fairytales
Saskia Baron
This might just be the most challenging film review I’ve had to write in decades. The best thing would be to go and see Border knowing nothing more than that it won the prize for most innovative film at Cannes. Don't watch the trailer, and definitely don’t read those lazy reviewers who complete their word count by writing a detailed synopsis ruining every reveal and plot twist. Border is simply brilliant and best seen clean, although a duty of care means that viewers of a delicate disposition are warned that there’s a significant amount of body horror on screen. Fans of David Cronenberg, Read more ...
David Nice
Once upon a time there was the terrible mouth of Richard Jones's Welsh National Opera/Met Hänsel und Gretel, finding an idiosyncratic equivalent to the original Engelbert Humperdinck's dark Wagnerian heart. Then came something very nasty in the witch's deep freeze of the last Royal Opera staging, something of a dog's dinner from Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser. It seems that The House got cold feet about the cold store after tabloid uproar - though not so much as to stop a revival - and the result now is a much cleaner but not much more flavoursome fantasy by director-designer Antony Read more ...
David Nice
Once a year is never too often to revisit one of the most perfect of all orchestral scores (not just for the ballet), a climactic Russian Imperial Pas de deux and the old-fashioned magic of illusionist painted flats flying in and out across a production/choreography that manages to crack the soft nut of a fantastical story only a quarter told. It all adds up in Peter Wright's Royal Ballet Nutcracker. His rekindling of as many elements as he can fit from the Hoffmann-via-Dumas original adapted by Petipa and somewhat reluctantly followed by Tchaikovsky is only as good as his two pairs of Read more ...
David Nice
Supernatural wonders, consciously avoided in Rossini's enlightened tale of goodness rewarded La Cenerentola and unrealised by second-rank composer Isouard in his 1810 Cendrillon, recently uneathed by Bampton Classical Opera, flood Massenet's gem-studded version of the Cinderella story. For a contemporary production to avoid visual representation to match would be foolhardly; but to yoke magic to an alternative narrative can also be confusing. Fiona Shaw's fitfully perceptive but overstuffed cabinet of curiosities is too heavy for the gossamer textures of this total charmer. Young leads and a Read more ...
David Nice
Cinderella as opera in French: of late, the palm has always gone to Massenet's adorable (as in a-dor-Ah-bler) confection, and it should again soon when Glyndebourne offers a worthy home to the master's magic touch. The Cendrillon of Maltese-born honorary Parisian Nicolas Isouard, aka Nicolò, clearly had its day after the 1810 premiere, but it was eclipsed by Rossini's La Cenerentola coming along seven years later, and with good reason. The muse assigned to Rossini did not visit mostly pedestrian Isouard, though his approach is compact and briefly steps out of the generic with two pretty Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s an event that only comes around once a generation: a new Matt Groening TV series. The Simpsons is rightly regarded as one of the greatest shows ever made. It changed the face of American television, and 10 years later was followed Futurama, a series that may lack the cross-demographic appeal of its predecessor, but consistently produced satirical masterpieces. Now, with a vastly changed viewing landscape, Groening makes the jump to streaming giants Netflix with his new show Disenchantment. The question is, can lightning strike thrice?On first appearances, probably not. Disenchantment is Read more ...
Owen Richards
Childhood is an inimitable experience – the laws of the world are less certain, imagination and reality meld together, and no event feels fixed. A Sicilian Ghost Story recreates this sensation in the context of real world trauma, producing a unique and sometimes unsettling cinematic experience.Luna (Julia Jedlikowska, pictured below) is a rather typical 12-year-old girl: precocious, imaginative, and very much infatuated with her classmate Giuseppe. Although they don’t have the same interests, they share something deeper, a comfort and belonging in each other’s company. On the walk home Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A raw pagan vitality animates this extraordinary story about a teenage boy wrestling with tumultuous emotions in the face of his mother’s terminal illness. Director Sally Cookson has taken the potent blend of myth and realism in Patrick Ness’s book and transformed it into a wild, beautiful piece of theatre that visually beguiles at the same time as it bruises the heart.Grief – even when suppressed – is an isolating phenomenon, and the production emphasises this from the start by stranding the boy, Conor (Matthew Tennyson, pictured above right), at the centre of a stark, clinical white stage. Read more ...
Owen Richards
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.Teenager Iona and her mother Lyn (Lily Newmark and Joanna Scanlan, main picture) are a pair of social outcasts, recently moved to Swadlincote in Derbyshire. They’re constantly festooned in bright woolly layers and surrounded by ornamental tat and misplaced furniture (including a toilet at the head of their shared double bed). Iona boasts about her new school Read more ...
David Nice
It's awfully long for a fairytale in which a mystery prince helps a damsel in distress, and she asks him the question she shouldn't. Myth tends to go deeper, as Wagner did in The Ring of the Nibelung after Lohengrin. Here he captures the magic of transformation and transcendence, but in between there's too much hard-to-stage pomp. Director David Alden treats it all too predictably, with images of post-war ruin – tilted, tottering shells of buildings – and fascist paraphernalia (the swan motif in Nazi colours). The real light of the piece is there in the music, led with bright breadth by the Read more ...
David Nice
With the eyes of musical fashion turned relentlessly on the calculating stage works of chilly alchemist George Benjamin, hopes ran high for a brighter spark in a new opera by his contemporary Mark-Anthony Turnage. Would Coraline, a music-drama for children of all ages based on the celebrated story by Neil Gaiman, burst into flames like Greek and the last two acts of The Silver Tassie or continue the elegiac strand in the best of Anna Nicole? Alas, no: despite the dedicated musicianship and the nifty staging of Aletta Collins, no-one is going to come out of this two-hour immersion fired up or Read more ...
Robert Beale
Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is a ‘"fairytale opera" (its composer’s description), and yet one characteristic frequently commented on is its "Wagnerian" scoring. For this production, with David Pountney’s English translation, the RNCM used Derek Clark’s reduced orchestration.Good idea, because the college has always been concerned that still-maturing voices should not be forced into trying to dominate massive orchestral sounds, and with that in mind has in recent years often provided surtitles for the audience to follow, even when the sung language was English. This time they Read more ...