England
Nick Hasted
Suede were both prototypes and outliers of the Britpop pack, and their 2010 reunion managed a rare, creatively substantial second act; given their resurrection after guitarist Bernard Butler’s fractious 1994 exit, this may even be the band’s epic, open-ended Act 3.Where their first three reunion albums restored Suede’s sense of conceptual art, Autofiction brings back the pop, the glamour and fizz of their early singles and feverish gigs. Rather than rehash that past, it looks to post-punk for its attitude and sound, imagining a Suede born into the hard monochrome of 1979, not the hedonism and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Road movies in England work better by foot. Slowing down finds the scale to explore our small island, tramping Chaucer’s pilgrim paths, not Kerouac’s roaring highway.Visual artist Larry Achiampong’s debut feature accordingly sends its heroine from Hadrian’s Wall to Margate, during the already fantastical year when lockdowns left the landscape vacated. Wearing priestly red robes akin to Red Riding Hood penetrating the forest or an Atwood Handmaid, the Wanderer (Perside Rodrigues) is an sci-fi tourist, exploring a post-imperial country through a post-colonised immigrant lens.Wayfinder is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What will get audiences back into theatres? Revivals of old favourites. Works from popular genres like musicals. Pantomimes. This production of Into The Woods kinda ticks all those boxes, but it also ticks the box that matters most. It is a unique experience – not podcastable, not downloadable, not multiplexable. Co-directors, Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausman, have worked together before and it shows in a vision that is both coherent yet also continually surprising, even a press night audience (who’ve seen it all – or think they have) going full “Wow” time and again, as the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Give Them Wings is the biopic of Paul Hodgson, who seven months after he was born in 1965 was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he survived his precarious childhood to become a devout fan of Durham’s hapless Darlington FC – it’s criminal that this low-budget British indie wasn’t titled Give Them Wingers.An ex-civil servant and now a screenwriter and producer, Hodgson has spent his life confined to a wheelchair and hampered by a speech impediment. Directed by onetime Bond heavy Sean Cronin (who cast himself as a football thug), the film version of Hodgson’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Once upon a time the Three Choirs Festival conjured up a single image, that of the English Oratorio – the grand choral solemnification of everything that was most profound in Anglican thought (though ironically its greatest exemplar, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, was irretrievably Catholic, and one Anglican bishop is supposed to have said he wouldn’t allow it into his cathedral). Today the festival’s image is more diverse, but it still sometimes hankers after the good old days, with their smug serenities and flowing pieties, and this revival of George Dyson’s 100-minute long Quo vadis, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Porcupine Tree’s members have said they don’t know if their 11th album and this autumn’s North American–European tour will conclude their 35-year career. If it does, it would be typical of the progressive rock trio – as averse to standing still as King Crimson – if they bowed out with a record that doesn't suggest a grand finale. As its title hints, Closure/Continuation sounds like a work in progress.Less dependent on singer-guitarist (and here bassist) Steven Wilson’s compositions than its predecessors, the project was jammed into life by him and drummer Gavin Harrison, and composed with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you need an excuse to spend a day in the charming seaside town of Whitstable, the Biennale is it. After a four-year hiatus, the festival is back with a somewhat edgy, apocalyptic feel.For instance, Webb/Ellis’ film This Place is a Message (St John’s Methodist Chapel, pictured below) features a group of teenagers hanging out in a disused chalk quarry in a part of the country long listed for the burial of nuclear waste. What symbol would they choose to warn future generations of the presence of this hazardous residue?It’s a bit like a philosophy class that includes communicating with beings Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
According to the programme, La bohème is (probably) the most performed opera, by the most performed operatic composer. Ever. So, what is it about this piece that continues to enthral, inspire and intrigue artists and audiences alike?Perhaps it’s that the characters – a group of young Parisians in the mid 19th century – are so relatable to so many, regardless of age, class or nationality. Or perhaps it’s the nostalgic pining for youth that seems to echo throughout the piece (Puccini was nearly 40 by the time he finished composing the work). A more pertinent question, however, may be “how does Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Handel’s operas have long posed, and still pose, severe problems for the modern theatre, and especially the modern director – all those endless streams of wonderful but emotionally more or less generalised arias hitched to interchangeable characters in fabricated love stories about crusaders or Roman emperors or oriental potentates.But they can suddenly explode into true music drama where the cardboard dramatis personae suddenly become real and human and acquire minds and feelings. Tamerlano, sandwiched in 1724 between two of Handel’s greatest operas, Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda, is a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A birthday weekend in Devon goes rather badly wrong in All My Friends Hate Me, the new film co-written by its leading man, Tom Stourton, that looks guaranteed to make shut-ins of us all.The antithesis of the warm-and-fuzzy gatherings proffered onscreen over the years by the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Richard Curtis, Andrew Gaynord's film directing debut is compulsively watchable, in an increasingly grim way. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering somewhere past the midway point why the likeable-enough Pete (Stourton) doesn't just cut his losses and drive away.The character's name can' Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a haunting but uneven biopic of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and a drama about the burden of incalculable loss. If sorrow and futility enshroud it, Davies leavens the bitterness with his tartest dialogue yet; the second act, much of it depicting Sassoon’s romantic disappointments in the no man’s land of the 1920s and 1930s, is a sustained comedy of exquisite bad manners – of which he is always the loverlorn, masochistic victim.The very English middle son of a wealthy Jewish merchant and his Anglo-Catholic wife, Captain Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Anne-Marie Duff blazes across the stage like a meteorite in Beth Steel’s excoriating drama about the changes sweeping through a Northern mining town over the course of five decades. As Constance Webster, a frustrated miner’s wife, her angry energy simultaneously lights up every room she appears in and sets it on fire; the more strongly she tries to escape her world, the closer she comes to destroying it.Steel has made her name with great state-of-the-nation dramas. In Wonderland she excavated the emotional traumas left behind by the miners’ strike, while in Labyrinth she created a riveting Read more ...