Reviews
David Nice
Dvořák’s rustic operetta sits, swinging its legs rather diffidently, historically somewhere between the neverland Bohemia of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and the lacerating reality of village life in Janáček'’s Jenůfa. The Cunning Peasant’s charms lie in its string of sophisticated songs and dances, more through-composed than Smetana’s, and in the abundance of not over-taxing roles, as well as chorus numbers, it offers to students.That the Guildhall School embraces these so cheerfully has much to do with the way that fine, underrated conductor Dominic Wheeler effortlessly drives the tractor, Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Pretty in Pink featured an interesting example of female friendship between a teenager and a grown woman. A record shop owner imparts motherly advice to her employee while also getting to grips with her own identity. In a similar manner, Lynn Shelton’s indie comedy (which was written by YA author Andrea Siegel) pairs up Keira Knightley and Chloë Grace Moretz, but shifts the focus away from teen angst to tackle the quarter-life crisis from the point of view of a woman who decides she needs to find herself 10 years after graduating from high schoolWhen Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to Megan ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How odd to recall that Michael Portillo was the Thatcherite brat they loved to hate, the man whose 1997 defeat at Enfield Southgate would have caused a Twitter meltdown had the 140-character phenomenon been invented in time. Today's repackaged Portillo has blossomed in all directions, from being a stalwart on The Moral Maze and Andrew Neil's This Week to documentaries about capital punishment and mental health. You could almost suspect he had something of the Lib-Dem about him these days, Euroscepticism aside of course. And then there's his ongoing infatuation with railways. After four Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is no exaggeration to say that Lloyd Newson has created a new theatrical language. Verbatim drama and intricate choreography would seem, on paper, to be fatally competing elements, yet Newson’s hypnotic fusion charges both word and movement with fresh meaning. Critically, the dance element of this typically confrontational new work from his company DV8, covering such harrowing topics as domestic violence, rape, incest, addiction and criminality, prevents it from slipping into hackneyed territory. A potential sob story with sermonising framework is reborn as an extraordinarily personal Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of course unavoidable circumstances do strike, and concerts do get delayed, but it’s astonishing just how often those circumstances seem to conspire against Valery Gergiev. Last night’s UK premiere of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera Levsha – the second night of a Mariinsky triptych of performances at the Barbican – started a nice round hour late, which was a real shame because once the drama shifted from offstage to onstage the work revealed itself as a bit of a gem.Based on a story by Nikolai Leskov (he of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), the opera’s plot is less about unfolding narrative Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one is more prescriptive than Tennessee Williams when it comes to stage and set directions. As he got older and wiser he made allowances for directors and actors to have their say. “The making of a play is, finally, a collaborative venture,” he concluded. What he would make of the Royal Exchange’s self-styled “bold adaptation” of his favourite play, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, is debatable. A co-production with the Royal & Derngate in Northampton and Northern Stage, there’s nothing “bold” about this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, though much trumpeted in pre-publicity, an Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When you're talking about dancers, the old adage about genius being 99% perspiration has a point. You have to work damned hard just to be average in professional dance; to be good, like Akram Khan and Israel Galván are good, takes sweat (and tears and blood, like as not). Still, all the perspiration in the world won't avail if you don't have that 1% of inspiration, a little blue flame of a pilot light in your soul, ready to spark the gas jets of hard work into fiery life, rather than just a lot of hot air.This show works because Khan and Galván are inspired. The premise is pretty simple: let' Read more ...
fisun.guner
So many words have been expended on Egon Schiele, that it’s almost impossible to imagine what more can be added for such a relatively small and narrow, albeit intense, body of work. His was an early blossoming talent, and in his short life – he was 28 when he succumbed to Spanish flu, dying three days after his pregnant wife, in 1918 – he produced works preoccupied by sex and decay, riven by anxiety and fear, often marked by a tone of aggressive swagger. The work appears not only to embody the spirit of Vienna in the age of Freud, but also to betray his youth. Not for nothing has Schiele’s Read more ...
David Nice
God-sent sea monsters and divinely ordained human sacrifices don’t wash well with opera updated. The favoured contemporary take on the post-Trojan War myth of Mozart’s Idomeneo, which may even have originated in the last Covent Garden production 25 years ago by a fitfully brilliant Johannes Schaaf, has been to put a populace at risk from natural disaster and pestilence. Clearly the programme was expecting something of the sort, with its images of Hurricane Katrina. But no, for director Martin Kušej, the only monster is the state.Chuck out a cosmic dimension in favour of power struggles, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We seem to have spent most of 2014 examining the social, political, historical, geographical and military ramifications of the First World War. You would have thought, therefore, that the upcoming Remembrance Sunday commemorations could have been allowed to stand alone, uncluttered by further efforts to explain or dramatise the events of 1914.But still the BBC felt the urge to give us this five-part drama by veteran EastEnders/Life on Mars writer Tony Jordan, about two young men – teenagers in fact – who rush to join the military at the outbreak of hostilities but soon discover that war is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Space, the final frontier. Except that on the slowly dying earth where Christopher Nolan's often awesome sci-fi epic begins, the instinct to reach for the heavens has been crushed by the struggle for survival as crops die and life-choking dust storms sweep across the American midwest.In this eco-doom dystopia, technology has been deemed useless because food production is the sole imperative, and schools teach that the NASA moon landings were a fiction designed to bankrupt the competing Russians. Virgin Galactic is evidently not operational. It's only when former test pilot Cooper (Matthew Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s one of the ironies of life and art that Prokofiev’s tenderest and most romantic opera was composed at a time when he was abandoning his wife in favour of a Moscow literature student half his age. Betrothal in a Monastery is a setting in Russian of an opera libretto by Sheridan about the attempt of a Spanish grandee to marry off his young daughter to an elderly fish merchant. Like most comic operas, and some not so comic, it’s set in Seville; the wife Prokofiev was walking out on was Spanish.The trauma of such events naturally plays little or no part in the opera, which is a Read more ...