Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
There’s nothing like a bit of communal booing to sharpen your critical faculties. And Christof Loy’s new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House last night received wave after wave after wave of it. An ocean of boos almost as deep and profound as the Wagner that had just washed over us moments before. One boo surge from above, one boo surge from below, rivulets of bass-boos and piccolo-boos from the flanks, all lapping at the half-grinning, half-freaked out German production team on stage. Fence-sitting was not possible in this maelstrom. Loy’s approach, however imperfect, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The door to a pristine apartment is opened by a rivetingly beautiful young woman. “You're early," she says matter-of-factly. "I was just masturbating.” Has a date, and indeed a romantic comedy, ever started so winningly? Not that it goes so well for short, fat, snub-nosed Mark Bellison. At the restaurant she informs him that she’s way out of his league and the evening will not conclude in sex or even a kiss. And the waiter hits on her, unsuccessfully. Mark takes all this on the chin because he’s used to it. Everyone is. In the brilliant conceit of Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying, this Read more ...
howard.male
If a couple of years ago, some old bloke in dungarees with a long grey beard had proclaimed that the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir were his new favourite band, you probably wouldn't have taken much notice. But this particular hirsute gentleman is none other than the now legendary Seasick Steve, a man who has somehow morphed from unknown street musician to someone who can single-handedly make a Royal Albert Hall audience feel like they are in his own backyard.It might also be argued that this American bluesman has been responsible for creating a musical climate in which the AMGB's fairly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now we've become so steeped in digital devices that we can’t count to four without the aid of a calculator, it’s the perfect moment to take a voyage back to an era when British Leyland manufactured cars in diarrhoea-beige and there wasn't any daytime TV.Electric Dreams (part of the BBC’s Electric Revolution season surveying 40 years of galloping technology) rests on a simple premise. I can imagine it being described by mad Californian professor Denzil Dexter from The Fast Show - "we took this middle class suburban family and subjected it to intense technology deprivation." The clock in the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You might imagine a cultural artefact on the topic of make overs, albeit primarily of the self, to be handled with particular care and attention when it is itself made over, as the Truman Capote novella Breakfast at Tiffany's has now been on the West End. Alas, Sean Mathias's second successive Haymarket production is an object lesson in how not to tamper with the pre-existing goods. Joseph Cross's leading man, William Parsons, sends us into the interval, his jaw dropped open in disbelief. He's not the only one.The misfire is all the more surprising given the abilities of those involved, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Blame it on J.J. Abrams. With the success of the unfathomable Lost, Abrams altered the consciousness of American TV drama, and made it obligatory to think in at least four dimensions. Hence we had Heroes, in which people could fly, were indestructible, or could alter the course of history. Abrams himself is back on the paranormal beat with Fringe (due back imminently on Sky 1), a kind of X-Files-through-the-Looking Glass.Now here’s FlashForward, Five’s big new buy-in for the autumn, and a series which many reckon looks uncannily like ABC's potential replacement for Lost. The brainchild of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Take four superb actors - Lucy Cohu, Kerry Fox, Ian Hart and John Simm - cast them in a revival of a play that inspired a haunting film, and what do you get? On the evidence of last night’s opening performance of Speaking in Tongues, a right mess, that’s what.Australian writer Andrew Bovell (who worked with Baz Luhrmann on Strictly Ballroom) and whose latest play, When the Rain Stops Falling, was staged at the Almeida in London earlier this year) adapted his 1996 play five years later as the film Lantana, starring Barbara Hershey, Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush. With its interlocking Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving through the front doors. In that quietly embarrassing, I-hope-no-one-saw way, after some light-hearted Schumann, I thought for a moment she flashed a smile at me and – charmed – smiled back, but it turned out that I was sitting behind Brendel. It was that sort of audience.Perhaps it wasn’t such a difficult mistake to make. This was a genteel tea- Read more ...
admin
History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the Royal Academy of Arts tried to persuade us to look beyond the grisly tales of human sacrifice to a more nuanced portrait of a people steeped in gory rituals that we, soaked in the serial-killer television porn of the 21st century, might strangely understand.It didn’t work – how many vessels designed to receive still-beating human hearts do you need to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
4 am. Eternal. I'm at an all-night temple festival somewhere in north Kerala in southern India - not so much in the middle of nowhere as on the outskirts of nowhere. There's wild chenda drumming and a terrifying apparition of a man who has gone into a trance – the goddess Babrakali, they tell me, has possessed him. He's wearing an outrageous red costume 12ft high, and he is charging right at me. The fact that his outfit is on fire, that he's just bitten the head off a live cockerel and the remains of the unlucky fowl dangle from his mouth, doesn't reassure me.In fact, he stops just in front Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
They played their first concert in 1969, and 40 years later the TP Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, to give them their full name, had their UK debut last night at the Barbican as part of their first European tour. They are the latest expression of a growing cult of classic bands who hit their peak in 1970s Africa. The music of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti has never been more popular, strange jazz from 1970s Addis Ababa has been selling impressively on the Ethiopiques series of records, while Senegal’s Orchestre Baobab have reformed to great acclaim.Three cult albums, culled from a repertory of over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Werther is based on the young Goethe’s semi-autobiographical epistolary novel which tells of a young artist’s thwarted love for a simple country girl who is already engaged. First performed in Vienna in 1892, it is audibly a product of that time. You can hear the predominant influence of Wagner in piquant unresolved dissonances, suggestive of a fleeter-footed, gallic Tristan with added harps. The sheer depth and splendour of the music is what makes a potentially risible narrative work so gloriously: it is superbly paced and always entertaining. And Opera North’s first stab at it since 1982 Read more ...