Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Is the Rose Playhouse London theatre’s best-kept secret? Or simply its worst-publicised? Either way, this gem of a space, tucked away behind the Globe in Bankside, needs and deserves a greater following. If it continues to stage shows like the delicately beautiful Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang however, it’ll be an easy sell. Gentle and melancholic, inventive and profoundly moving – this is a show with a particular autumnal alchemy to it.The first purpose-built playhouse to stage any of Shakespeare’s plays, The Rose was rediscovered by accident in 1989. Two-thirds of the foundations of the Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
There’s no denying that this one-woman show, starring Tricia Kelly, is mightily ambitious. Written by East German playwright Manfred Karge and rarely revived, Man to Man depicts a German widow – Ella Gericke – who decides to impersonate her dead husband, Max, and take over his life. The play opens with Hitler’s army advancing, spans 50 years, covers dozens of characters and includes a number of surreal dance, dream and fantasy sequences. Demanding indeed – but a bit of a mess.Man to Man launched Tilda Swinton’s career in 1987, which gives you an idea of the versatility and, well, wackiness Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s fascinating to catch the moment when an already great film director moves onwards and upwards, to another level. Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev has been collecting major festival prizes for more than a decade, since his debut feature The Return won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003. After that he became a regular at Cannes, with his follow-ups The Banishment and Elena; his latest film, Leviathan, came away from the Croisette this year with the best script award. Many critics there felt that it merited something more.Because Leviathan marks a change of direction for Zvyagintsev, a move Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be the ultimate cornucopia of choral and early-instrumental invention. So long as the musicians immerse themselves in the beauty of a strange adventure, it doesn’t matter where you hear Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610: however selective the acoustic, you’ll always get something out of one rare combination of sounds or another. The challenge of The Sixteen on their latest tour was never going to be one of communication, only of adapting in the move between cathedrals and concert halls.If the Winchester experience began in the aural equivalent of a dimly-lit room, it ended in total Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The voice is unmistakably Icelandic. Fluting and dancing around the notes, the words it carries are broken into segments which don’t respect syllables. Although singing in English, Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir hasn’t sacrificed her Icelandic intonation.The music itself is also unmistakably Icelandic. As with fellow Icelanders múm, electronica has been assimilated bringing a glitchiness which knocks the lush, ebbing and flowing arrangements off balance. Yet the totality is folky and warmly intimate.Innra, the third album from Rökkurró, is a lovely thing – a musical postcard from a world where Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Anyone whose affection for Rachmaninov is bounded by the Second Piano Concerto or the Paganini Rhapsody might be surprised to learn that his own favourite work of his was his setting for unaccompanied choir of the Vespers, or All-Night Vigil, of the Russian Orthodox Church. Admittedly he uses the Latin “Dies irae” in the Rhapsody, and the “Blagosloven yesi” from the Vigil does battle with it in his Symphonic Dances. But these are no more than Lisztian self-dramatising pieties. The Vigil setting, made at the height of World War I in 1915, is proper, self-effacing piety, and I suspect Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Since Rovio hit the jackpot with Angry Birds the Finnish developer has not been shy about pumping the franchise for all it is worth. There are licensed sequels incorporating Star Wars and Transformers characters, spin-off games like Angry Birds Epic and Angry Birds Go, board games, stuffed toys and even a movie in development. While those furious fowl dominate Rovio's output, they haven't given up on indie gaming entirely. Not content with publishing third party games like Tiny Thief and Plunder Pirates, Rovio is also home to Rovio LVL11 - a development team dedicated to producing games that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Attenborough’s characteristically soothing narration again described the unceasing struggle for survival in the animal world. In astonishing films from all over the world, we witnessed an enormous variety of tactics for finding homes that not only provided shelter, but protection. In nature, he told us, good homes are all too rare, and we were treated to some not-so-subtle allusions to our own housing crises.This episode, subtitled Home, opened by visiting a bushy glade in the huge Zambian plain where a dozen wild dog pups were guarded by an adult male babysitter, as the other Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When science and the arts combine they form a new genre, which has the unlovely name of “artsci”. But although there have now been several plays about climate change in recent years, can an innovative partnership between a playwright, a scientist and a director throw any more light on a subject — global warming — that is vital, yet seems to leave most people cold. More tellingly, can theatre tell us anything about it that we don’t already know?The title of the piece, 2071, comes from the idea that this will be the year in which, as the scientist Chris Rapley says, “my oldest grandchild will Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Even the cold breeze along the Thames played its part in conjuring the chilly, epic Finnish landscapes of Jean Sibelius last night, though Finnish maestro Osmo Vänskä and the perfectly weighted phrasing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra can take primary credit. It’s unusual to have a single-composer programme these days, but Vänskä justified his repertoire with a performance of taut, lyrical and evocative power, which connected and illuminated different areas, historical and generic, of Sibelius’ career.From Smetana to Shostakovich, a school of broadly Romantic composers created musical Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
A significant milestone was passed this week: Tuesday 4 November was Equal Pay Day. From that day until the end of the year, the average woman in this country effectively works for free compared to her male counterpart, such is the disparity in wages. And in case you were wondering, it’s getting worse, not better. The moment arrived three days earlier this year than last.Over 40 years ago, the 187 women who worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham took extraordinary risks to try and do something about this injustice. They went out on strike in 1968, holding out against the management and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Broadmoor is not a prison. It just looks like one, as reiterated by umpteen craning shots which prowled around the Victorian red-brick exterior, assessing its brute institutional heft from every angle. For the first time, and after five years of negotiation, cameras have been allowed to document what happens inside this mythologised sanctum. Is it really the chamber of horrors of popular imagination? Is this where society’s malignantly insane are locked away for our better safety?Broadmoor’s staff are complicit in preserving its secrets. Rather than admit to working there and then spend hours Read more ...