England
James Saynor
This modest British dramedy is billed as a “heart-warming story of friendship and survival set against the backdrop of the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak”. That’s perhaps not the first catastrophe we associate with that fateful year, but it was a grim event in its own way: a livestock epidemic that led to the culling of countless farm animals across Britain.The film wears its over-warm heart on a rather thin sleeve but seems to have an intrepid background: it’s adapted from a play that won a writing competition at a small Battersea theatre in 2014 And it’s hard to be critical of first-time Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Fia is a Swedish singer with a crystalline voice and a ear for a great melody - her singalong choruses are not typical for a festival Friday night headliner, like getting the audience to join in with “Sit with your pain/ cradle it close/ and when you’re ready/ Let it go.” This had a hypnotic effect on the audience, more mass therapy than a having a good time. The lyrics won’t go down as great poetry, but the point of the song was the effect it had, there was an undeniable group energy in the audience - a growing group empathy that every single person in the audience had varying levels of pain Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The world might end with a whimper or an inferno, but it’s hard to imagine a day will dawn that extinguishes John Lydon’s scorn for other people’s fecklessness and idiocy. That hand-made polemic typically drives the cauterising post-punk hosannahs and disarming post-pop ditties on Public Image Limited’s 11th studio album.Maintaining the momentum of This Is PiL (2012) and What the World Needs Now (2015), also recorded with the settled lineup of Lydon, Lu Edmonds (guitar), Bruce Smith (drums), and Scott Firth (bass and keyboards), End of World opens with two barnstormers. "Penge", seemingly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is a complicated business running a summer school for 170 people in the British countryside. Not only laying on a stimulating programme of musical events, providing pastoral care for the under-18s and interval drinks for the over-18s, but more basic needs. As I arrived and was greeted by Voces8 Foundation CEO Paul Smith he was grappling with the news that a tree had come down on a nearby power line and there was likely to be no power to the site for 5 hours. This was a challenge both for the provision of lunch but also for the supply of electricity to the church so the organ could be used Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever your opinion of Vaughan Williams, it’s unlikely that you think of him as an essentially theatrical composer. Yet he did write at least three important (as well as several less important) works for the stage: a ballet (not so-called), Job, a one-act opera (also not so-called), Riders to the Sea, and a full-length music drama, The Pilgrim’s Progress, based of course on Bunyan’s famous but probably no longer much read allegory of that name.Since its none too successful first performance at Covent Garden in 1951, VW’s Pilgrim’s Progress has suffered much the same fate as its source. One Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Three Choirs is (are?) off again, for the 295th time, but with a very different look, even from the festivals of my youth, never mind 1715, or whenever the first one was held (there seems to be some doubt about it). The big oratorio concerts in the cathedral are still there, but these days with a pulsating retinue of smaller concerts and recitals in a variety of other venues, not all of them in Gloucester, this year’s host city. Even oratorio life has a somewhat skewed appearance. Vaughan Williams’s Sancta Civitas is labelled “oratorio” but lasts a mere half-hour or so, while his Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
A Kind of Kidnapping is a low-budget British comedy with a neat premise and satirical view of class and politics in the midst of a cost of living crisis.A young couple struggling to make ends meet and facing eviction from their squalid flat come up with a plan to strike pay dirt by kidnapping a sleazy Tory politician. The only snag is the MP’s wife is so thoroughly sick of his lying and cheating that she declines to pay the ransom, leaving the bungling crooks with a problem – and a hostage – on their hands.The best thing about this film written and directed by DG Clark (How Not to Live Your Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s impossible to think about Jean Cooke’s work without taking into account her relationship with her husband, the painter John Bratby, because his controlling personality profoundly affected every aspect of her life.Had it not been for him, she might never have become a painter at all. She studied sculpture and pottery and, when they met in 1953, was running her own pottery in Sussex. They married the same year, but Bratby didn’t want a potter for a wife, so Cooke went to the Royal College of Art to study painting.Bratby’s attitude was still ambivalent, though. He would only allow her Read more ...
Mark Kidel
As an authentic artist, PJ Harvey manages to remain true to her essence as well as constantly shifting her creative stance. Each of her albums has been a leap forward, and yet anchored in a sound and style that are immediately recognisable as hers.This new album, the first in seven years, is in character – sensual, mysterious, a mixture of introverted softness and extrovert violence. It's very good, full of surprises, slow to reveal itself, like a really well-accomplished piece of poetry.Her previous release, The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016) was a collection of demos, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Smetana’s enchanting bitter-sweet comedy is probably on the danger-list for cancellation by the modern guardians of our moral sanctity. The plot hinges, like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the cash-sale of the hero’s bride (in Hardy, the wife and daughter): not nice, and surely a risky hint to any young men in the audience teetering on the brink.And it has an anti-hero in the person of a youth with a stammer, who gets laughed at and ends up as a circus bear. The fact that the proposed sale is a trick to enable a genuine love match is the sort of detail that passes unnoticed in the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Young women who were riveted by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones columns in the 1990s are now probably of the age where the menopause is, or has recently been, a bigger concern than landing your own Mr Darcy. Which is why Bridget Christie’s The Change (Channel 4) has arrived with ideal timing.I don’t mean Christie’s series is “the new Bridget Jones”. About the only significant crossover between the two – a prickly stance towards misogyny and lesser male infringements aside – is their obsession with keeping tabs on their daily round. Fielding sent up her own love of logging calorie counts Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Is everything loss?" the great Oliver Ford Davies once asked on the National's Olivier stage, in the closing moment of David Hare's masterful Racing Demon. That question informs another masterful play, James Graham's Dear England, newly opened in the same space.This stirring portrait of Gareth Southgate (the remarkable Joseph Fiennes) and the England squad that he continues to lead takes the national temperature and finds it wedded to defeat; what's most remarkable is that the three-hour drama then dares to go the distance and insist upon hope because, well, what other choice have Read more ...