London
Helen Hawkins
The red, white and blue bull’s-eye on the front curtain at Sadler’s Wells tells us we are in the familiar territory of Pete Townshend’s rock musical about teenage angst in 1960s Britain. What follows isn’t so easy to recognise.Quadrophenia started life in 1973 as a double album, and six years later became a film; now it’s a contemporary dance piece with an outstanding cast. Yet it seems to be a case of diminishing returns.The powerful vocals of its songs are silenced, with just a heavenly choir in the closing numbers representing a human presence. And the thrilling axeman chords Read more ...
mark.kidel
Alfred Brendel’s death earlier this month came as a shock, but it wasn’t unexpected. His health had gradually deteriorated over the last year or so, and I was fortunate to see him just a few days before he died. I visited him for one of our regular film nights – evenings when we’d eat dinner together, prepared by his partner Maria, and then watch a movie. On this occasion we’d decided to take in the recently-made German documentary about Leni Riefenstahl. It struck me that it would be a perfect choice, given Alfred had grown up watching Nazi films in the Zagreb cinema his father had run Read more ...
David Nice
Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected.The circumstances are unique. Kolesnikov and Tsoy welcome you as if into their home to sit in a close semi-circle for wonders in the schoolroom at the top of the building – now more spacious, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sarah Kane is the most celebrated new writer of the 1990s. Her work is provocative and innovative. So it seems oddly unimaginative to mark the 25th anniversary of her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, by simply recreating the original production, with the original actors and the original production team in a joint Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company venture. Sadly this is typical of our reboot culture, which prefers the old to the new, nostalgia over experiment, but it does feel like a wasted opportunity. After all, when David Byrne, artistic director of this venue, was head of the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Rarely has a revival given a firmer thumbs-up for the future of dance-theatre. Yet Matthew Bourne’s latest show, first aired at the tail-end of lockdown, is far from being a high-octane people-pleaser. It won’t send its audience out teary-eyed and shaken as his Swan Lake did and continues to do. It doesn’t have the delirious narrative sweep of The Red Shoes (set to return next Christmas). Nor a heart-stopping central moment such as in his Blitz-era Cinderella, when the Café de Paris takes a direct hit. The Midnight Bell, inspired by the novels of the mid-last-century English writer Patrick Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A look at Darling on its 60th anniversary offers a sobering reality check on the "Swinging Sixties", a reminder of the fallacy of the decade’s gaiety and supposed liberation, especially for women. This attractive 4K restoration reveals the film to be a very complicated animal indeed – both in its own time and through the prism of today’s very different political correctness and gender ethics. While John Schlesinger’s "classic" plays like a scathing satire of the period, I’m not convinced that this was entirely intentional at the time, which of course makes it even more Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s an old theatre joke. “The electric chair is too good for a monster like that. They should send him out of town with a new musical”. The UK equivalent of touring a nascent production in Albany and Ithaca in the hope of a Broadway transfer, is to to play one of London’s fringe venues. Few come with the pedigree of The King’s Head, now fully established in its new, only marginally less cramped, basement accommodation off Upper Street. Can Martin Storrow’s very personal, American developed, six-years-in-the-making musical find a crock of gold at the end of its rainbow at its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport. Now screenwriter Neil Forsyth has returned to the scene of the crime to reveal what happened – or might have happened, since there’s a fair bit of artistic licence at play here – to the missing portion of the £26 million quid’s worth of stolen gold.Though this time around we no longer have the likes of Sean Harris and Dominic Cooper in the cast, there are still plenty of sharply-drawn characters to savour. There is, for Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Bush Theatre is becoming a garden centre. Earlier this year, the venue staged Coral Wylie’s Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew, which featured an abundance of plant life, and now it’s the turn of talented novelist and screenwriter Danny James King, whose Miss Myrtle’s Garden has Wylie aptly listed as its botanical consultant. Directed by incoming artistic director Taio Lawson, it is a study of loss, love and ageing set initially amid the weeds and neglected plants of 82-year-old Miss Myrtle’s garden. She is the widow of Melrose, both being Windrush Generation migrants who have Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.Stepping into the main gallery, you are infused with a supreme sense of calm. Hanging from the ceiling is a Newton’s cradle – 18 glass orbs suspended a few inches apart on fine wires (main picture). Glowing golden yellow, these fragile vessels are serenely beautiful. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Little Simz clearly believes in meeting situations head on. Her sixth full-length album kicks off, in every sense of the phrase, with “Thief”: unambiguously a lyrical barrage at her childhood friend and frequent collaborator Inflo, who Simz is currently suing for alleged failure to repay £1.7 million in loans for ambitious recording and performance projects.It’s a topic she returns to on at least two other tracks on the album, going into quite some detail about her sense of betrayal and broken trust and the impact of this on her sense of self and creative process. It feels kind of bleak that Read more ...
Gary Naylor
MOR. Twee. Unashamedly crowdpleasing. Are such descriptors indicative of a tedious night in the stalls? For your reviewer, who has become jaded very quickly with a myriad of searing examinations of mental health crises and wake up calls about the forthcoming environmental collapse, I often find comfort in material more suited to the large print section of the library. But the show still has to be good and that’s a big challenge when dealing with "smaller" subject matter.We open on a large scale doll’s house, and, to be fair, the allusions to Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams et al don’t ever fade away Read more ...