Reviews
Miranda Heggie
You’ll have seen the picture countless times. Gracing posters, postcards, tote bags, book and album covers, wrapping paper, phone cases and more, the iconic image of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is thought to be the most reproduced visual artwork of all time. Created by Katsushika Hokusai in Edo period Japan, "The Great Wave" was one of the earliest woodblock prints; a medium which was rapidly developed in this period of Japanese history which allowed for mass production of images. One of the earliest examples of this print is housed in the British Museum, and it was here that the initial Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The legendary Jamaican-born bass Willard White made his New York City Opera breakthrough the year I was born, so he has been around a long time (I am no spring chicken). But any fear that time had diminished his powers was gone within seconds of him starting to sing in his recital last night at Kings Place. Willard White has still got it. But I was less convinced by the playing of the Brodsky Quartet, who have been around for about as long as White, and performed with him regularly for the last 20 years. Their playing, although much more secure in the second half, was quite ragged in the Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In his mesmerising 2023 novel Brian, Jeremy Cooper told the story of a reclusive middle-aged council worker who is rescued from loneliness by watching nightly screenings at the National Film Theatre (before it was renamed the BFI Southbank a couple of years ago). It was “only in the cinema that he became a person,” the narrator says at one point of the eponymous hero’s celluloid journey. The work of Werner Herzog, Yasujiro Ozu, Agnès Varda and even Clint Eastwood, among others, seems to deepen his experience of living but doesn’t make him any less of an outsider.The same transformative power Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Mermaid Chunky’s music is a celebration of fun and frivolity. Combining loops of electronica, pipes, flutes and various percussion instruments with Edward Lear-like nonsense lyrics that seem to be largely improvised on the spot, their weirdness is a fine tonic in these difficult times and a joyful soundtrack for misfits everywhere.Freya Tate and Moina Moin may already have two albums to their name but, with the exception of the magical “Chaperone”, their set in Birmingham seemed to be created anew in real time. Dressed up in their flamboyant dressing up box chic, Mermaid Chunky took to the Read more ...
David Nice
It's nearly eight years since Kåre Conradi first appeared at the Coronet in a revelatory, visceral Norwegian production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf. He's in his middle years, like Peer the temporarily successful entrepreneur of Ibsen's tricky middle act, and in a good position to run the gamut from youthful tale-teller to old man in search of salvation for his ill-tended soul, too weak to go to heaven or hell. These 70 minutes are no "lecture", as advertised, but a spellbinding summary, take, interpretation, as you like it, of the massive drama.True, we get some background right at the beginning Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Although the Beaches may hail from Toronto, they evidently have more Scottish connections than many bands that come this way. Drummer Eliza Enman-McDaniel announced early on that she got her very first tattoo on a visit to Oban around a decade ago, but this was trumped by guitarist Leandra Earl recalling she lost her virginity in Dundee.The chap in question was not only apparently in the audience for this show, but also the only man Earl ever enjoyed sleeping with. This declaration was made before the group played one of the night’s few slow songs, the keyboard led “Lesbian of the Year”, Read more ...
Justine Elias
When the protagonist of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You hears herself described as "stretchable, like putty”, her whole body stiffens in protest. Driven to near insanity by the demands of her mental health counselling job and her young daughter's mysterious illness, Linda is all raw nerves and quick recoil – a mother on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And who can blame her? Barely a few minutes into the movie, the ceiling of her small flat collapses in a flood of water and plaster, and that's just the start of her travails.In her first feature since Yeast (2007), writer-director Mary Bronstein Read more ...
Claudia Bull
Is this person dead? It’s a wise question to ask yourself when reading George Saunders. In his Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, the answer doesn’t arrive until page three, where the narrator first mentions his confinement in a “sick box”. Not so with his new novel, Vigil, which opens:'What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.'In life, Jill "Doll" Blaine was a limited woman, capable of directing her love only toward “those precious few with whom she had Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Saul has lately been occupied by opera. Lauded versions, above all Barrie Kosky’s recently-revived smash for Glyndebourne, have claimed Handel’s mighty oratorio from 1739 as a virtual theatre piece with the stage directions mislaid. Yet its incandescent drama of rage, envy, betrayal, love and derangement lives in the blazing, epic music – trombones, carillion, harp and all – that partners every step of the Israelite king’s descent into destruction. For the opening event of this year’s London Handel Festival, Jonathan Cohen’s period ensemble Arcangelo deployed a 30-strong chorus, a full- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Cynthia Erivo delivering her stunning, technically complex one-woman performance of Dracula is not unlike watching a top athlete gunning for gold at the Winter Olympics – with the exception that this is infinitely more exciting. Over the last week, dissatisfied audience whispers led to headlines that the Oscar-nominated actress was struggling with the lines needed to play the 23 characters. Yet in a virtuoso press night performance she slayed doubters like a vampire hunter administering a stake to the heart.Kip Williams’ adaptation is the third in his gothic cine-theatre trilogy that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Somewhere in the bowels of the BBC, far away from the overheated stories of serial killers and female mutilation that clamour for the audience’s attention elsewhere on British telly, there is an oasis of calm. This little patch is the fiefdom of Mackenzie Crook.Yet Crook for me represents life as most people live it, full of mundane domestic duties and quiet pleasures. His characters are the ones you see down the pub, operating the supermarket tills, loitering in workspaces with not quite enough to do. Crook’s career was launched in one such workplace, The Office, then boosted by a run in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Some exhibitions make you feel inspired, others perplexed. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery left me feeling battered and bruised – as if I’d been hit by a wrecking ball.The show doesn’t start out that way. In the early 1940s, Freud spent several years perfecting his drawing technique. At first, he used a mapping pen, which produces clear, sharp lines perfect for detailed observation.In a luminous self-portrait from 1947 intended as a book illustration, he uses a variety of marks to create the impression of a three-dimensional head. A shock of wiry hair Read more ...