Reviews
Veronica Lee
Well, here’s a first; I was taken to a comic’s dressing room to be checked out before I could review his show. There was a mix-up over tickets for Jim Davidson so the front-of-house manager asked him If he would give the OK to let me in. “He wants to see you,” he said. After a few minutes of Davidson telling me he doesn’t read his reviews, how awful journalists are and how he now couldn’t do jokes about Guardian readers, lesbians and immigrants (he did all three), he took me to the bar and bought me a drink while we talked about both growing up in south London.I wish, then, I could Read more ...
Naima Khan
There have been some strong two-handers of late, which perhaps explains why the London premiere of Robert Holman’s 2008 play Jonah and Otto seems sub par. Originally written for the actor Andrew Sheridan, this is a Beckettian take on loneliness, God, love and masculinity. In the hands of director Tim Stark and actors Peter Egan and Alex Waldmann, it feels like a teasing introduction to theology-lite which never hits home with any lingering power.That said, there are a few moments of real poignancy which interrupt the rambling conversation between 62-year-old Otto Banister and 26-year-old Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Love: Love Songs The Red Crayola: The Parable of the Arable LandJust how much messing with a band’s back catalogue is acceptable? Should classic albums only be reissued as stand-alone releases, sometimes bolstered with bonus tracks but still allowed to stand on their own merits? These two reissues of music by prime psychedelic-era outfits Love and The Red Crayola raise these questions and more.Love’s third album Forever Changes didn’t attract a lot of attention or sales when it was originally issued in November 1967, but it’s gone on to be accepted as a classic: the nine songs by bandleader Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Sheryl Crow doesn’t do genres. She may have recorded her first authentically country album, Feels Like Home, in Nashville recently, but for her, the tag seems to mean little. “It’s country, but it just sounds like a Sheryl Crow record,” she told the BluesFest audience last night, and whenever the subject came up afterwards, she put finger-wiggling inverted commas around the term “country”. She gives her audience what she knows they like, and what she knows she likes, too.As if to emphasise brand Sheryl, new songs and back catalogue were cheerfully mixed from the start. “All I Wanna Do” got Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The challenge was already in the title for me: as both a dance critic and a strongly visual person, in the normal order of things I see the dance first and hear the music second. Last night's show, the second of the Sadler's Wells Composer Series of productions (the first was with Mark-Anthony Turnage in 2011), set out to challenge that order of perception by marrying dance and music in a partnership of equals: the formidable musical heft of Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia on the one hand, and on the other dance works by four major contemporary choreographers, including new commissions Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Rediscovered work offers aficionados a tantalising piece of the puzzle. Terence Rattigan’s callow debut, reborn after 80 years in obscurity, bears the hallmarks of his later plays, notably closeted ardour and the torment of unequal passion, but is more study than finished painting: ideas sketched, colour yet to be filled in. It does, however, have the distinction of at least partial veracity, inspired by the influx of theatrical luminaries to the Oxford University Dramatic Society while Rattigan was a Trinity College undergraduate.One of those luminaries, the inimitable Peggy Ashcroft, is the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.And just as Topsy-Turvy was as Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA testing destroyed the story’s credibility. In his Mayerling, Prince Rudolf’s drug habit muddies the waters, likewise the brown ooze in Arthur Pita’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It takes a brave choreographer to tackle mental illness head-on, not least when it's his first full-evening commission for the Royal Ballet.And there’s Read more ...
David Nice
You know what to expect from a standard programme of masterpieces like this, led by two great performers in careful control of their repertoire, and those expectations are never going to be disappointed. You’re not going to hear the kind of new-sound Brahms side by side with the more recent end of the German musical tradition – Zimmermann, say, or Henze; that’s the provenance of a fresh thinker like Vladimir Jurowski. But while last night’s kind of old-style concert format may not be with us for ever, we might as well treasure it while it lasts from the likes of Mitsuko Uchida, a pianist who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ireland has had not just an economic meltdown in the past few years, but also a social one. The country that thought it had seen the back of emigration going back several generations has had to deal with its young people once again leaving in droves – albeit this time to staff schools, hospitals and television programmes with teachers, doctors and presenters, rather than men and women to build roads or clean floors, as so many of my parents' generation did.This very painful ending of the Celtic Tiger period of modern Irish history is the starting point for Fiona Doyle's first full-length play Read more ...
Simon Munk
If Splot looked any more like Angry Birds, it'd have to call itself Bouncy Birds. But looks can be deceiving – this is a fairly shrewd attempt to merge the visual style of the record-breaking mobile series with something far more traditional in videogame terms – the platformer.Platform games such as the Mario series, most famously, see you jumping from point to point around a level, trying to reach an end goal (often against a timer) and dodge the hazards in the world. Frozenbyte, the developers of Splot, previously made the Trine series – an attempt to update the classic platformer in a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Georgie Fame opened the evening with a five-piece band, including the singer on his old Hammond organ. Favourites such as “Yeh, Yeh” were belted out to pleasing effect, as well as covers that included Van Morrison’s “Moondance” (Morrison played the packed-out BluesFest the previous evening). It was a strange, “extended” version that paid homage to a Paul Robeson number – Fame boomed out an African chant that bookended the song. I’m not quite sure the unusual arrangement worked, but the band were superb and Fame’s voice – it’s been exactly 50 years since “Yeh, Yeh" was a major hit for him – in Read more ...