruised body in an ice-bath which she scoops to put Read more ...
David Kettle
Rhinoceros ★★★★★Marketed by an image of a Trump-quiffed and -besuited pachyderm, Zinnie Harris’s new version of Ionesco’s absurdist 1959 comedy is one of the International Festival flagship shows for 2017, a collaboration between Edinburgh’s own Royal Lyceum Theatre and Istanbul’s DOT Theatre. And with its wild, scabrous humour and its blazing, furious energy, it doesn’t disappoint. This is a Rhinoceros very much for our times, with fake news, mistrust of immigrants and even a USA gone to the dogs under a tinpot dictator all firmly referenced, in amongst Ionesco’s tale of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips ready: spot the difference between a woman who passes herself as a doctor and a woman who passes herself off as a Doctor.Trust Me, among other things, is a timely shop window for Whittaker’s abilities. The plot requires her to play her own private game of doctors and nurses. At the start she’s Cath Hardacre, a ballsy ward sister who makes the Read more ...