Reviews
fisun.guner
Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry. What’s more, he’s a hugely prolific musician, so I’m sure he means only that he feels a little more comfortable expressing himself through imagery rather than abstract concepts – though obviously, being human, he must do that as well.Alongside these many activities, Childish also co-founded the Stuckists, that rather silly anti-conceptual art Read more ...
sue.steward
This week I discovered Irving Penn’s little-known portraits of anonymous street traders, taken in Paris, London and New York between 1950 and 1951. Previously unseen in the UK, they are now appearing at Hamiltons’ Mayfair gallery: 33 examples from a series of almost 252 full-length portraits collectively titled Small Trades. While they lack the instant glamour of the celebrity Portraits currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery, these sensitive depictions of skilled street traders – including a Parisian cheese-seller, a London house painter, a New York flower delivery man - are Read more ...
David Nice
As one who came to know the B minor Mass singing in a clogged, 150-strong choir, I welcomed the authentic-movement rush in the 1980s to whittle it down to What Bach Might Have Wanted (if, indeed, he had lived to hear his ideal religious compendium performed in its entirety). For a while, it shrivelled to anorexic dimensions in the shape of Joshua Rifkin's one-voice-per-choral-line hypothesis. Last night, though, showed how far we have come: a well-tempered Mass from Christophers' ensemble, with thankfully more than 16 in the chorus (26, to be precise), the occasional unexpected murk Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For the life of me I cannot understand why London Assurance is not performed more often. It’s a rollicking comedy, written in 1841 but which has a Restoration heart, with a cast list that includes a wideboy named Dazzle, a valet Cool, a servant Pert, a lawyer Meddle and - hold your sides - a horsey broad brandishing a whip named Lady Gay Spanker. Calm down, now.Dion Boucicault’s comedy of manners (written when he was only 21) is a witty commentary on town versus country and many of its lines could have been written yesterday. Mostly, though, it’s a chance for some of our greatest thespians Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems both Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass felt it was time to leave the Bourne franchise on the shelf for a while, fearing they would corner themselves into making The Bourne Redundancy. Instead, they have transposed their working partnership into this Iraq war saga. The result is a fast-moving conspiracy thriller, but with an underpinning of actualité in the way Greengrass alludes to a war waged on a false premise, and spotlights the criminal ignorance and stupidity of American attempts to rebuild Iraq. These latter aspects of Brian Helgeland’s screenplay derive from the book Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
There must have been gnashing of teeth and the rending of heavily discounted garments in the marketing departments of Marks & Spencer, House of Fraser et al, when they realised that their commercial rival had been granted a three-hour advertisement on the BBC, but then there has always been something about John Lewis that seems to elevate it above the ruck and maul of the high street. What that something was – and whether or not it was purely mythical – was the subject of Liz Allen’s ultimately interesting documentary foray behind the façade of Middle England’s favourite department store Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In movies and on TV we expect sequels and spin-offs and the perpetuation of a franchise whereby we follow Rocky, The Terminator, or whomever seemingly to the grave. But theatre has tended to take the high road: Chekhov never revealed whether the three sisters actually reached Moscow. (What do you think?) And the nearest Beckett got to Waiting For Godot 2 are Hamm and Clov in Endgame, who can be seen as Didi and Gogo filtered through an even bleaker end of the existential prism. So the first thing to be said about Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber's sure-to-be-debated follow-on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.It’ll be curious to see if the planned Hollywood version Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What should a choreographer set before a Prince for a Royal Gala performance when his finest hour is a portrayal of Royal buggery with a hot poker? Well, possibly (sotto voce) clogdancing cobblers and pegleg pirates might be found more suitable, and plenty of children on stage. So peglegs and clogdancing is what Prince Charles will duly be served tonight at the celebration of 20 years of Birmingham Royal Ballet. These are not times to be challenging any more.It's 20 years since Sadler’s Wells Ballet took on a breakneck challenge, handed in the keys to its historic home in Islington and got Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a decade ago with a story of the drug-induced implosion of one of the city’s top agenting talents. As parallels with a real-life career melt-down were all too obvious to the in-crowd, sourcing to the Tolstoy story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” may have crept in as a cover-up.Rose is back with Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as Ivansxtc lead Danny Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The new millennium shimmered into earshot with a musical masterpiece from a female Finn. Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (2000) appeared to open up an enticing new operatic sound world, less dogmatic, more instinctive, colourful and intense, very much like the work's model, Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande, had done a hundred years before. Ten years on, the critical establishment descended on Lyon for Saariaho's third opera, Émilie - which comes to the Barbican in 2012 - based on the last days of the life of 18th-century French intellectual, Émilie du Châtelet, to see if Saariaho could repeat Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We know the grammar now by rote. Some local institution is on its uppers. A traditional way of life is threatened by changing times. Sic transit etcetera and so forth. What’s wanted is a shot in the arm, a kick in the seat, preferably administered by a famous well-known celebrity star, one if at all possible followed at all times by their own bespoke camera crew. And yea, lo, not to mention verily, they will sprinkle their fairy dust, twinkle their pixie bits, and an impossible task of a horridly hard nature will by some completely predictable miracle be achieved, all thanks to grit, graft Read more ...