London
Jessica Duchen
As András Schiff remarked from the stage early in this fairly remarkable evening, his usual audience knows he’s not about to play Rachmaninov. The idea for this concert last night and his return visit today, is that we turn up not knowing exactly what we will hear, beyond the name of a composer or two. He has a point. Why should pianists have to decide on every detail of their programmes two years in advance, sometimes more? It’s not an orchestra that needs to hire music and book a conductor. Given a sterling reputation, a devoted public following and a very good memory, a top pianist Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is Cruella the escapist blockbuster the Covid-blighted world has been waiting for? Well, it’s a feast for the eyes but 20 minutes too long, and for an origin story of the despicable Cruella De Vil of The Hundred and One Dalmations fame, it lacks the killer instinct when it comes to the crunch. At the end of the day, Cruella may have some serious mother issues, but she isn’t really cruel.Besides, we’ve had a consciousness-revolution about animal welfare since 1956, when Dodie Smith published her original Hundred and One Dalmatians novel. Smith’s Cruella was the acme of heartlessness, a woman Read more ...
aleks.sierz
After months of watching theatre on screens large, medium and tiny, I definitely feel great about going to see a live show again. Of course, it’s not the usual theatre experience, you know, the one with crowds milling around the bar, people breathing down your neck and elbowing you while you’re watching, but at least it’s three-dimensional.With COVID-19 restrictions, the audience is all masked up and socially distanced, but there is still a buzz at the Bush about this piece. Harm, which has already been screened on BBC Four with Leanne Best, is a new monologue by Bruntwood Prize-winning Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s crazy, but could it possibly work? Writer Nida Manzoor (a veteran of Doctor Who and BBC Three’s sitcom Enterprice) grew up in a Muslim family, but that didn’t stop her being a fan of punk rock, Blackadder and This Is Spinal Tap. She also writes songs, so creating a sitcom about the female Muslim punk band Lady Parts wasn’t quite such a stretch as it might seem.Her smartest trick here, though, is to have used the device of the band to cast a wry and hilarious eye over not just Muslim life but common preconceptions of it, and its complicated interactions with the secular West (it’s not all Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An attractive and likeable cast remains the principal drawing card of Trying, the Apple TV+ romcom centred around the efforts of a 30something couple to adopt a child. Following on from the first season aired last spring, Andy Wolton's creation gives pride of place to a terrific assemblage of actors, who carry the day even when the piece itself seems to tread faintly overfamiliar ground.You feel, for instance, as if you've already heard the sort of badinage that bonds Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall), the affectionately sparring duo who may debate the age your shoulders drop (not Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Emotions don't come in half-measures in Rare Beasts, with which Billie Piper makes a commendably edgy debut as writer-director onscreen while affording herself a stonking star part. Dedicated., we're informed, to "all my friends and all their woes", this self-described "anti-romcom" may be too stylistically indulgent for some.But see out its excesses and you emerge with a potent look at three very different relationships amidst our rancorous, chaotic times. And Piper, back in our midst for the first time since I Hate Suzie, here confirms herself as a huge talent who never chooses the easy Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Chris Petit's Radio On, his 1979 debut as writer-director, should be regarded as the first British psychogeography film. Though its protagonist, Robert B (David Beames), a DJ for the United Biscuits Network, drives from London to Bristol in his two-tone Rover to investigate why his brother has killed himself, his journey extends beyond his half-hearted sleuthing and carries him into as many liminal spaces in his psyche as the real ones in which he lingers during his journey. Unfolding over a few wintry days centred on Saturday, 10 March 1979, Radio On is often painted as bleak, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1992 Martin Amis published a story, “Career Move”, in which the writers of sensational screenplays with titles like Decimator and Offensive from Qasar 13 read their work to empty rooms in shabby pubs. Meanwhile, wealthy and fêted poets pen verses entitled “Composed at – Castle” or “To Sophonisba Anguiscola” and their agents immediately juggle megabuck offers from LA: “In poetry, first class was something you didn't need to think about. It wasn’t discussed. It was statutory.” Dead Souls, the first (almost) conventional novel by poet Sam Riviere, shares Amis’s engagement both with male Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
We may not be in the EU any more, but geographically and culturally we can celebrate being part of Europe as much as we jolly well like. For Europe Day, the European Parliament Liaison Office, the Camōes Institute, the Embassy of Portugal and the Delegation of the EU in the UK staged a special lunchtime concert at St John’s Smith Square, given by the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Bloxham. The ensemble is from Bloxham’s eponymous festival in the north east, sporting 12 different European nationalities and a larger number beyond that continent. In its ranks you Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation. Poltergeist (main picture) and Doppelganger, the works that dominate Internal Objects, Rachel Whiteread’s powerful and moving new show at the Gagosian Gallery, imply isolation and are a vision of sheds destroyed, broken apart – structures that speak of a post-apocalyptic, unpeopled world. No home offices there.These are not her typical inside-out interiors cast in concrete, resin or steel, negative spaces Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I think I can safely say that polymath playwright Philip Ridley has had a good lockdown. In March last year, when The Beast of Blue Yonder, his new show for Southwark Playhouse, was closed due to the pandemic, he came up with an idea called The Beast Will Rise, and wrote a new monologue for each cast member to be performed and streamed each week. These number 14 in all, and vary from River (two minutes in length) to Eclipse (almost an hour). Then he wrote The Poltergeist, a fantastic one-man show which streamed in November. Now he returns again to this venue with Tarantula, a new monologue Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Wigmore Hall does not dish up a great deal of contemporary music, preferring a menu of mainstream chamber music. But this programme by the Nash Ensemble offered a different kind of mainstream: within the world of contemporary music this was a middle-of-the-road offering. A roster of composers including Harrison Birtwistle, Simon Holt and Mark-Antony Turnage, all at one time enfants terribles, now more les vieux terribles, made for a somewhat monochrome concert that was a bit indigestible, even for a modern music fan like me.And is it ok, in 2021, to have a programme like this, comprising Read more ...