Reviews
Matthew Wright
Many jazz singers are known for an instantly recognisable tone. Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong are known the moment they open their mouth, for a particular quality of delivery. Jazz singer and comedian Ian Shaw, who launched his 14th album at Pizza Express Jazz Club last night, works differently. His best performances are about the blend of comedian’s timing and musician’s tone, and once he’d warmed up last night, there were tears and giggles aplenty.His new album combines originals and an eclectic collection of covers, and they give the incredible versatility of his vocal range full rein Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology. At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.And here comes a six-part television history, sprawling and ambitious, of the past 4,000 years masterminded and narrated by Michael Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, a film of surpassingly exquisite visual beauty, centres on a deadly hit-woman in ninth-century China who for humanistic or sentimental reasons can't bring herself to kill all her designated victims. That the Taiwanese master Hou dispatches the movie’s stylized skirmishes and ambushes bloodlessly, and with uncommon brevity, emphasizes that it wasn’t the chance to depict violence that drew him for the first time to the wuxia martial arts genre. Quentin Tarantino won’t be remaking The Assassin any time soon.Lithe, black-clad, and unsmiling, Nie Yinniang (Shu Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.That precipitated a witch-hunt, forcing those accused to flee their families and homes. They suffered violence: so great was the sense of public anger inspired by made-up equations of homosexuality with paedophilia that a number of people Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Some chamber ensembles flourish through creative conflict, contrast and tension. Others streamline their approach, not so much relinquishing individuality as allowing the best of each to blend into more than the sum of their parts. The Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch has grown, in its five-year existence, to be one of the latter.Partly the secret of its success could be that the three musicians – British cellist Raphael Wallfisch with two Israeli colleagues, pianist Arnon Erez and violinist Hagai Shaham – are not only old friends, but long-experienced chamber music players, each with a wealth of Read more ...
David Kettle
Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Court in 1997, Conor McPherson’s The Weir has become something of a modern classic, notching up dozens of productions worldwide and even winning inclusion in the National Theatre’s list of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century. It’s also a deceptively simple, unassuming offering – on the face of it, not much even seems to happen. There are no theatrical pyrotechnics, just a few spooky stories told by locals to an intriguing newcomer in a rural Irish pub. So there’s a weight of expectation on any new staging, and also a curiosity as to what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago, Channel 4 aired Jamie Roberts's documentary Angry, White and Proud, the result of a year Roberts spent getting to know members of far-right splinter groups. Now here's the follow-up, this time the result of two years' research into Islamic extremism in Britain.Amid the mountain of hair-raising material he came away with was the revelation he kept until last (except it had already been trailed fairly heavily, but never mind). This was that the man he'd come to know as Abu Rumaysah, who lived in Walthamstow and used to make a living by renting out bouncy castles for children's Read more ...
David Nice
Unlike Schubert, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, Mozart composed nothing astoundingly individual before the age of 20. That leaves any odyssey through his oeuvre, year by year – this one will finish in 2041, by which time I’ll be nearly 80 if I live that long – with a problem effectively solved by Ian Page and his Classical Opera in placing works by contemporaries of various ages alongside young Amadeus’s efforts. For the music of the nevertheless precocious nine/ten-year-old of the year 1766, directness of communication was everything, not a problem given Page’s players and two bright Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It is a nightmare scenario: you have an accident that leaves you comatose. You are out of action in hospital for three weeks and then, when you wake up, you gradually realise that you don’t remember anything of the past 10 years. Not three weeks, but 10 years! So what has happened to your life? This is the basic premise of Olivier- and Tony-award-nominee Peter Quilter’s new drama, 4000 Days, whose title aptly describes the gap in the experience of its protagonist, played by the ever-watchable Alistair McGowan.Set entirely in a hospital room, the story explores the situation of Michael ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ah, the fascination of faraway countries of which we know nothing. And of dictators, always a species of interest to filmmakers, because you rarely have to make anything up – Chaplin, of course, wrote the primer on that one. How alluring when reality is already so much weirder than anything that can be invented.Ben Hopkins’ Lost in Karastan plays on both tropes. It’s billed as a comedy, though the level of humour that communicates itself will perhaps depend on how well you already know the territory, which is that belonging to tin-pot leaders in obscure outposts of ex-empires who seek to put Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Created and written by the abundantly talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also stars, Crashing is set among a group of twenty- and thirtysomethings living in a disused hospital in London, which the characters are “protecting” – sort of legalised squatting, where the sanctioned occupants pay a small rent and protect the building from being taken over by, well, squatters. It was filmed in an actual disused hospital, with lots of rooms and shared spaces such as bathrooms, which lends bags of atmosphere and allows the story to have several strands.In the first episode we saw Waller-Bridge's Lulu Read more ...
David Kettle
It was a simple yet beautifully elegant way for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to kick off its 2016 chamber concerts: a recital for flute, viola and harp, with Debussy’s beguiling Sonata as the centrepiece, and other contrasting music for the same trio orbiting around it.And it was a similarly sensible decision for the orchestra to spotlight two of its principal players – flautist Alison Mitchell (pictured below) and violist Jane Atkins (main picture) – who joined together in what felt like an entirely unforced, natural partnership, both equally supple in phrasing and tonal variety, alive to Read more ...