Reviews
Stuart Houghton
At first glance, Desktop Dungeons is a slick update on the classic "roguelike" dungeon adventure. You move your hero around a maze of passages, carefully juggling your resources as you attempt to survive in a turn-based battle of tactics and wits.At second glance, Desktop Dungeons seems a bit rubbish. The enemies don’t attack you unless you attack them first and you restart each dungeon with a brand new character that you must laboriously level-up until it is strong enough to defeat the final boss.At about glance nine or ten you might get an inkling that this grind is actually the point of Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Caspar Gomez stays offline at Glastonbury. This report arrived at theartsdesk two days later handwritten by fax with an accompanying preamble which said only, “This scribble has now suitably matured in the cider-oaked barrels of a pot-holed brain. I am Uncle Fuckle and I’m here to bring the pain. It began like this…”Thursday 25th JuneI check Facebook just before I leave. A friend has posted that she’s never been to Glastonbury, and ponders whether she ever might, whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be.“I've been to a lot of festivals and I have to say that nothing beats watching them on telly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I don’t think I could handle it, I think I’d go mad.” It’s the sort of answer given by anyone asked how they’d react to fame. With the possibility looming of recognition beyond jazz circles, Amy Winehouse, who was then not so well-known, responded with something which could have appeared trite; the humble words of an aspirant not wanting to seem too big for her boots.What came later is well known. Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on 23 July 2011 after a too public decline which seemingly realised her prediction. Those off-the-cuff words in an interview took on a resonance few would have Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902) was an army officer and photographer, the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did – younger son, but of a certain social status – the East India Company’s army (the 12th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so. The Company was the de facto and implacable foreign ruler of India until, following the trauma of the Indian Mutiny Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell. Having completed its tour around England, Adrian Noble’s affectionate production of The Importance of Being Earnest now sets up home in London’s Vaudeville Theatre, cucumber sandwiches at the ready, hoping to charm summer audiences with an English classic that’ll tick boxes for any tourists not quick enough to get tickets for Wimbledon.There’s a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feeeelings. Just like that Morris Albert hit of the Seventies for star-crossed lovers everywhere, I lost count of the number of times I heard that word in this Alan Yentob meets Jeff Koons love-in. Or, more precisely, “feeling” singular, since Koons, one of the most bankable artists in the world, was talking about the “feeeeling” aroused when you looked at one of his art works. The engendered feeling was, we learned, a cross between sex-lust, consumer-lust and religious transcendence – “transcendence” being another favoured Koons word. And left to his own words, Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The brackets around {150} are ambiguous, almost apologetic. The 150th anniversary of Y Wladfa (The Colony), the semi-legendary "oasis of Welshness" in the Patagonian wilderness has given occasion in Wales for the celebration of a most unlikely story. One hundred and fifty men, women and children left their homes all over Wales and created a new life for themselves, against all the odds, at the other end of the world. Sixty-six came from the villages around Aberdare and Mountain Ash in a valley 15 miles north of Cardiff.The Royal Opera Stores, a hangar-sized warehouse on an industrial park Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Normally, if an album as good as The Man Who Sold the World had itself sold the sum total of sod all on release, it would have been lost, then found, before becoming a fêted rarity, exchanging hands for hundreds while bootleggers had a field day. The fact that it was a David Bowie album meant that, despite the initial indifferent shrug from the buying public, it’s shifted more than a million and a half copies. It remains, however, overlooked and underrated by many.Having never toured the album at the time, last year saw Spiders from Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey and producer Tony Visconti put Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was one of the most disturbing, terrifying and informative programmes imaginable, made more so by Dan Cruickshank’s calm demeanour as he interrogated everyone from scholars to fanatics about the actions and rationale of the Islamic State (IS) during the past two years in Iraq and Syria. These conversations were set against his own visits to the Middle East and terrifying videos of IS hammering to smithereens the contents of museums and bulldozing world-famous archaeological sites.When Cruickshank visited Iraq's ancient sites in 2002, he feared the destruction Western bombs might bring; Read more ...
David Nice
There are two operatic types who should leave Rossini’s epic swansong for the stage well alone. One would usually be a conductor who ignores many of the notes written by a master at the height of his powers, since even the least dramatic numbers have musical idiosyncrasy in them. Antonio Pappano still omits, among other things, Rossini’s superb Mozartian canon-trio for women's voices and wind ensemble; but what he does conduct is so focused and shapely that he must be forgiven. Not so his director, Damiano Michieletto, who not only jettisons a choreographer for the essential swathes of ballet Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Freedom Festival, a new event curated by vibes player and electronicist Orphy Robinson and vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, is all about bringing improvised music out of the shadows and into the limelight. All the same, it felt strange going to the Vortex in broad daylight. Gigs here don’t usually get started much before 9 pm (I’d always assumed that improvising musicians only came out at night), and darkness seems to lend itself to the free jazz atmosphere.After appearances from Tony Kofi’s Sphinx Trio and Byron Wallen on the first day, it was down to the Freeform Improv Strings to start the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rumour has it that there's a proposal floating around Hollywood to remake Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, his enthralling 1973 masterpiece of love, grief and death foretold. Anyone foolish enough to contemplate such a move should be made to watch this skilful and absorbing film about Roeg's career and work. It was a vivid illustration of how a singular artist pursuing a distinctive vision goes about his business, as opposed to being a mere component in a commercial clone-factory increasingly bereft of original ideas. On the other hand, what it didn't show us was Roeg's debilitating struggle Read more ...