Reviews
peter.quinn
It would be difficult to imagine a more impressive curtain-raiser to the London Jazz Festival than Jazz Voice, and this year's vintage was the finest yet. One sensed from the very opening bars of Gregory Porter and Ian Shaw's a cappella duet, “Feelin' Good”, that something remarkable was about to unfold, and so it proved. Drawing on major anniversaries, birthdays and milestones that link the decades stretching back from 2011, the annual vocal extravaganza – hosted this year by Victoria Wood – featured a typically adventurous mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul.With spine Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some plays are so weird they defy description. Well, almost. One of these must surely be the late James Saunders’s deeply absurdist play, whose first outing in 1963 launched the career of the young Michael Caine. Soon after, its author won a promising playwright award. The current revival, part of the Orange Tree’s 40th-birthday season, gives us a chance to look again at a writer whose innovative work has been consistently promoted by Sam Walters, artistic director at this address.Darkness. A man lies under a starry night. Actors, and other creatives, arrive on stage. Who are they and what Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
She grew up in Norway, lives in Sweden and has been recording since 2003. Her new album, It All Starts with One, is her most assured, her most vital. But Ane Brun’s recent work with Peter Gabriel has attracted attention outside Scandinavia. Her vocal contribution to his remake of “Don’t Give Up” claimed it as her own. Last night erased Gabriel from her CV. This fabulous show was a new beginning.Starting with a quartet of songs drawn from It All Starts with One (“These Days”, “One”, “Worship” and “Words”) instantly stated that this concert was about moving forwards. And opening with the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you didn't know Frederico García Lorca's Yerma before this show, you probably wouldn't be any better informed after watching Natalie Abrahami's engaging but flawed production. In “a new version by Anthony Weigh”, as it says on the programme cover, a backstory of the childless couple Yerma and Juan is interpolated in the Spanish playwright's 1934 "Tragic Poem in Three Acts and Six Scenes” and its chorus has been excised in a much-reduced cast.In fact the version by Weigh (who has just been appointed associate artist at the Donmar Warehouse in London under new artistic director Josie Read more ...
josh.spero
Coming as it did over this Armistice weekend, when the soldiers who have died for us are foremost in our thoughts, last night's Art for Heroes: A Culture Show Special was a salutary reminder that soldier-victims are not just those who are killed or sustain terrible physical injuries but also those with psychological wounds which can't be stitched together. It went beyond, however, an exploration of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder into how art therapy is helping some of these veterans process and express and salve their aggression and anxiety.The programme began with footage from a century of Read more ...
judith.flanders
In 1757, what had previously been the royal collection of manuscripts was handed over to the nascent British Museum. Edward IV, who started the collection in the 15th century, had created a collection of books designed to display the greater glory of God and (by extension) his chosen sovereigns and country: the Yorkist leader in the Wars of the Roses used these books, and the images they contained, to create a propaganda machine to suggest that God was on his side. Today the struggles of history are for the most part left to specialists, but the gorgeous propaganda machine is accessible to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of us who regarded The Office as a work of comic genius (not a word I use lightly) will, I'm afraid, take some convincing about Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais's latest offering. Keen fans who have followed the duo's every move since that landmark sitcom will feel they know every last trope on display in Life's Too Short, from its mockumentary setting and unPC subject matter to dark comedy and celebrity guest spots.All those and more are present in the spoof documentary written and directed by Merchant and Gervais, in which they also appear. It's about Warwick Davis (played by Read more ...
David Nice
When telling a complex musical story, handle with care. Interpreters need have no fear of composers who find selective, tone-friendly angles in their literary sources, like Janáček with Gogol’s Taras Bulba in last night’s searing finale, or Zemlinsky with Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the saturated climax of the previous evening. But what about Dvořák in oddball, potentially enriching mode, setting every jot and tittle of a folk ballad without actually using words or voices? Don’t, whatever you do, chop off the arms and legs, the fate that befalls the pretty maiden of The Golden Spinning Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Some successful rock stars accumulate wives, others accumulate houses, cars or drug habits. Damon Albarn seems to accumulate bands. As well as his on-off relationship with Blur, there is the semi-regular Gorillaz. And he has been seeing even more musicians on the side, too. He recently appeared at the Barbican alongside the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea (must have been a seven year itch?) and last night he rekindled an old flame, reconvening The Good, The Bad & The Queen for a one-off Greenpeace benefit.If things started sluggishly that was unsurprising. Albarn, Paul Simonon, Simon Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot. Whether audiences will go the distance with her may depend on individual tolerance for a film that plays like an overcooked British knock-off of the Nicole Kidman starrer The Others, complete with Dominic West on hand to contribute belated rumpy-pumpy and Imelda Staunton very visibly furrowing her brow.I suspect you'd be fretting, too, if you found yourself in the position of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Family occasions can be fraught affairs, as playwrights from Harold Pinter to Alan Ayckbourn have convincingly proved, but the mother of all family meltdown dramas must be Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish Festen, a Dogme 95 film made in 1998. Soon after, this was turned into a stage play by Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov, which had an outstanding success in David Eldridge’s version here in 2004. Now a Romanian theatre company, Nottara, from Bucharest, bring their version to London.At the start of the evening, we are welcomed chez Klingenfeld-Hansen (the Danish names remain unchanged). The family has Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
First come the strip-lit corridors, the stained breeze blocks, the locked doors; later there are restraints, drugs, needles. The time is out of joint, and we are all imprisoned in a nightmare of confusion, paranoia, guilt and despair. Who are the mad? Who the sane? In Ian Rickson’s thrilling production of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, it’s often frighteningly unclear.This is the director’s first Shakespearean staging and, electrifyingly, he approaches the text without careful reverence, but with the energy and inventive flair he has habitually brought to new plays. It is a distinctly personal Read more ...