Reviews
fisun.guner
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.This is because everything, but everything, that the BBC stands for is encapsulated by BBC Four’s original programming. And in the visual arts it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So Fresh Meat approaches the conclusion of season one and, against my expectations, I’ve become a devoted fan. When it was announced that Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were launching a new sitcom, based around a Manchester student household, it sounded promising; perhaps a postmodern update on The Young Ones was in the offing. Peep Show fans were expecting a riot of sordid humour and cruel jokes of embarrassment. We had those in spades. What we weren’t expecting were such wonderfully written and acted character studies.You grew to really care about perky try-too-hard Welsh Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two 16-year-old schoolboys, next-flat neighbours in the high-rise south-east London council estate of Thamesmead, who fall in love – and overcome prejudices and obstacles, not least their own self-realisation.It was a daring work. “I wrote it out of anger and outrage,” Harvey says in the programme notes. “The age of consent for gay men was 21, whereas Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau’s lives of “quiet desperation”. But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude – that it is therefore a mark of wisdom and the wise to avoid acts of desperation – has been taken up by far fewer. Salt, Root and Roe sees Tim Price transform an act of violence from one of apparently senseless desperation to one of humane intelligence and generosity. It’s quite the sea change, and one that makes for discomfiting viewing in the close quarters of Trafalgar Studios, but Price and director Hamish Pirie handle their subject matter Read more ...
David Nice
Theatregoers may be disappointed to read on and discover I mean Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, the only 19th-century Shakespeare-based opera in the German language to hold the stage. Which it did, and not just in Germany, until the arrival of Verdi's infinitely superior Falstaff. Is this that rare thing, German comedy in music between Beethoven's Eighth Symphony and Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel that's actually funny? Not really; Wagner's Die Meistersinger stands alone. But it's a piece which offers plenty of roles for student singers - with two leading sopranos, no Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Whose idea was it to do the gig in this shithole?” asks Captain Sensible towards the end of the night. He’s right. The East Wing is truly an atmosphere-free venue, a carpeted, low-ceilinged conference room that’s part of the much larger Brighton Centre complex. It’s easy to imagine it filled with municipal administrators milling about, the stink of coffee and the rustle of paperwork. Instead, it’s packed to the gills with men and women, mostly in their late forties and early fifties, mostly clad in black, lots of leather and badges.The Damned have undoubtedly played worse. They’ve had a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ken Kesey is one of these characters who gets filed under "Counterculture Legend", alongside the likes of Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman, though his accomplishments are somewhat amorphous. His early achievements as a novelist are easier to quantify - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion put him pretty high up in the batting averages of modern American literature - but he gave up literature for film-making. By his own estimation, his subsequent 1964 road trip from California to the World's Fair in New York with his anarchic band of Merry Pranksters was his finest Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Garrow’s Law, which returned last night for a third series, would seem to be entirely about the foreign country that is Georgian England. One of its progenitors is Tony Marchant who, give or take the odd adaptation of Dickens or Dostoevsky, has spent his packed writing life in the modern day. But they don’t seem to make his kind of searing contemporary drama any more, the type that hunts for the root cause of moral failure in individuals and society. So in order to hold a mirror up to his audience, he has turned to the 1700s. Profitably.The shrewdness of Garrow’s Law is that it has a foot in Read more ...
judith.flanders
Fifteen years ago Paul Noble began to create an imaginary city, Nobson Newtown, with preparatory sketches and drawings in his meticulous pencilled style. Now we have a Noble-ian paradox: in this penultimate contribution to his Nobson Newtown series, the visitor is greeted at the door with a "Welcome to Nobson" sign, and 15 small drawings of the "Genesis" of Nobson Newtown.Genesis it truly is, for the drawings take the words from the Bible, and illustrate them with Noble’s characteristic little turd-shaped men, producing a Newtown creation-myth as they form their world. The last drawing of the Read more ...
David Nice
What’s not to love about Tchaikovsky’s candid, lyric scenes drawn from Pushkin’s masterly verse novel? ENO’s advance publicity summed it up neatly by promising “lost love, tragedy, regret”. We’ve most of us been there. That does mean that truthfulness to life can count for even more in a performance than good singing. Both burned their way through Dmitri Tcherniakov’s radical Bolshoi rethink, but while there are four fine voices to help Deborah Warner’s surprisingly traditional production along, the truth flickers very faintly here.Warner updates the action, but by less than a century: Read more ...
howard.male
Over the past decade I’ve always been more an admirer than a fan of Susheela Raman, wanting to like her music more than I did. But her latest album Vel has changed all that. It’s an uncompromisingly dark and powerful statement that makes no concessions to what one might call “world music” tastefulness. It still incorporates some of the languid sensuality and meditative mood associated with previous works, but incorporates a harder, at times even angrier edge which makes it wholly unique.So when I turned up at last night’s gig to find myself in a large hall that felt like the inside of a 1930s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In an age when comics are doing shows with theatrical content or presented with a degree of technological sophistication, and they appear on stage expensively coiffed and suited, it's refreshing to spend an evening in Sarah Millican's company, whose show at times feels like we're having a chat over the garden wall. It's also pleasing that someone who just a few years ago was a jobbing club comic is now enjoying the sort of success her talent so richly deserves. I saw her latest show, Thoroughly Modern Millican, at the huge Hammersmith Apollo but I suspect that arena gigs can't be far behind, Read more ...