England
Adam Sweeting
The last time I noticed Sean Harris he was playing Micheletto Corella, the merciless assassin and enforcer for Pope Jeremy Irons and his Borgia clan. Unpleasantly good at it he was too.Perhaps it would be unfair to describe his appearance in Southcliffe as typecasting, but you can hardly fail to spot some similarities. As Stephen Morton, whose robotic killing spree with his private collection of automatic weapons is the driver behind a group of interlocking stories set in the coastal town of Southcliffe, Harris projects a similar suppressed intensity and inner turmoil, as well as a staring- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Buying a used car is not for the squeamish at the best of times, but the notion of buying one from something called the Essex Car Company freezes the blood. Yet the idea of making a slice-of-life, fly on the wall, reality-tv-style doc about the aforesaid jalopy-shifting outfit radiates an unmistakeable allure.The introductory voice-over laid out the floor plan: "Two hundred used motors, a team of fast-talking salesmen, and car-buying customers from all walks of life." Perfect. We were introduced to James, the most successful of the Essex boys when it comes to getting those lumps of car-flesh Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Reviewing last night’s Prom of British Light Music feels a bit like getting all AA Gill on your granny’s Victoria sponge. The collage of musical morsels from Bantock, Arnold, Coates and Elgar is music made with love, for pleasure, by composers who rated enjoyment over admiration. It’s music that smothers critical appraisal gently but firmly in its tweed-clad bosom, killing you with musical kindness. It’s also music that needs Xenakis-like precision if it is to come off, and more pep even than that.It’s a combination we’ve come to expect from the John Wilson Orchestra who batter their way into Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and merciless exploiters of child labour.As the first episode opened with the tolling of the wake-up bell calling the poor, struggling young workers to another dismal day on the factory floor, it all felt terribly familar. We were back at Lowood school with Jane Eyre, enmeshed in the proles-versus-fatcats class struggle of South Riding, reliving the grinding Read more ...
graham.rickson
Most of us could compile soundtracks to our lives. We’d probably save our favourite songs and pieces for the worst bits. Pianist James Rhodes was sectioned in his twenties and maintains that a visitor who smuggled in an iPod stuffed with classical music helped to save his life. He’s refreshingly candid though, admitting slyly that “listening to a piece of Bach isn’t going to fix everything". Look at Rhodes’s garish website or listen to the banter on his latest live CD and you might be tempted to switch off. You'd be wrong; here, he’s an articulate host – humble, modest and engaging. Rhodes’s Read more ...
David Nice
As good old Catullus put it, I hate and love, you may ask why. No doubt it's my job as a critic to probe such difficult responses to Britten's Canticles. Why am I so repelled by the sickly-sweet lullaby Isaac sings just before daddy's about to put him to the sword in Canticle II, then so haunted by the sombre war requiem of Britten's Edith Sitwell setting, Canticle III? Ambivalence about Ian Bostridge's weird dominating presence and Neil Bartlett's marshalling of five responses to the five very different narratives doesn't make it any easier. Then again, there's no reason why anything should Read more ...
Heather Neill
The celebrated 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom was apparently intended as a cartoonish satire of post-war British decline. In 2013, with the Empire long gone and the country struggling in a new age of austerity, what is there to do when contemplating "the state of the nation" but laugh hysterically?Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted and The IT Crowd) is the right man for the job, bringing The Ladykillers to the stage with a hefty dollop of lunacy and some spectacular physical comedy, some of it based in music-hall tradition: the Vaudeville Theatre ( Read more ...
caspar.gomez
The smell is like a squidgy hash spliff marinated in hickory-smoked barbecue sauce. There’s an additional top note of tangy, excited human musk and a hint of vinegary organic waste. By the weekend’s end this Parfum de Glaston will have infused everything, from unworn clothes to the tent to even skin and hair. It will take days to shift, permeating the pores as completely as this temporary city of madness sandblasts the mind. But let’s not get carried away before we’ve begun. To peak too early would be a classic rookie mistake.Thursday 27 JuneThings begin, then, on a sunny A303 that turns Read more ...
Nick Hasted
An English Civil War horror film which looks as if it was shot on authentic location in both space and time should convince his widest audience yet that Ben Wheatley is a major director. Released in cinemas, on TV, Video on Demand, DVD and Blu-ray on Friday, it’s yours if you want it.It starts with Whitehead (The League of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith) and two companions fleeing a brutal battle. Wandering into a field which seems endless, all but Whitehead eat the mushrooms growing there. It’s when they happen upon O’Neil (Kill List’s Michael Smiley) that the screaming starts. He has papers Read more ...
stephen.walsh
"This," Lizzie Graham writes in the programme book of the current Longborough Festival, “is definitely the test of whether or not it is possible to put on a convincing Ring in a small, privately-owned country theatre.” I don’t think Lizzie or her husband, Martin, the festival’s founders and owners of the theatre, can have seriously doubted that the answer would be yes. Serious doubts seem not to be part of their entrepreneurial make-up; or if they are, they suppress them. But the noisy acclaim of the far from provincial or rustic audience at the end of Götterdämmerung on Saturday must all the Read more ...
David Nice
Britten’s coronation opera, paying homage less to our own ambiguous queen than to the private-public tapestries of Verdi’s Aida and Don Carlo, is not the rarity publicity would have you believe, at least in its homeland. English National Opera successfully rehabilitated it in the 1980s, with Sarah Walker resplendent as regent. Phyllida Lloyd’s much revived Opera North production gave Josephine Barstow the role of a lifetime, enshrined in an amazing if selective film. The real questions, then, were why choosy visionary Richard Jones agreed to stage Gloriana, and whether he would have fun at Read more ...
Heather Neill
In Bracken Moor Alexi Kaye Campbell inhabits similar territory to J B Priestley, whose work he admires. Like his predecessor, Campbell combines social comment with the mystical and spiritual and even chooses to set the action in pre-war Yorkshire. Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, quoted both in the dialogue and the programme, also contributes to the play's landscape.There are, of course, resonances here for the present, another period of austerity and economic upheaval in Europe during which right-wing parties threaten to come to the fore. (A chance encounter with an Read more ...