Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Every lover of folk-tales knows that the seeker has to endure dangers and setbacks before they finally win the prize. Last night, the ever-enterprising Aurora Orchestra played The Firebird – Stravinsky’s own musical vision of the intrepid hero who outwits the forces of darkness – on a unique site that presents an audience with its own kind of ordeals. Once the Tottenham IKEA, Drumsheds has undergone a metamorphosis from super-store to super-club.Set in a wilderness of concrete lots and wire fences, across a roaring highway, the big blue terminal-sized shed now offers 608,000 square feet of Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The years may go by and the albums might change, but there are always a few constants with Public Service Broadcasting. There is the recorded message that precedes their arrival for one, a disembodied voice booming out to inform the crowd to put their phones away and not talk loudly. It’s greeted with wild cheers and mostly adhered to, which is welcome, because this was a gig rich with visual imagery that should be absorbed rather than simply observed. The stage set-up was inspired by Ameila Earhart's cockpit, footage of the aviator flickering on screens. Earhart provides the latest Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last Monday my colleague Boyd Tonkin was delighted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s playing at Hatfield House – and on Thursday it was my turn to be impressed by their colourful Wigmore Hall recital, which featured the marvellous clarinettist Carlos Ferreira in Bartók and Brahms.In Bartók’s Contrasts, Ferreira (pictured below) was following in the footsteps of Benny Goodman, who co-commissioned the piece in 1938. There are distinctively Goodmanesque moments in which Bartók channels the recently deceased George Gershwin, and Ferreira found a rich and resonant American accent for Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
No film tackles the knotty topic of inherited mental illness with as much gleeful abandon as Smile. Mental health has been a popular subtext in contemporary horror for the past decade, but Parker Finn's Smile felt refreshing in how unsubtle it was. The premise was a curse that drives you mad with violent hallucinations that eventually force you to kill yourself, passing the curse on to whoever witnesses your death. But Smile didn’t become a box-office hit because of its sensitive approach to mental health, it was because its many quiet-quiet-LOUD scares were thrillingly effective and because Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There is star casting, and there is casting the right star – not the same thing. The Donmar’s new production, The Fear of 13, succeeds in the latter category, in spades. The star in question is Adrien Brody, a child actor who left stage work for the cinema more than three decades ago, where he became the youngest recipient of the Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist. More recently, he has also graced premium television series such as Succession and Peaky Blinders. At the Donmar he has been allied to the director Justin Martin, an award-winner for Prima Facie, Stranger Things and The Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
John Webster’s sour, bloody tale of brotherly greed and vice has been updated by the playwright Zinnie Harris, who also directs her own text at the Trafalgar. The title has a handy [of Malfi] added. But do we really know where we are? Or which century we’re watching?Shortening the title to The Duchess seems to indicate a more generic lead character, less anchored to a time or place. But the production wants it both ways. The action is taking place not far from Naples, according to Harris’s text, pace the original, but not in the early 16th century Italy of the original. The costuming here is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
QueerWilliam Burroughs’ eponymous novel was nearly filmed by Steve Buscemi in 2011, but it has finally reached the screen under the helmsmanship of Luca Guadagnino. It bombards the viewer from a variety of angles and leaves plenty of treacherous crevasses to fall into, but is bound to be remembered mostly for Daniel Craig’s central performance as William Lee, an expatriate American of invisible means living a life of self-exile in Mexico in the early 1950s.If Craig was hell-bent on burying James Bond for good, he could hardly have chosen better (007 tends to blot out the impressive variety of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
An incendiary play has opened at the Marylebone, the adventurous venue just off Baker Street. Bigger houses were apparently unwilling to stage it, fearing anti-Israeli protests. Their loss.Nathan Englander has expanded his short story of the same title and brought it bang up to date. He was mid-writing when the October 7 attacks occurred, so rewrote the piece with Patrick Marber, factoring developments since into the dialogue. Any issue somebody might have with the current state of modern Judaism is examined here, at full volume, by two Jewish couples, one ultra-orthodox, one not so much. It’ Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Christian Gerhaher, the most compelling and complete interpreter of German Lieder of our time, makes no secret of the fact that – unlike his devotion to, say, Schumann – his relationship with the songs of Brahms has never been comfortable.In a memoir published in 2015, he explained a “certain antipathy” towards the composer: the singer demurs from being cast in the role of a mere conduit for melody “like a viola”, He says he sometimes feels “under attack” from the words, and he is also very mistrustful of Brahms’s motives in espousing the German folk song idiom.And yet the result of all this Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
How many times does a politician survive wave after wave of attack from rivals, surf the waves of fickle voters and tiptoe around every policy mishap, only to be undone by an appalling error of judgement in their private life, a skeleton in the closet, their own, flawed personality? And how many times, on the downfall of a British PM, does the television news take us back to the moment the disgraced politician stood on the steps of No 10 in their moment of victory?With this in mind, it’s a neat touch for Robert Icke to open his adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus with his Read more ...