Reviews
David Nice
Arturo Ui, king of the Chicago cabbage trade, is Brecht’s Richard III. Egad, he even speaks in iambic pentameters, with a fair few nods at Shakespeare, though a certain cowlick and moustache locate him firmly at the centre of the 20th century nightmare. The problem for any actor, grateful though he may be for such a role, is that unlike Shakespeare’s Richard, Brecht’s Arturo starts out as an idiotic, malapropist thug, loathed by all: how to transform him credibly into a sleek, terrifying tyrant? For the director, the trick is to negotiate a haunting path between the over-insistent realism of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer would have come back to steer clear of such television exposure, even when Fox came knocking. Not because there are any dreadful secrets to be found in those ample closets – unless you count some of the interior design – but because the result makes them look a bit like they’re out of a bad soap.It’s all so easy to mock. Just as it’s easy to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You could call it the iceberg syndrome. It’s a work of art that is a flash, a sliver or an imprint: think of a passport photograph, a cheap trinket or a half-finished graffiti. Yet beneath the simple image there is a world of pain. Rachel De-lahay’s new play, a follow up to her award-winning The Westbridge, offers snapshots of the great migrations of recent years, and slowly reveals the raw emotion of these simple tales.Routes looks at two journeys. It opens with a scene set in Nigeria in which Femi, a fortysomething Nigerian man who used to live in London but has been deported back to Lagos Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
We all know the backstory of the Mighty Mac, the breakups, the betrayals, the addictions and now, finally, the reunion. These days they're more like the Mellow Mac with the emotional hatchets buried, lingering hugs on stage, and tender tales of their time as struggling Seventies hippies. Few other bands, not even Abba, have mined their private lives for inspiration to the same extent. Unlike today's manufactured pop-ettes who invent relationship strife to grab column inches and make themselves more interesting (Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, I'm looking at you), heartache has always been at Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A fortnight after its release, fans now know the Manics’ latest album Rewind the Film to be a rich, contemplative affair. The musical dynamics are intimate and seemingly best suited to small venues, like the one that features in the video for the single “Show Me the Wonder”. As I made my way across London last night, I wondered if this new sound was why the band had chosen to downsize from last year's O2 to the cosy surroundings of Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Was this "last phase of the band's development" to be consciously close-up and personal?To an extent yes, though not straight away. The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Love him or hate him, James Corden undeniably does have a range of talents – actor, writer and co-creator of some very funny comedy (we'll politely forget the car crash of his misguided BBC sketch show with Mathew Horne). And now, dontchaknow, he's come up with another comedy vehicle, The Wrong Mans [****], which had a very accomplished debut last night.Corden, late of the National Theatre and Broadway, has co-written, with fellow Gavin & Stacey alumnus Mathew Baynton, a comedy thriller in the style of Simon Pegg and Joe Wright's Cornetto trilogy, with appreciative nods (in the title) to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a time when England’s greatest and most charismatic footballer of the last 40 years would inspire fine writers to flights of poetry. Karl Miller in the London Review of Books compared him to “a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun”. Not to be out-hyperbolised, Ian Hamilton in Granta invoked a Miltonic Old Testament hero in his essay “Gazza Agonistes”.That was in 1990, before the wife-beating and other agonies. The literati have long since abandoned Paul Gascoigne to his horribly public decline, and his life is now measured out in redtop headlines. They come along as regularly Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Darbar Festival, now in its eighth year, encompasses four days of talks, yoga, food, and music – swathes of it, morning, afternoon, and night, with each concert featuring two main sets.This year’s focus was on female musicians, and included a talk featuring the great Carnatic singer Sudha Ragunathan discussing her own experiences and the role of women in Indian music.Friday and Saturday evening’s concerts focused on Dhrupad, Hindustani and Carnatic music. Dhrupad is the oldest living form of Hindustani (north Indian) classical music, uninflected by Persian and Islamic influences, and with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Gazing out of my window pondering how to start my review of Ana Mendieta, I noticed a creeper engulfing the house at the end of my garden. Having covered the wall, one window and a chimney, the tentacles are spreading along the gutter and over the roof. Meanwhile, my neighbour’s roses have encroached six feet into my territory and, next door the other way, a vine is assiduously working its way along the hedge and into the branches of a tree. Nature, it seems, is quietly overwhelming north London.What struck Mendieta when she visited the archaeological site of Yagul in Mexico, in 1973, was the Read more ...
David Nice
“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter. Known sensation Andris Nelsons and the much-anticipated Christina Goerke were much more likely to hit Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first of the ten concerts in the Temple Music Society's autumn/winter season. The Society uses two venues right in the heart of London, Temple Church and, as last night, Middle Temple Hall, most famous as the site of the first performance of Twelfth Night in 1602.Traditions run deep in this place. The audience sit on comfortably upholstered – and occasionally creaky – wooden seats under the watchful gaze of no fewer than eighteen metal suits of armour. The walls are bedecked with the personal crests of lawyers past, their names magniloquently latinised. A profession that often Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies," intoned the Earl of Grantham lugubriously in this fourth-season opener [****], and the death of Matthew Crawley hovered heavily over the household. His widow Lady Mary haunted the corridors like the Woman in Black, speaking in an even more dolorous monotone than usual. The great Penelope Wilton imbued Matthew's mother Isobel with a piercingly real sense of grief.However, writer Julian Fellowes ensures that events flash past at astounding speed in the beloved national institution that is Downton Abbey, whether it's a love affair Read more ...