fri 29/03/2024

England

The Little Big Things, @sohoplace review - real-life story movingly realised onstage

It's rare that a new musical or play opens in the West End with as much positive word-of-mouth as The Little Big Things. Social media has been ablaze over the last few weeks, with critics and bloggers sneaking into previews and authoritative big...

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A Life on the Farm review - a fabulous eccentric gets neatly packaged

“There’s nowt so queer as folk”, they say, and Life on the Farm amply proves the point. A cassette slides into the slot; “play” is pressed and a middle-aged man appears on screen at the gate of Combe End Farm. “Follow me down”, he says to...

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And Then Come the Nightjars review - two farm friends

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...

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Medicine Festival review - the new New Age gathers in leafy Berkshire

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...

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Album: Public Image Limited - End of World

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...

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theartsdesk at the Voces8 Summer School - musical oasis offers opportunities for all

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...

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The Pilgrim's Progress, Three Choirs Festival review - revelatory performance by young musicians

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...

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theartsdesk at The Three Choirs Festival - Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Hammond

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...

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A Kind of Kidnapping review - claustrophobic class-division satire

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...

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Jean Cooke: Ungardening, Garden Museum review - a cramped show of airy and spacious paintings

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...

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Album: PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying

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....

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The Bartered Bride, Garsington Opera review - brilliant revival of a comedy of cruelty

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...

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