Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
No one divides opinion quite like Wayne McGregor, Sir Wayne since 2024. He’s the closest thing to Marmite on the ballet scene. Either you’re excited by the brave-new-world qualities of his work – the forefronting of science and new tech, the diminution of emotion, the physical contortions, legs up past the ears every two minutes – or it leaves you cold. Woolf Works was his first full-length work for the Royal Ballet and is already old enough for the current revival to feature almost none of the dancers who helped create it in 2015. In practice, it feels less one three-act ballet than Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
A new look and new vibe for Grant-Lee Phillips at this pared-back performance, part of the Celtic Connections festival that takes over Glasgow for a couple of weeks every January and February. The fresh vibe was due to this being Phillips first tour entirely seated, as he put it, sitting down and armed only with an acoustic guitar, while the 62-year-old is now more hirsute, having grown a beard.There was little else beyond simple performance here, for Cottiers' converted church setting does not exactly lend itself to any onstage gimmicks. If the plastic chairs of the auditorium gave it all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a journey Jamie Eastlake’s play has had: his stage adaptation (which he also directs) of Jonathan Tulloch’s book The Season Ticket began life as a three-hander in 2022, when it was performed in a social club on North Tyneside. It has had various iterations since and now – with a greatly enlarged cast and multiple storylines – it has a short West End run.The show centres on “two reprobates from Gateshead", the titular Gerry (Dean Logan) and his best mate Sewell (Jack Robertson), two unemployed young men always on the lookout for a money-making opportunity (and comically, in Sewell’s case Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a tasteful but somewhat unmoving adaptation of writer Helen MacDonald’s memoir, which in 2014 won the Samuel Johnson and Costa book prizes. MacDonald was an academic lecturing in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, when their father, Alisdair MacDonald the press photographer, died suddenly. Grieving and inspired by their shared love of observing birds, MacDonald bought a wild goshawk and brought it home. The writer named the bird Mabel and painstakingly trained it to fly to the hand and hunt. The resulting book elegantly interweaves a meditation on loss Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lionel (Paul Mescal; played as a child by Leo Cocovinis) has perfect pitch and is able to name the note his mother coughs each morning. He can harmonise with the barking of the dog across the field. “Early on I thought everyone could see sound.” Sounds bring shapes, colours, tastes too: “B minor and my mouth turned bitter.”Directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie; Living), The History of Sound, adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story about a gay couple in the 1920s, starts promisingly but its tone is too tasteful and restrained and its faded painterly palette of brown and white, though Read more ...
Robert Beale
It was a pleasure to see conductor Duncan Ward back in Manchester. His Hallé debut was by no means his first time in the city – he trained at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music and has conducted the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata in the past, and some may even remember him as a student with an orchestra he took to the Arndale shopping centre, making music in the malls, back in 2011.He was something of a Wunderkind then – pianist, organist and composer as well as budding conductor, a product of Mark Heron’s joint course at the two Manchester Read more ...
Gary Naylor
On a motorcycle, you have to slow down once you get that sinking feeling that there’s an accident on the road up ahead. Even if you’re not rubbernecking yourself, you don’t want to be going at full tilt in close proximity to those who are. I made an effort not to look past the sirens and flashing lights towards the wreckage, but sometimes it was unavoidable.I recalled such incidents in the unlikely environment of the Hotel Malmaison’s first floor corridor and again inside six of its bedrooms, the venues for Dante or Die’s revival of their immersive production I Do. It’s not like Tunde (Dauda Read more ...
David Nice
Every visit by Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's former Principal Conductor and now Conductor Emeritus, is unmissable, and this fascinating programme outdid expectations. If there was any link with the LPO's "Harmony with Nature" season theme, it was ironic – discord being the keynote – but the concert was perfectly wrought.Jurowski balanced Mosolov's 1920s mini-thrash depicting an iron foundry with contemporary Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun's soundcape initially tied to an image of mining waste mountains in the Donbass (the composer pictured below by Konrad Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
To the rich but faintly melancholy strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 23, the latest release from Korean director Park Chan-wook sets up its protagonists for us, a carefree family enjoying a barbecue in their garden, with a mischievous ironic tone from the outset.The music suggests refined, portentous emotions, far from the mundane domesticity of the scene before us. The father, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun, pictured below right), is almost blissed out with happiness at his good fortune: he has a sexy wife, two photogenic children, a house that once belonged to his farmer grandparents, a long Read more ...
David Nice
After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performances, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night. They could leave the most fiendish element in Bartók's Second Violin Concerto to the astonishing Patricia Kopatchinskaja, delivering every aspect of a work that might have been written for her, and other poetic extremes to mezzo Rinat Shaham, before letting their hair down in Falla's complete ballet Read more ...