Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Even in the 21st century, it may not take that long for an outlandish literary experiment to jump genres and become an established musical classic. In 2008, I enthusiastically reviewed a strange, poetic, almost Beckett-like novella by the writer and music critic Paul Griffiths.His let me tell you reconfigures the 483 words that the hapless Ophelia speaks in Hamlet into a haunting, melancholy first-person testament of love, sorrow and (in Griffiths’s version, if not Shakespeare’s) dogged survival. Five years later, the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen brilliantly embraced the intrinsic Read more ...
Like Water for Chocolate, Royal Ballet review - splendid dancing and sets, but there's too much plot
Helen Hawkins
Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate, set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. This for me is less successful than the other two.Which is not to say it doesn’t provide many pleasures along the way, not least its superb stage pictures, which start right from curtain up, when we see a long line of Frida Kahlos in wedding dresses and Day of the Dead masks, who Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a wraith.It exemplifies one of the hallmarks of a good model – the ability to become a screen that invites projection, rather than expressing your own personality. And in shot after shot for British and American Vogue, Miller remains an enigma – impassive and searingly beautiful. Would the exhibition bring her into sharper focus, as I hoped, or would Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s truly thrilling to see the Barbican embracing big concept long-form theatre again, seeking out productions that are as conceptually challenging as they are visually exhilarating. Last week, audiences were asked to understand the forces of globalisation that shaped a royal wedding dress in the Théâtre National de Strasbourg’s multimedia tour de force, Lacrima.This week the pioneering Polish director Łukasz Twarkoswki brings his much feted Rohtko (the misspelling is deliberate), to investigate a real-life forgery scandal in which New York gallery, Knoedler & Co, sold almost 40 faked Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like fellow New Yorker, Lee Miller, Lee Krasner changed her given name, the better to be accepted into what she called "The Boys Club" of 20th century Modern Art. Like Miller, she was known more for her working and romantic partnership with a major artist – for Man Ray, read Jackson Pollock. And like Miller, Lee Krasner is now belatedly acknowledged as a major artist in her own right – though she does not have a solo Tate show, as Miller does this Autumn (at least not yet). We open on her working in her Long Island studio, surrounded by her paintings, canvases that you can’t quite place – Read more ...
mark.kidel
The revival of Robert Carsen’s production of Handel’s Ariodante at the Opéra Garnier in Paris under the direction of Raphaël Pichon, with his Ensemble Pygmalion and a top-notch cast, is well worth a trip to Paris. At over four hours, it might seem daunting, but the show is as close to perfection as opera can be, bursting with vitality and emotion, and never feels a second too long.There are plenty of totally beguiling moments, but the high-point of the performance is provided by the young Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Molinari. In the title role, she doesn’t just provide the beating heart of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rockin’ vicar the Rev Richard Coles is not only a C of E priest and former member of Bronski Beat and The Communards, but also a purveyor of crime fiction in the shape of his Canon Clement mysteries. The first of these was Murder Before Evensong, and now it has arrived on Acorn TV, where they do a lot of this sort of thing.As its title might suggest, Murder… is rich in echoes of classic British crime-and-detection stories from way back when. There’s plenty of Agatha Christie in the mix, some Midsomer Murders, maybe a bit of Morse and perhaps a shaving or two of M R James’s celebrated ghost Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Schubert’s Fifth Symphony is one of those pieces whose existence in the modern world hangs on the most tenuous of threads. After its posthumous premiere the score was lost for half a century before a set of parts resurfaced, and the work was saved for posterity. I’d hate to imagine a world without Schubert’s Fifth in it, and will never turn down a chance to hear it live, hence a trip to Milton Court to hear the Britten Sinfonia give it a cheerfully loving reading, as the finale of a programme that also featured Schubert’s inspiration, Mozart, and two contemporary pieces.Before we got to the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Urchin feels like a genuine moment in British cinema. Thematically, it offers a highly original, thoughtful, affecting account of the endless cycle of misfortune and institutional ineptness that can trap someone in homelessness. At the same time, it marks the coming of age in the careers of two brilliant young talents. Harris Dickinson has been quietly asserting himself as an actor over the last few years, with a diversity of roles in films including Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper and Babygirl, and in the TV mini-series A Murder at the End of the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong’s second Bridgewater Hall concert of the new season was partly an introduction to the Hallé’s artist-in-residence for 2025-26, Anna Lapwood. The star organist brought a new piece by Max Richter for organ, choir and orchestra and a recent one by Olivia Belli for organ solo – both on the theme of space travel.It sounds a bit bald to say it, but they both evoke the vastness of space and the awe it creates in the human mind in similar ways. Richter’s Cosmology – a Hallé co-commission with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra which has still to receive its Australian premiere – was written Read more ...
Gary Naylor
An opening video montage presents us with a rogues' gallery of powerful men who have done bad things. Plenty of the usual suspects appear to stomach-churning effect, but no ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced last week to five years in prison by the usually tolerant French. So the problem certainly hasn’t gone away with the Clintons, Weinsteins and they’re ilk. We all know the “power corrupts…” quote, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised and, maybe, we should be a little wary of vesting so much power in such men – that is, most men.Duke Vincentio, no stranger to sins of the flesh Read more ...
David Nice
High on the hill of fascinating New Ross in County Wexford sits its greatest treasure, the ruined 13th century Gothic beauty of St Mary’s. Unless you come at it from the east, its glories are concealed behind the working church which completes it and takes the place of the old nave, built in 1813 and “improved” twice later that century.Plain and spacious inside, with a few military memorials on the wall, the acoustics of its shoebox shape (think a smaller Musikvereinsaal without the trimmings) are perfect, as pianists great and less well-known have attested over the 19 years of the stunningly Read more ...