England
Adam Sweeting
You read the book, you saw the play, and in January you can see the BBC's new six-part dramatisation of Wolf Hall. Cunningly adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and directed by Peter Kosminsky, the series promises to be both a faithful translation of Hilary Mantel's novel and an absorbingly fresh approach to the telly-isation of history."They're such huge books [ie Wolf Hall and companion piece Bring Up the Bodies] and so layered and epic, the first challenge was to find a kind of through-line for the drama," said Peter Straughan at a screening of the first episode. "I decided it was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There have been legendary conductors, and then there was Herbert von Karajan. He was a colossus of post-World War Two classical music, equipped with fearsome technical mastery allied to a vaguely supernatural gift for extracting exquisite sounds from orchestras. But that wasn't all. An expert skier with a passion for high-performance cars and flying his own jet, he was as charismatic as a movie star or sporting idol.John Bridcut's superb profile surveyed the Salzburg-born Karajan as if he were Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, considering the contradictions in his character as though studying Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all hinges on an overbearing father, a conniving queen, murder, and general mayhem. The tale, we were informed, was shocking, brutal, more astonishing than any fiction, and this ruling family, from its inception with Henry II of Anjou, became the greatest English dynasty of all time. (Tell that to the Hanoverians.)Who knows what marketing guru decided Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This will have brought a nostalgic tear to the eye of fans of The Sweeney (the TV show, not the Ray Winstone movie) or GF Newman's still-shocking 1978 series Law and Order. The producers had rounded up seven retired policepersons and got them to spill some of the beans about what policing was like in the Sixties and Seventies.The strange thing was, it was exactly like folklore says it used to be. There was plenty of rough justice including kickings and beatings, dousings in freezing cold baths and possibly even some electric shocks. Rule-bending was de rigueur, there was routine acceptance by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We seem to have spent most of 2014 examining the social, political, historical, geographical and military ramifications of the First World War. You would have thought, therefore, that the upcoming Remembrance Sunday commemorations could have been allowed to stand alone, uncluttered by further efforts to explain or dramatise the events of 1914.But still the BBC felt the urge to give us this five-part drama by veteran EastEnders/Life on Mars writer Tony Jordan, about two young men – teenagers in fact – who rush to join the military at the outbreak of hostilities but soon discover that war is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.And just as Topsy-Turvy was as Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This concert was part of a tour of Canada’s National Arts Centre orchestra to five cities in the UK themed around the anniversary of the start of World War One. The Ottawa-based orchestra joined forces with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir for this London centrepiece to the tour, under the baton of violinist-turned-conductor Pinchas Zukerman. Splicing two orchestras together with necessarily minimal rehearsal time may not make perfect musical sense but, as artistic director of the NCA orchestra and principal guest conductor of the RPO, Zukerman is uniquely Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hell is other people. It’s not the wilderness that poses the greatest threat to the stranded corporate bonding quartet in this docile Lord of the Flies-meets-The Office pastiche, but the endless stream of well-meaning incompetence. Yet while Tim Firth’s 1992 play is Schadenfreude Central – if you haven’t had your fill of disaster-by-proxy following the trail of Hurricane Gonzalo – it, too, suffers from benign ineptitude in not committing to a genre. At two and a half hours, Angus Jackson’s production offers exceedingly flabby comedy, but its foray into serious drama leaves it up the Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
London homelessness charity The Passage was set up in 1980 and has been growing steadily so that it now provides a day centre, short-term hostel and long-term housing in an effort to help street sleepers get their lives back on track. Its annual "A Night Under the Stars" gala concert is the central event on its fundraising calendar, and assembles an extremely high standard of musician. The evening was compered by Jo Brand and Petroc Trelawny, both safe pairs of hands in their distinct ways.The Orion Orchestra, a cross-conservatoire group of students and recent graduates, was set up ten years Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Benedict Cumberbatch leads a superb cast in The Imitation Game, the highly-anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, gifted mathematician and father of modern computing. The opening film for the LFF this year, this beautiful period drama, adapted from Andrew Hodges’ book The Enigma by debut screenwriter Graham Moore, travels between Turing’s formative days at boarding school and miserable existence in the 1950s, centring on his unique and crucial work defeating the Nazi’s Enigma encryption device during WWII.The English-language debut by Norwegian director Morten Tyldum (best known for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite a 47-year history which has taken them from pomp to pop and established them as a top-selling global institution, there's still a lingering sense that Genesis don't think they've been taken seriously enough. This was detectable in Phil Collins's comment included here that "we're just popular and there's nothing wrong with that... I won't take the credit and I won't take the blame."This "it's not my fault, guv" approach seemed curiously defensive in the light of their colossal string of successful albums and hit singles. Genesis have been one of a bare handful of major bands who Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Julian Fellowes, now the Conservative peer Lord Fellowes, left behind the fictional world of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey to give us this sumptuous tour of Blenheim Palace. Nor were its surroundings neglected as vista after vista showed us Blenheim’s lavishly landscaped gardens, fountains and columned monument to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, victorious over Louis XIV. It was his military prowess that led to wealth and Blenheim itself, gifted by the grateful nation and thus an early example of government subsidy.But this was more than a gushing visit to yet another stately home. Read more ...