Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
The Southbank Centre’s second Multitudes festival – which commissions artists ranging from filmmakers to acrobats to shine new light onto the orchestral repertoire – began last night in triumph with the Aurora Orchestra’s celebrated performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from memory. As a musical feat alone this seemed the equivalent to building a human pyramid on a tightrope above the Thames, but the Aurora Orchestra heightened the challenge by sweeping us back to 1913 for a dramatised account of the Rite’s origin. Experiments fusing classical music and theatre are, perhaps Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Just now, everything WNO does inevitably bears the mark of their Arts Council-imposed financial troubles, and this new Flying Dutchman directed by Jack Furness is no exception. It proceeds on a bare stage largely devoid even of props, the singers costumed in the most mundane modern street-wear, no sign of the sea or ships, nothing beyond a few mysterious period-clad Scandinavians far upstage and some neutral back projections on which the audience is invited - I suppose - to bring their imaginations to bear.Of course there’s a justifying concept. “Stripping everything away,” says the designer Read more ...
Carsie Blanton & the Burning Hell, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review - a fine revolutionary singalong
Guy Oddy
In these times of genocide, illegal invasions and a class war which the ultra-rich are emphatically winning, we clearly need a woman to point out the nonsense that we have just come to accept as the way things are meant to be. That woman is Carsie Blanton.Powered by revolutionary optimism, a guitar and a group of like-minded friends, she has plenty to say about the world – but does so with a sense of hope for the future and a wry smile. Folk, jazz, blues and ragtime songs such as “Rich People”, “Elon Musk” and “Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch” are funny but serious, hip-swinging but thoughtful and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Antonio Pappano’s pairing for last night’s Barbican concert intrigued – and, initially, baffled – me. Shostakovich’s Fifth: a clear choice, given the London Symphony Orchestra’s recent stellar accounts of the Russian’s major symphonies. Its preface, however, came in the unpredictable form of Korngold’s violin concerto, under the bow of the supremely elegant and tasteful Vilde Frang.Between Hollywood and Leningrad, however, Pappano and his high-achieving band struck up a truly engrossing dialogue. Questions of kitsch and sentiment, of freedom and compulsion, of authenticity and artifice, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
“Since when was getting older an honour?” asks Tereza, rightly suspicious when she finds officials nailing up a cheap garland around her front door and presenting her with a medal. This is Brazil, sometime in the near future, and the government has decided that anyone over 75 is an economic burden on younger workers. No matter how fit you still are, you must hand in your work clothes and accept being shipped off to ‘the colony’ on a caged truck dubbed the wrinkle wagon. Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail is a dystopian fable, not dissimilar in its plot and casting to the more sombre Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This entertaining, gorgeous-looking film within a film, directed and written by multi-talented Turkish-Italian Ferzan Özpetek (he’s also directed operas and written several novels), starts in the present day with a large, noisy lunch party. Özpetek plays himself, a director who’s planning a movie, Diamanti, with this company of actresses - a vaginodrome, as one calls it. It’s about the power of women, he tells them. “Is it science-fiction?” asks one, sarcastically. He hands out scripts and everyone reads quietly.Özpetek moved to Rome from Istanbul in 1976 and his meta-film, based on his own Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the most resonant contemporary slogans is “Build bridges not walls”. Because it applies to the personal as well the political, it has the force of simplicity and directness. The way that building walls can be psychologically destructive, cutting a person off from emotional connection, is exemplified in Mancunian playwright Kit Withington’s new family play, Heart Wall, currently on the main stage at the Bush Theatre. Once part of this venue’s Emerging Writers’ Group, Withington now returns with a distinctly Northern voice – and a work which has power and subtlety, but also some problems Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2025 is this Saturday! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been playing through exclusive RSD goodies. Check the reviews. Then check head to your local record shop! See you amongst it. I apologise for the lack of current pop, particularly female pop singers, both established and rising. I spent time chasing such material but none arrived. Our RSD Special, then, lacks this tasty sliver of seasoning, but is still extremely tasty. That aside, DIVE IN!THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S CHOICEST CUT OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2026Robert Plant with Suzi Dian Saving Grace: All That Glitters Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As a catchline for a tour, “40 years of arsing about in comedy” is a grabber. That’s how Harry Enfield describes Harry Enfield and No Chums!, and it certainly shows that he is still, well, arsing about to great effect as he casts an eye over his life and careerThe show is a collection of anecdotes about his life and some of the characters he has voiced in television programmes such as Spitting Image, or created for shows such as Saturday Live and Harry Enfield & Chums.He comes on stage as King Charles, whom he has spoofed in The Windsors. The references to cancer are unexpected, but then Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nine-year-old-year-old Callie-Rose (the extraordinarily talented Australian actor Lily LaTorre; Run Rabbit Run) needs the Wi-Fi to do her homework. The trouble is, there's no signal because her dad, a reticent cowboy named Dusty (an excellent Josh O’Connor), is living in a trailer on a FEMA campsite, his farm having burned down in wildfires.This quiet, beautiful film, directed by Max Walker-Silverman (A Love Song) with a great score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, is set in southern Colorado. There’s an atmosphere of John Prine-esque melancholy running through it, and indeed one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was back in 2019 when The Capture made its debut on BBC One, with writer Ben Chanan skilfully exploiting the sinister potential of deep-fake technology and ubiquitous mass surveillance conducted by the authorities. But if it seemed like sci-fi at the beginning, the new third series lands in a world where ever-evolving gadgetry has made all this stuff not just entirely feasible but almost commonplace. In the opening episode we got a quick warm-up about the marvels of identity-snatching and image manipulation in a scene at Heathrow airport where a suspect kept changing his appearance Read more ...
Jon Turney
Browsing second-hand books is one of life’s reliable gentle pleasures. Nicholas Royle, though, in Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-Hand Books, takes it to the next level. And this is his third book relating the many small adventures he has devised to augment the basic activity of accumulating more and more books.Small? Definitely. Does the book harbour a train ticket? Royle takes the train indicated, if the ticket is affordable, and reads some of it en route. A street map is even better, as it allows Royle to indulge one of his other obsessions: walking. If there’s a house address Read more ...