Reviews
Sarah Kent
Imagine that Rodin’s Thinker gets bored with sitting, head-on-hand, contemplating the folly of humankind and, springing to life, descends from his lofty perch above The Gates of Hell. Having been immobile for a century or more, he is extremely stiff and needs to limber up: cue for some first-rate body popping interspersed with the kind of heroic poses usually reserved for life drawing classes. This surreal scenario provides a glimpse of the contrasting ideas and impulses informing Russell Maliphant’s latest work. In The Rodin Project, images from the sculptor’s drawings and bronzes are Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sensing economic opportunity, the Dutch artist Peter Lely (1618-1680) emigrated in his early twenties to London, and was thus the right man in the right place. After the early death of Sir Anthony van Dyck, followed by the Englishman William Dobson, Lely cleverly and charmingly utilised disarming ambition to open up a career for himself and become in due course the most successful painter of his time.Lely’s establishment in Covent Garden became a factory for the production of portraits of grandees, aristocrats, royals and their wives and mistresses. He was the pre-eminent portraitist in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appearance of the Goldfinger-era Aston Martin DB5 in the new Skyfall is prompting cheers from audiences, and as Richard Hammond commented in this celebration of Bondmobiles down the ages, the Bond movies have been unique in their ability to turn cars into personalities. From the absurd to the spectacular, 007's transport has rarely been less than memorable, apart from a disastrously lacklustre flirtation with BMWs during the Pierce Brosnan era.Hammond's jokey, blokey, anecdotal approach, mixed with some notable specimens of jerry-built science, made this a hugely diverting hour. He Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“When I was a teenager even I had a period when apparently I was quite morose,” Jack Dee tells the Edinburgh crowd, his hangdog features projecting various extremes of existential agony. “But, hey, I got through it." This may be Dee’s first standup tour for six years, but it’s very much business as usual in terms of perpetuating his role as comedy’s Mr Grumpy, eternally exasperated, irritable, acerbic. And, truth be told, these days a tiny bit predictable.Apparently Dee decided to tour again because he figured someone had to keep the magic of 2012 going. He does indeed take a brief frolic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Finding the mythic echoes of the ancient Greeks in stories about the modern world is not just confined to past greats such as TS Eliot, but is also used by contemporary adapters of old tragedies. Yet Colin Teevan’s new play, which shadows the lives of Irish navvies working in England with echoes from Greek tragedy, goes one better. Asked by the director Lucy Pitman Wallace to rewrite the Oedipus myth through the lens of Krapp’s Last Tape, the playwright has come up with The Kingdom.Teevan’s ambitious idea is to marry stories from the great migrations of Irish workers to England, from the 19th Read more ...
howard.male
Perhaps only someone as supremely confident of his world view as Richard Dawkins might think he could come up with a TV series that would live up to such an all-embracing title. But at least in this three-part series the evolutionary biologist gets off his militant atheist’s high horse to tackle the God question from a more constructive angle. Instead of continuing with his usual line - God doesn’t exist so get used to it - he offered ideas as to how we can best prosper in a godless world.These programmes were essentially built around two stultifyingly naive and unimaginative questions that Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Forty years ago Michael Nesmith was the tall, woolly-hatted Monkee people called “the talented one”. Faint praise maybe, but there was nothing mediocre about the country rock albums he went on to make. Nesmith had another advantage. His mother had invented Liquid Paper giving him the financial freedom to experiment as he pleased. He soon became a true renaissance man. But according to one newspaper, by 2011 he was also increasingly reclusive and eccentric. Even the promoters billed last night’s concert as “rare and exclusive". With fans not knowing quite what to expect tickets had shifted Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For the past few years Russell Kane has mined much of his comedy from his fraught relationship with his father, now dead. It's a neat twist then to postulate his latest show, Posturing Delivery, on his relationship with "Ivan", Kane's entirely imaginary son.It's high concept, and in many a comic's hands it simply wouldn't work, but Kane - as ever flouncing and skittering across the stage, energetically acting out much of the comedy, complete with perfect mimicry and a lot of campery - pulls it off, drawing us expertly into his fantasy world in which he wonders what kind of dad he would be now Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Misfits now a misfit on E4? When it first announced itself three years ago, the series about probationers with sci-fi superpowers straddled the bridge between the WTF generation and the can-do ethos of the comic strip. It was quite a lot of fun, even for those outside the target demographic. As is natural with any series targeted at a youth audience, success breeds the one thing that no cult series wants: staff turnover.When the departure of Robert Sheehan could no longer be avoided, a special online edition lasting all of eight minutes was broadcast to explain his forchcoming absence. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American indie director Ira Sachs’s last film was Married Life, and he returns to similar territory in Keep the Lights On, which could just as easily be titled Scenes from a Relationship. Episodes over the decade from 1998 onwards tell the story of the coming together - and falling apart - of a New York gay relationship, one that Sachs has said draws on his own life.Sachs is writing implicitly from the point of view of his character, Erik, a blond, slightly gap-toothed and emotionally open Dane (Thure Lindhardt) who’s floating happily in Big Apple life. The film’s title doesn’t refer to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Muse are not cool. For a minute on leaving the tube station I did think they'd broadened their appeal quite dramatically before realising that a fair section of the people around me were heading to Giants of Lovers Rock show also at the O2 complex last night. But no, their audience, judging by those heading for the main arena, are a fairly even split between hyper-mainstream V Festival demographic and slightly misshapen indie/goth kids, not really much more rock'n'roll in demeanour than, say, a Coldplay crowd, but very dedicated.This isn't meant pejoratively, not at all. It's just that Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Set at the start of the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, Clare Bayley's Blue Sky follows an old-school journalist pursuing justice at the cost of neighbours and friends. Jane, played with careerist resolve by Sarah Malin, is convinced she has uncovered a case of extraordinary rendition. She believes the CIA are involved in the kidnap of a man seen being bundled on to a private jet in Islamabad so that they can question him under torture. “People,” she says, “don't just disappear.” Now she needs proof.Jane contacts an old flame, Ray (Jacob Krichefski) to help her trace the plane, Read more ...