Reviews
joe.muggs
For some people, dubstep has an identity problem. Its suburban origins and recent global spread, its propensity for hybridity, the relatively genial nature of the scene, and perhaps worst of all its popularity with – whisper it – students lead some commentators to regard it with suspicion. A common attack is to compare it unfavourably with either its antecedent jungle (the wild polyrhythmic early-mid 1990s precursor to drum & bass), or its first cousin grime (the fearsomely jagged, lyrically ultra-violent sound of London's pirate radio stations in the first part of this decade): next to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Got a mortgage.” Thus spake Michael McIntyre last night. It’s an article of faith for McIntyre - an all but unique selling point - that he is one of us. He wears a suit to work and doesn’t think about al-Qaeda that much. How many other comedians do you come across who remind you even vaguely of you? Where most stand-ups are weird or ugly or angry or hairy or epically rude (or all of the above), McIntyre is groundbreakingly normal, boy-next-door bourgeois. The jokes are all about the things all of us do - in the shops, in the kitchen, the bedroom. But not in the office. In what other Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre is the art of storytelling, and the best stories are those that constantly change their shape. In Dennis Kelly's storming new play, Orphans, which wowed critics and audiences when it opened in Edinburgh in August, the narrative morphs and flips like a bad conscience. And for good reason. Long before the final climax, you just know that something isn't right.The evening starts innocuously enough. Danny and Helen are a nice couple. If not exactly shining, happy people, they at least exude an air of comfort as they settle down to enjoy a quiet night at home. Nice room, nice furnishings, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You’re playing, say, a Brahms sonata. You’ve got jam on your face. Your trousers fall down. Your accompanist starts to play the piano with his head. What you’re meant to do in this situation, I remember my violin teacher drilling into me, is to drive on blindly. Judging last night’s concert by this basic lesson on musicianship, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra, who drove on through a complete blackout during the penultimate tableau of The Firebird, triumphed.
Ok, so the darkness lasted only two seconds. And it’s lucky it hit when it did. A few bars later - in the shifting Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rubies is a ballet for a girl comfortable with her curves, who can slink her hips and tip her bottom and relish seeing the men’s eyes widen. That the said girl is a ballerina, for whom curves are usually anathema, shows the personality challenge that this snazzy, jazzy George Balanchine ballet sets to its leading lady.That Sophie Martin, Scottish Ballet’s French leading lady, had enough personality to suggest Bette Midler curves, despite her refined build, is a measure of what fun she was to watch when the company hit Sadler’s Wells last night.Musical values were good, with Stravinsky, Berio Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Staycationers who didn't make it to their favourite Greek isle this summer may constitute a ready-made audience for Driving Aphrodite, the travelogue masquerading as a film that has opened just in time to tap into a collective desire for sun, sand, and the odd drop of retsina just as the nights are beginning to draw in.Others will merely roll their eyes at the predictability of it all, from the boorish stereotypes of Mike Reiss's script to the feel-good ending that lands our lovesick heroine, My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardalos, in a big fat Greek clinch. (Oops, I gave it away, but c'mon Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Joe Orton's untimely death has often threatened to eclipse his life. On 9 August 1967, he was murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who then committed suicide. Although Orton had completed the first draft of his masterpiece, What the Butler Saw, he'd never got around to writing a play called Prick Up Your Ears, whose naughty, innuendo-heavy title had been suggested by Halliwell. But the title lived on. First as John Lahr's 1978 biography, then as Stephen Frears's 1987 film and now as Simon Bent's new play. Starring Little Britain's Matt Lucas as Halliwell and Chris New as Orton Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As anyone who has ever had the misfortune to sit through a real court case knows, they can be deadly dull; but by golly when playwrights get their hands on them they usually become riveting. And so it proves here in Trevor Nunn’s pacy, funny and moving production of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee’s 1955 play.Inherit the Wind is based on the 1925 Monkey Trial in Tennessee, when teacher John Scopes was charged with breaking a law prohibiting the teaching of evolutionary theory in the state’s schools. The great liberal thinker Clarence Darrow was Scopes’s defence lawyer and fundamentalist Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Is HBO trying to tell us something? Is the once peerless cable channel signalling a midlife crisis? I only ask because Hung, the HBO comedy-drama that starts on More4 in mid-October, features a marginalised middle-aged basketball coach who turns to prostitution, while Eastbound & Down is about a Major League baseball pitcher who, “several shitty years later”, finds himself teaching PE back at his hometown high school. Crisis or not, both shows are well worth checking out, starting last night with the Will Ferrell-produced Eastbound & Down - a vehicle for the very funny Danny McBride. Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Theresienstadt was the Nazis’ most successful PR exercise. Described as a “Jewish settlement” for the preservation and propagation of the Arts, this Czech outpost turned concentration camp housed virtually the whole of the Jewish cultural elite. Inmates called it an anthill, a “Garden of Eden in the middle of Hell”. But the Nazis insisted that cultural freedom was encouraged, even cultivated, here. This was no concentration camp, rather a transit camp. Even the International Red Cross was taken in. Actually it was death’s waiting room. And while they waited, they wrote, they played, they sang Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Great Unknown, the Last Enemy, the Big Sleep… it’s death we’re talking about, and Dan Cruickshank’s affectingly personal film succeeded in reaching the conclusion that there is no conclusion he could comfort himself with. “What if after death there’s nothing?” pondered Dan.But although he expressed a wistful desire that he could share the true believer’s certainty that there is an afterlife, he seems pretty well resigned to the fact that nothing is all there is. Nonetheless, as an expert in art and architecture, he persevered in his efforts to discern whether some solace could be found in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Philip Roth once perversely suggested that Eastern European novelists whose work was banned under Communism were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to scour their navels for material; it was all there, dumped in their laps. In the second half of the 1980s, I devoured a lot of their fiction. If the novel came from the other side of the Iron Curtain, I’d buy. My policy was indiscriminate. It didn’t seem to matter if the author had been born too early for Communism. One of them was by Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew who was shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942. The volume contained two shortish pieces Read more ...