Reviews
Nick Hasted
This year’s glut of haunted house films have been unusually, often painfully intimate. Elizabeth Olsen’s pure, panting terror in Silent House, like Gretchen Lodge’s depraved unravelling in Lovely Molly, added to the sub-genre’s essential horror: the thought that when you shut your front door you’re locking something awful inside, not out; that your home, every creaking floorboard and attic thud of it, isn’t a safe haven but an insidious foe. Even as a long-time horror film lover, I’ve found them at times almost unbearably tense, creeping under my skin in minutes.Sinister seems set to push the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’ve seen Akram Khan’s Desh twice. The first time I sat in my favourite spot – the front row – close enough to smell the sweat drenching his shirt as the demanding physicality of this ambitious solo work became evident. But I could also see him apparently lip syncing to recordings of his own voice and, despite the potency of his close physical presence, this created a profound sense of disjunction, as though he were emotionally disengaged from the recollections and stories being told. The work is autobiographical or, rather, an exploration of identity – of what it means to be born of Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Teenage angst is a tough thing to get right on screen. It's perenially popular territory for dramatic writers in part because of the heightened emotions it allows for – as Joss Whedon once phrased it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series which was in itself an extended metaphor for the horrors of high school, "everything feels like life or death when you're 16 years old."But push that inevitably narcissistic young worldview too far, and and your audience will be alienated, regardless of how appealing your performers are. Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of his own late Nineties novel Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic director, Josie Rourke, in bringing us this new version of his romantic tragedy. But if it’s admirably courageous, truth be told, it makes for rather punitive viewing.The new translation of Racine's 1670 text, which was originally composed in Alexandrine couplets, is by Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker-winning novelist. In unrhymed pentameter, it is cool, pellucid, direct; what it is not, and perhaps does not Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“For if their musicke please in earthly things/How would it sound if strung with heavenly strings?” Listening to viol consort Fretwork last night, the audience at the Wigmore Hall didn’t have to imagine the answer to Gibbons’ question. Listening to the vitality and variety of tone colour this group so reliably produce, it’s hard to remember that this is ear(th)ly music – hardly the wan and consumptive sound so many people still stubbornly associate with viols.Joined by the Hilliard Ensemble to form a sort of Renaissance supergroup, Fretwork gave us a programme of Orlando Gibbons, passing his Read more ...
bruce.dessau
A revival of an old play with a broad sense of fun and a turbo-charged role for a co-star of hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey? No, not One Man, Two Guvnors, but this well-dressed production of the classy 1892 farce by Brandon Thomas starring Mathew Horne. One cannot help thinking that the Menier is hoping that this might do for Horne what One Man... did for James Corden. I doubt if this will make it to Broadway, but it certainly deserves to make it to a bigger London theatre.The Chocolate Factory's stage is so crowded with Victorian props it almost feels as if the front rows are actually in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shouldn’t it be a stiff lower lip? When a person loses control of his or her emotions, and gives in to the instinct to blub, the telltale sign is not the unstiffening of the upper lip but the wobbling of the lower. In short, we have been saddled with a national characteristic that is an anatomical inaccuracy. It was an American who got it wrong in the late 19th century. But that’s not until next week. In fact in part one of this history of British repression, we weren't very repressed at all. We – or rather our Enlightenment forebears – had not yet learned the art of keeping a lid on it.Ian Read more ...
fisun.guner
There are two films in the Turner Prize exhibition and taken together and watched end-to-end they last just under three hours. That sounds gruelling for an art exhibition, but they’re from the strongest two candidates on this year’s shortlist. And since neither is one of those poorly filmed and edited pieces that are best viewed as moving wallpaper as you drift in and out of the gallery, both are worth devoting time to.The first is by Elizabeth Price, which is 20-minutes long. The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (image below left) is a beautifully constructed and rather captivating, as well as Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
You could say that the Titanic has been done to death, and that any new show would really need to say something different, something so far unknown, unearth a new angle, find new facts. To some extent, Treasured does that. Who’s ever heard of Mouser, the Titanic cat, who is supposed to have carried all six of her new-born kittens off the ship in Southampton? Allegedly her feline prescience sensed impending doom.White Star had also, it seems, wanted to build the ship in Liverpool – for which read Birkenhead on the other side of the Mersey – but the contract went to Harland and Wolff in Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Manu Chao is “backstage” in a little makeshift tent on the green outside Brixton’s St Matthews Church (that’s the one opposite the Ritzy Cinema) and he’s certainly more at home than in some of the more conventional rock star places I’ve seen him in. Like Glastonbury, where he hated being in the VVIP area of the main stage with Amy Winehouse and Jay Z – all the fences and passes made him think of Palestine and he looked bored and dejected.This event is more Manu’s speed – befitting its name, the inaugural Brixton Come Together Festival was a small, friendly, positive community event that is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The screenwriter Peter Bowker won over viewers of all stripes with his wonderfully clever, musical serial Blackpool and sealed the deal with the chunky post-Iraq War drama Occupation. He demonstrated a deft narrative touch, an expert ability to spin a yarn and the right level of unpredictability to give him a reputation as something of a televisual auteur. Ah, but before all that he used to write for Casualty, and it is to those days he returns with Monroe, the second series of which began last night, and which bears a strong resemblance to the BBC’s hospital soap warhorse.Dr Gabriel Monroe Read more ...
garth.cartwright
The Barbican Centre’s Transcender Festival celebrated its fourth anniversary in 2012 and deserves to be recognised as one of the UK’s most culturally radical and engaging music events. Transcender grew out of the Barbican’s previous festival Ramadan Nights and aims to explore a similarly rich vein of music that is rooted both in Islamic trance music of Asia and the Middle East and Western improvised music that shares a similar sense of free exploration and wonder. Transcender 2012 – and, yes, the word "transcender" was invented by the Barbican to explain this bringing together of very Read more ...