Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
There is only one rule by which one should ever judge a Barber of Seville. If your eyes (and possibly also your trouser legs) aren’t moist by the time the interval arrives, you might as well leave. The last time this Jonathan Miller production was revived by the English National Opera, it passed with flying colours. This time round, I was dry as a bone. Three hours and I notched up two smiles and a snigger.There’s little wrong with designer Tanya McCallin’s set-up, traditional and 18th century though it all very earnestly is. It’s all neatly tailored to allowing this smooth-as-clockwork Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Stephen Poliakoff's slow-burning drama had turned into a propulsive whodunnit by this final episode, hurtling towards a resolution with panache and surprise. The five-part mini-series about a black jazz band in early 1930s high society has had the feel of an exploratory score at times. With syncopated beats and riffs decorating its unfolding narrative, the occasional scene and detail has seemed superfluous. But Poliakoff has had his reasons. By episode five, almost every character had a motive for murdering Jessie (Angel Coulby), the lead singer, or at least assisting in a cover-up.This Read more ...
David Nice
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.As it happened, Schiff made it all sound unshockingly natural on one level within the charmed circle of equally Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.” Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, the composer’s Lecture On Nothing went on to become a core text within his 1961 collage-meditation of essays, Silence. Restoring it to spoken form (and thus reanimating the beautiful tensions of this un-speech, this voiced absence), Robert Wilson’s staging finds a whole new echo-chamber of resonances for a classic text muted by neglect in mainstream culture.Wilson’s affinity for the American minimalism of this period is most famously explored in his quasi Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
After the nightmarish vision of justice system turned spectator sport that was last week’s Black Mirror, you’d be forgiven for feeling a little disappointed that writer Charlie Brooker hadn’t ramped up the horror at the start of the final episode of this all-too-short second series. There were many adjectives one could consider throwing at Waldo, the inexplicably popular blue cartoon bear at the centre of the action, but “horrific” probably wasn’t one of them.And yet the climatic moment of this particular piece of drama was the scariest of all, not least because of its sheer plausibility. As Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in an Italian prison, performed by criminals? If it sounds like a gimmick, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die is anything but. Following a popular tradition of freshening up Shakespeare's works with a shift in setting or location (think 10 Things I Hate About You or Ran), the Tavianis' deft editing creates a lean and intriguing 76 minutes that outstrips three hour epics in meaning and depth.Now in their eighties, the brothers are no strangers to effective cinema, with Padre, Padrone and Night of the Shooting Stars hallmarks of their time. Discovering Julius Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Emmanuelle Riva travelled all the way to Los Angeles for that? I doubt I’m the only one whose heart went out to the radiant French actress, newly turned 86, as the 85th annual Academy Awards drew to a long and lumbering close well into its fourth hour. Sure, Lincoln star Daniel Day-Lewis made history, becoming the first actor to win three leading Oscar trophies, and Austria could celebrate both Django Unchained co-star Christoph Waltz’s second supporting actor Oscar in four years and the Foreign Film trophy for Austrian director Mikael Haneke and his French-language Amour.Michelle Obama even Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket.Jackson was slickly able to prove his own innocence, then quickly extracted crucial clues about the gang who were drugging and kidnapping young women. His medical Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Janáček’s opera subjects – the 300-year-old opera singer, the composer with a mad mother-in-law, the Siberian prison camp – are by any standards a fairly rum collection. But The Cunning Little Vixen is arguably the most deviant of the whole bunch. Its foxy heroine (out of a Prague newspaper cartoon strip) is captured by the local Forester, lectures his hens about their subservience to the Cockerel, slaughters the lot of them, runs off, marries, starts a family, then allows herself to be shot by the poacher. All very charming, random and pathetic, one might feel. But Janáček typically has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly everyone is noticing that Richard Gere, now 63, is a much better actor than he used to be in his aloof and self-regarding youth. In Arbitrage, written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, Gere plays powerful and privileged Manhattan hedge-fund magnate Robert Miller. Since the financial crisis, characters like this are routinely portrayed as surrogate Pol Pots or relatives of Hannibal Lecter, but Gere manages to convey Miller's lust for money and testosterone-drenched sense of entitlement while also suggesting that there's a part of him that is, or at least was, capable of finer feelings Read more ...
judith.flanders
If you are a Bausch newbie, Vollmond (Full Moon) may well be the place to start. “It’s a full moon,” says Nazareth Panadero, giving us a cynical smirk. “Don’t get drunk,” she adds before sauntering off. Glasses are raised and, as always in Bausch, water flows, both in and, especially, out of glasses, across the stage, swept in buckets-full over the massive rock that looms at the edge of a great pool of water lurking invisibly at the rear.Vollmond was choreographed in 2006, just three years before Bausch’s terribly sudden death. In it she continued to explore her regular preoccupations – the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football. Show Racism the Red Card. Say No to Racism. Such are today’s campaign messages. And then there’s the headline: “Colour Prejudice Problem” in a London newspaper. However, the latter is dated September 1909, perhaps the first time that racism in football (and other sports) was headline news. So, the issue has been around for more than a century in this country and the player who brought it to light was Walter Tull. This is his story.Tull, grandson of a Barbadian slave, was born in 1888 of mixed parentage, his father marrying a local white girl in Read more ...