London
Bernard Hughes
What’s it like to be in the middle of an orchestra, hugger-mugger with the violas, looking directly over the flautist’s shoulder? Last night’s immersive concert by Sinfonia Smith Square gave the us the chance to find out, the players spread around Smith Square Hall on podiums, with the audience encouraged to wander round as the performance unfolded. It was at once a revealing but also somewhat frustrating experience.The hour-long programme explored the plight of the UK’s temperate rainforest. You may not (I didn’t) realise the UK had any temperate rainforest, but it does – and centuries ago Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV. Seeing them projected full-size in the dark with a live audience sharing the experience is a far better way of gauging their impact than watching them alone in a living room. Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard (pictured above) got the warmest reception: its sold-out screenings were greeted with laughter and a standing ovation. It’s a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! While such tales are seldom far from a screen, they are often far from a stage, the challenge of scaling down just too intimidating for most adaptors. Not so Shaun McKenna and Lion Couglan who took on the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Purveyors of extraordinary energy and euphoria, Underworld never miss a beat. The new album – 30 years on from their debut, and their exposure in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – once again features music that will always be better live, in the midst of a bouncing throng, ablaze with smiles of joy, than on the best stereo at home, or state-of-the-heart cordless headphones.Karl Hyde and Rick Smith recommend that listeners avoid shuffle mode, as this new offering is programmed as a sequence, raising a storm, driven by the electronic bass drum, pulsating synths and Underworld’s trademark Read more ...
Autumn, Park Theatre review - on stage as in politics, Brexit drama promises much, but loses its way
Gary Naylor
Theatre is a strange dish. A recipe can be stacked with delicious ingredients, cooked to exacting standards, taste-test beautifully at the halfway mark, yet leave you not quite full, not exactly satisfied, disappointed that it didn’t come out quite as expected when plated up. Autumn certainly looks good when you lay everything out on the kitchen table. A celebrated source novel from an award-winning writer (Ali Smith) adapted by Harry McDonald, fresh from his critical success, Foam, at the Finborough and Brexit, a hot button topic even eight years on, at its heart. Roll in a stellar cast Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.I immediately thought of The Godfather and the iconic, seductive, even beautiful language in which this rite of passage is labelled "making your bones". So much gangster culture is framed by the script, cinematography and charismatic acting of Francis Ford Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It seems to be silly season for big-name directors. First, Coppola’s Megalopolis and Steve McQueen’s Blitz: why? Now Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer: double why?What happens in the minds of directors whose careers have matured and whose audiences have come to expect a degree of subtlety and sophistication from them? Apple TV+ has managed to commission Slow Horses, Bad Monkey, Presumed Innocent and Time Bandits of late, some of the best television drama around. But this time it’s come up short. Cuarón has recruited a motley crew, presumably with an eye to their global saleabitliy, for this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ConclaveDirector Edward Berger won an Oscar for his last feature, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), but here he concerns himself with the more intimate and claustrophobic battlefield of the Vatican. The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died, and under the watchful eye of the Dean, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the cardinals gather to appoint his successor. No-one said it would be easy.The opulent gloom and aura of centuries-old secrecy that swathe the Holy City provide fertile soil for this tale of clandestine machinations and carefully camouflaged lust for power (Berger and screenwriter Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?Stefano Massini's play, adapted by Ben Power, never quite loses that vacuum at its centre, as it tells the story of The American Dream for the umpteenth time, sidestepping some inconvenient truths (also for the umpteenth time), while Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark is best known for taking her abstract sculptures off the pedestal and inviting people to interact with them. Dozens of constructions named Bichos (Beasts or Critters) (pictured below right) are hinged along the joins to allow you to rearrange the parts in seemingly endless configurations.In the late 1960s her democratic approach may have been ground breaking, but now the novelty has worn off, it’s hard to get excited about creating this or that composition of steel shapes when all arrangements are equally acceptable and nothing is at stake.From Read more ...