Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
One after the other came their pleas. “Save us!” they cried, “Save us, or we will be no more!” Not the words of the enslaved Israelites of Handel’s oratorio, however, but the sentiments of the English Baroque Soloists, the Monteverdi Choir and their supporters during their pre-concert supplications. Never has the plea of a fundraising concert chimed so well with the thrust of the music. Moments after Sir John Eliot Gardiner - then Sir David Attenborough - had begged the crowd of sponsors to empty their pockets for the musicians, the choir of Israelites struck up their own Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Having felt thoroughly racked by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s marathonian and bone-dry Rosas danst Rosas on Wednesday, I was hardly expecting charm and beguilement from the even longer Zeitung last night. But Zeitung is one of the most delightful and intelligent evenings about modern dance’s volatile relationship with classical music that I’ve seen.Twenty-five years separate the two and an aeon of difference in emotional generosity; Rosas danst Rosas looks like the piano scales and exercises before the sophisticated, expressive performance for nine dancers and pianist that is Zeitung (German Read more ...
sheila.johnston
It is, as the best cinema should be, always all about the image. Andrea Arnold's films are born, she says, with just this: a visual imprint - strong, unsettling, inexplicable. The stories then slowly unfurl in her mind from that starting point. On paper, they sound grim: the director goes for terse, no-nonsense titles, and her working-class world seems at first unforgiving. On screen, they are thrilling, intriguing, instantly gripping, the work of a natural-born, utterly original director.Distinctively female in perspective, there's generally a woman at their centre and a rugged piece of male Read more ...
james.woodall
Fresh from scripting one of the year's feeblest films, Stephen Frears's Michelle Pfeiffer-love-in Chéri, Christopher Hampton has turned his translating hand to a solid 20th-century German drama. Ödön von Horváth's late-1930s Judgment Day is not a bad play, but the Almeida Theatre's new staging of it struggles to convince us that it's worth making that much of a modern fuss about. At its heart is a knotty and quite compelling moral dilemma. Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz, in a small, unnamed Austrian town, unhappily married to a much older woman, allows himself to be distracted by the daughter, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra like to do things their way. They still show little compunction about discriminating on sexual and ethnic grounds and for over 70 years have maintained the idiosyncratic position of having no fixed principal conductor. Instead, like the prettiest girl in the school year, they carefully bestow grace and favour on a special chosen few. One of their longest running relationships has been with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a partnership whose early results – trail-blazingly authentic - regularly raised Viennese hackles. So it was a great disappointment to learn that Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
BBC3 must sometimes feel very strange to its target audience – reflecting back a gallery of skunk-addled obese teenage single-mums not far removed from the nightmares of a Daily Mail reader. There’s no doubting the fruits of its comedy department however, and the likes of Man Stroke Woman, Monkey Dust, The Mighty Boosh, Gavin and Stacey and Being Human are shows that any averagely well-adjusted 16-34-year-old might actually enjoy. The sparky new student sitcom Off the Hook looks set to join that list. But Lunch Monkeys? Sadly, nah.David Isaac's sitcom, piloted last year as Admin, is the sort Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is youth wasted on the young? Well, precious few grown-ups who watch Simon Stephens's new drama, Punk Rock, will develop a sudden urge to be a teenager again: his portrait of a group of middle-class youngsters is every parent's nightmare. They are either foul-mouthed and aggressive bullies, or deeply troubled neurotics - and the gradual escalation of their conflicts ends in the kind of mindless violence that stays on the front pages for days.Set in a Stockport grammar school, on the eve of A-level exams, the play starts off with the tender encounter between two 17-year-olds, local fantasist Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In July the BBC brought us Freefall, writer/director Dominic Savage's credit crunch drama. It was a crude morality tale of greed and gullibility, just about compensating for its blatantly schematic characters with sheer pace. With The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers (BBC2), writer Craig Warner and director Michael Samuels set themselves an altogether trickier proposition, to dramatise the boardroom power-plays that ended in the collapse of American mega-bank Lehman Brothers on September 12 last year.It was a crash that echoed around the world almost as seismically as that of the Twin Towers. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”Wilde was in fact a keen recycler of his own bon mots. Many of those clever-clever inversions that ornament the plays first did service in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The author’s pragmatic calculation was that if they worked on the page, why not the stage? But for some reason, not a lot of them seem to have made the onward journey to the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The presence of an ellipsis in the title of Sean Hughes’ new show, What I Meant to Say Was..., is a clue to how the evening proceeds. He comes on stage with no announcement, chats for 90 minutes about this and that, rambles a bit when he loses his thread and frequently goes off at a tangent when he interacts with the audience. He even tells us he always talks rubbish for the 15 minutes and the show proper will begin after then.On first sight then it looks unplanned and rather disordered, but Hughes is a sly old fox. Because behind his casual appearance and seemingly shambolic delivery is a Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.The movie is breezy and well-observed, but also deeply conventional. It may poke fun at a tacky nightclub called Razzmatazz, which bills itself as “A Read more ...
josh.spero
Have Your Cake Theatre has a mission to 'demonstrate that the big themes have never gone away', and an Eighties stab at John Webster's Duchess of Malfi (if you'll pardon the pun) is their opening salvo.The plot certainly has immortal, immoral themes: incestuous jealousy, royal connivings, a bought conscience. And setting the show in 1981, the year of that ill-starred Charles and Di match, is bound to stir up its own memories, although I'm guessing Prince Andrew never had the designs on Charles that Ferdinand has for this widowed sister.
It is the horrific intensity of this one plot - brother Read more ...