Reviews
Richard Scott
Clearly rents in 2010 were substantially cheaper than I remember because somehow Rodolfo and Marcello have managed to find a garret in Soho of all places. And it would be easy to continue my review in this vein, poking the odd hole in OperaUpClose’s updating of La Bohème, including mentioning my temptation to shout out, “Pawn your laptop for some Covonia, mate, your girlfriend’s got a right cough on her!” But none of those quibbles were really the point of this production. While we did begin in a lacklustre set of IKEA furniture, with some shy, awkward lad acting from the quartet of Read more ...
fisun.guner
In what ways was the Northern Renaissance distinct from the Italian one? When we look at a painting by Holbein we’re struck by the painting’s rich surface: we admire the finely delineated weave of a Turkish rug, the individual hairs of fur lining a heavy coat, the intricate calligraphy of musical notation in an open hymn book. Since all is sumptuous surface and detail, our eyes feast upon the mass, weight and texture of objects firmly rooting us to the material world.This isn’t to say that Italian Renaissance artists such as Leonardo, or Giovanni Bellini, aren’t enamoured by the finely Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Bon Iver’s eponymous second album is nearly a year-and-a-half old now, so its bigger, richer sound – compared to the homemade sparseness of the debut – is well established. Nevertheless, it was hard not to wonder how any band assembled by Justin Vernon would function in the hangar-like Wembley Arena. Would success claim another victim?Vernon’s approach is courage in numbers, and those initial qualms fall away when he leads eight musicians on stage and launches into "Perth", the opening track of Bon Iver. The sound builds to fill the space, the plaintive howl of Vernon’s falsetto soars above, Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if De Keersmaeker made us work hard for our enlightenment earlier in the week, we more than get our reward with her triumphant, astonishing Cesena in the second part of her double-programme designed for the Avignon Festival.Both pieces are built around the form of 14th-century polyphony sung in the south, known today as the ars subtilior, the subtle art. While in En Atendant De Keersmaeker focused on the structure of the music, in Cesena she, together with Björn Schmelzer, founder of graindelavoix, a collective for musicians with an interest in physical theatre, concentrates on its Read more ...
Helen K Parker
There’s a horse, a chicken and an owl in your living room. You don’t know them, but they sure as hell remember you, and they’ve got some questions that need to be answered. Questions about what you did in Miami in 1989.It’s a great setup to a game which takes its neo-pulp heritage seriously, and its pixelated arcade violence to the extreme. You play a hired killer cutting a bloody swathe through the Miami underworld at the behest of innocuous phone messages. These jobs are as innocent as babysitting, or attending a medical check-up; however, once you’ve driven (in your DeLorean!) to the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There must be a way out of their Hackney council estate life for brothers Rashid (James Floyd, very sharp on screen here) and Mo (non-professional Fady Elsayed), whose claustrophic home life lived (more or less) to traditional parental rules, contrasts with the energy of the streets outside, where drug-dealing is the most lucrative occupation and there’s always a hint of violence in the air.One of the many achievements of Sally El Hosaini’s debut feature, winner of a clutch of festival prizes, most recently Best British Newcomer at the London Film Festival, is to nicely confound our Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The word “people” of the title of Alan Bennett’s new play is to be spat out, like a lemon pip. People, who invade your space, boss your values, make you be what they want. So does the beleaguered Lady Dorothy Stacpoole feel about the stark options facing her as her fantastically grand mansion leaks and crumbles over her smelly, freezing feet, while under it groans ancient mine workings like a whale with toothache. The options are to auction off the contents and house to who-knows-who, to sell via a slimy salesman to “The Concern” (a bunch of invisible super-rich who buy top works of art and Read more ...
howard.male
The last time we reviewed Krystle Warren on theartsdesk one reader responded by suggesting that it couldn’t be long before this Missouri-born singer-songwriter was as big as Beyonce (although he didn’t use that exact phrase). Yet even a 2009 performance on Later with Jools Holland didn’t have the effect it sometimes has in being the first big step up for both an artist’s sales and credibility. Having said that, in the current climate Warren is probably just happy to still be making records (this year’s Love Songs – A Time You May Embrace being both her most accessible and accomplished to date Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The political thriller may be alive and well but in recent years it has been spending time abroad. Elements of government conspiracy are intense flavourings of, for example, The Killing and Homeland, while back in Blighty there has been little to trouble the scorers since Paul Abbott’s State of Play nearly a decade ago. Why? British drama has been too busy scoffing at Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg to worry itself with shady Whitehall cover-ups. So it’s not exactly a surprise that the crafty and pulsating Secret State harks back to the distant yesteryear of A Very British Coup.Chris Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Taylor Wessing Photographic… well, you get the drift. It's quite a long title for what is now one of the most fascinating and wide-ranging exhibitions of photographs mounted in London, and which goes out on tour nationally next year. It is described as a snapshot of contemporary portrait photography, and this is one of the strongest iterations yet, 60 photographs selected from an international submission of over 5,000 images from more than 2,000 photographers, all taken within the last year or so. Each has been chosen blind, as the photographer was not identified during the Read more ...
David Benedict
Confession time: I’m a sucker for a romantic reunion. When lost-presumed-dead twins Sebastian and Viola finally rediscover one another alive and well at the end of Twelfth Night, you’ll find me in tears. And, yes, the late, great Nora Ephron’s New Year’s Eve climax in When Harry Met Sally works every time. All of which makes me more than well-matched for the musical-theatre version of the epistolary romance Daddy Long Legs. Dear Reader, I remained dry-eyed.For their musical version of Jean Webster’s 1912, Anne of Green Gables-tinged bestseller, composer/lyricist Paul Gordon and bookwriter/ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sligo Live is Europe’s most westerly music festival, and its mix of indie and traditional is unique. For four nights and days, cracking traditional players fill the town’s many excellent pubs - Kennedy’s, Foley’s, the Snug, Mchugh’s and Hardagan’s - with the headliners: Wallace Bird, Lau, accordion queen Sharon Shannon, Joan Armatrading. But one name stood out on the marquee, that of Van Morrison, coming to Sligo with the promise of a very different kind of show – “Lyrics and Poetry: Emphasis on Words”, with readings of his own work and that of Yeats.As it was, any hopes the audience filing Read more ...