New Zealand
Veronica Lee
Kieran Hodgson, Voodoo Rooms ★★★★When Kieran Hodgson was growing up in West Yorkshire in the early years of the century, he was obsessed with two things – cycling and Lance Armstrong, then the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.In 2003, where the engaging and very funny Lance begins, 15-year-old Kieran is preparing for a cycling challenge organised by the scout troop he and his best mates Simon and Matthew belong to, run by Rob.As he tells the tale, Hodgson, wearing a yellow cycling jersey, hops on and off a static bike, and moves seamlessly among a large cast of vividly realised Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clearly the makers of this delightful film from New Zealand have watched a lot of movies, as so many are neatly and obliquely referenced – Nosferatu, The Blair Witch Project, The Lost Boys, Grease, to name just a few - in a comic tale about a group of vampires in Wellington.It's spearheaded by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi – collaborators as performer and writer respectively in Flight of the Conchords - who write, direct and star in here, and are ably abetted by any number of their friends from New Zealand's thriving and deeply inter-connected arts community. It is, my Kiwi pals tell me, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even more deserving of the sobriquet “the beautiful voice” than Renée Fleming, the natural successor who virtually copyrighted it, Kiri te Kanawa was one of the great sopranos of the 20th century. With those big, candid brown eyes and bone structure she’s still a beauty, as the images of her cameo role in the Royal Opera’s La Fille du régiment underline. The voice now – well, as I wrote in my review of Monday’s opening, it’s what you’d expect of a 70 year old with form. Last night was the big birthday with Downton Abbey butler Carson (Jim Carter) wheeling on the cake for that other stately Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
Enigmatic troubadour Connan Mockasin returns with his second album, a follow-up to 2010’s critically acclaimed Forever Dolphin Love which won him a cult following. Championed by the likes of Erol Alkan, Radiohead and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the elfin New Zealander is governed by his creative whimsy, writing music only when the mood takes him. This album is the musical equivalent of an indulgent Galaxy Caramel bar – smooth, sweet and stupor-inducing.Apparently inspired by the mellifluous qualities of the word, Caramel was self-recorded over a month in a Tokyo hotel room. It’s a concept album, of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Everything you think you are, you’re not,” pronounced Holly Hunter’s inscrutable GJ in the final episode of the chilly Top of the Lake. Certainties crumbled as the series progressed, with Elisabeth Moss’s Robin Griffin discovering that almost everyone in the remote New Zealand town of Laketop had something they would prefer to hide. Returning there to see her terminally ill mother, Griffin also found that what she had escaped was becoming far too close, threatening who she thought she was - and who she actually may be. Top of the Lake may have been framed around the search for a missing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jane Campion's much-anticipated series is set amid hauntingly beautiful scenery on New Zealand's South Island, which in its remoteness seems to shake its head gently at the antics of the sparse human population. The people themselves are like a tribe that time forgot, living in a wilderness-bubble governed by the kind of attitudes you'd expect to find in some dust-devilled outpost of the Old West in about 1800.If they weren't born there, they've come to escape. Thus, in an early sequence, a cluster of containers was delivered to a lakeside piece of land called (either ironically or not) Read more ...
garth.cartwright
I've been to countless UK Womads yet have never before made it WOMAD Taranaki. Which is almost something to be ashamed about considering I'm a Kiwi. But this expat is never in the South Pacific mid-March. Until, that is, this year. The 11th New Zealand Womad is held in the small city of New Plymouth in Taranaki, a gorgeous West Coast hump in the central North Island. Mt Taranaki towers over the site - this beautiful mountain is often used as double for Mt Fuji, so sublime is its symmetery - and surfing beaches are 20 minutes walk away. The site - the Brooklands Bowl - is a vast park full of Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Camille O'Sullivan: Changeling, Assembly Rooms *****The Assembly Rooms may have reopened for this year's Fringe following a very swanky refurb, but someone obviously forgot to put sufficient thought into the practicalities of getting people in and out during the festival. The opening night of Camille O’Sullivan’s brief sold-out run started 40 minutes late after a chaotic queuing system apparently devised in tribute to MC Escher left much of the crowd – which, thrillingly, included Les Dennis – more than a little testy.It’s testament to O’Sullivan’s charisma and gifts as a performer that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kody Nielsen is possibly best known outside his native New Zealand as the producer of singer-songwriter Bic Runga, but since her star shines very much brighter at home than in Europe, that isn’t necessarily an especially high profile. He has also long been front man of The Mint Chicks, self-proclaimed “trouble gum art punks”, but now they’ve split up he returns with a new outfit, Opossum, and an even newer bag of tricks.Opossum’s sound is rooted in surf music, but only in the loosest sense, borrowing keening harmony vocals and chord structures from the classic Californian sound. Around these Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So, what's the "problem"? All is right with the world - or the theatre at least - in the Maori-language staging of Troilus and Cressida from the Auckland-based Ngakau Toa troupe that pierces right to the troubling heart of this first of Shakespeare's three so-called "problem plays". (The next, Measure For Measure, follows Troilus in the Globe to Globe line-up, a scheduling decision sure to be balm for scholars.) Inaugurating an epoch-defining sequence of blink-and-you-miss-'em Shakespeare productions from across the, um, globe, director Rachel House and her company of New Zealanders have Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You hear the names of the princes and romantic heroines in ballet, but the global success of 20th-century British ballet had much to do with its dramatic acuity and nuancing, the unexpected side characters who in the ballets of Ashton and MacMillan were vastly more interesting than the stock supporting roles of 19th-century ballet. Alexander Grant was the key man in the growth of sophistication in British ballet in the Forties and Fifties, a character performer of powerful personality, and a performer who could out-dance almost any leading man.He died on Friday, aged 86, in London, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
All ballet companies dream of finding a genuine creative talent among their ranks, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, visiting from the farthest end of the world ballet map, have one in Andrew Simmons. The unknown name on their triple bill on this rare visit to London shows a young mind drawn naturally to grace and understated expressiveness.His creation, A Song in the Dark, is effortlessly better than the busy, inconsequential work by Jorma Elo, one of the most noised names in ballet at the moment, for reasons that escape my understanding. Both pieces are leotard ballets, Elo’s in red, Read more ...