Reviews
David Nice
In one of the loveliest operatic scores of all time, Dvořák makes cruel demands on his eponymous water nymph and the prince for whom she acquires a mortal soul, having them soar above the stave countless times in anguish or ecstasy. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and American tenor Ryan Capozzo are both equal to the challenge. Unfortunately their characters are bent out of shape by director Netia Jones; the Prince is rendered one-dimensional, and Rusalka poisoning him rather than kissing him to death in the great final scene weakens its impact.
Image Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The stern and glowering demeanour of David Morrissey’s character, Michael Polly, looms over this six-part drama like the embodiment of a malignant fate. Polly is the headmaster of St Bartholomew’s private school in Bristol, a vintage establishment replete with cloisters, venerable and palatial buildings and playing fields that seem to stretch for miles (Downside School in Somerset was the actual shooting location.)You might say Polly is married to his job, because he runs the school with a devotion that borders on the fanatical. As well as being the stone-faced figurehead of the establishment Read more ...
Robert Beale
This was a concert of music by living women composers, and I guess you could call all three of its components protest music. Cheerful or sad, smart or overwhelming, each work had a point to make – and a sense of outrage. For those who were there, its impact was something they are unlikely to forget for a very long time. (It also drew one of the smallest audiences I can remember for a BBC Philharmonic Saturday night performance at the Bridgewater Hall in recent times: possibly the result of a series booklet which detailed only one of the three items that were finally performed, and even Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Your term is about to end,” Italian president De Santis (Toni Servillo) is told, with implications which extend far past politics. Director Paolo Sorrentino is second only to old maestro Marco Bellocchio in his current fascination with Italian power, from The Young Pope (2016) to Berlusconi satire Loro (2018). His muse Servillo’s bunga-bunga act in the latter contrasted with his gnomic reserve as post-war Machiavelli Guilio Andreotti in Il Divo (2009) and now this fictional sphinx, lizard-still even as damped passions threaten to finally erupt. His last half-year as head of state may anyway Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever witnessed both a Tristan and an Isolde physically plausible and vocally up to everything that Wagner throws at them, from violent cursing to heartbreaking tenderness? I hadn't until yesterday. At first it seemed as if Yuval Sharon's supposedly controversial production would smother Lise Davidsen's Isolde and Michael Spyres' Tristan in concepts and restrict them to a narrow curve set back from the front of the stage and hovering above it. Acoustically that seems to have been a challenge for those I know who were present at the Met, the orchestra supposedly overwhelming the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it was released as a single in November 1968, The Goodees’ “Condition Red” could – apart from a specific quirk – have been issued four years earlier, in the wake of The Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” hitting the US charts. Despite going on sale in the hippie, back-to-the-roots, heavier-than-heavy, burgeoning-bubblegum era, “Condition Red” is so in sync with “Leader of the Pack,” it can pass for a follow-up.However, the lyrics – that specific quirk – of “Condition Red,” while in line with the Shangri-Las’ tale of the demise of a ruff-’n’-tuff rebel boy after a vehicular mishap, are Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Though there are few starry, starry nights in Stockwell these days, nor flaming flowers that brightly blaze, you can find ragged men in ragged clothes outside the Tube station. One hundred and fifty years ago, when a fiery redheaded lad pitched up in SW9 asking for a room, something happened and, if we don’t know exactly what, we can have fun wondering can’t we?It wasn’t just Don McLean who was drawn to the legend of Vincent van Gogh. In 2002, Nicholas Wright used a fragment of fact and a whole lot of imagination to spin a play out of the youthful Dutch master’s brief sojourn in South London Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Hail Mary pass is a desperate act of sporting faith when regular tactics fail, and the world’s end is faced here by constitutional optimists on both sides of the camera: The Martian novelist Andy Weir and its film’s writer Drew Goddard, Lego Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord and Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, waking alone in a spaceship unreachable light years from home, beard and brain mangled as he remembers his suicide mission. Gosling’s cool charm, a blank slate which flips from Drive’s smooth killer to La La Land’s mild lover, here converts into raw film star fuel for Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Which crimes are the hardest to forgive? Violence; sexual assault; aggravated sexual assault? Yes, that kind of covers the territory. In Sarah Power’s new play, Welcome to Pemfort, currently playing at the Soho Theatre, this ethical and personal dilemma comes wrapped in an oddly discordant comedy about a countryside castle planning its first Living History event. You know the kind of thing: jousting, dressing up in medieval garb and serving olde English grub. But what about the crime? Set in the cluttered gift shop of Pemfort castle (actually just a fort with a bell tower), the play Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Over the years, Ronnie Scott’s, one of the premier jazz clubs in the world, has hosted some truly transcendental music. There’s something about the horseshoe layout of the seating that promotes exceptional intimacy. When the music zings and the audience feels it, there is a positive feedback loop which elevates the event beyond the merely ordinary.Steve Coleman and Five Elements, although still jet-lagged, in the early stages of an intense European tour, rose to the occasion, with an incandescent set that had the punters bewitched and – for Ronnie’s – unusually quiet. Unlike many other star Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tony Kiritsis (the excellent Bill Skarsgård; Nosferatu) is a nervy, paranoid oddball. Well, he would be. He has an appointment with a mortgage broker and in the long cardboard box that he’s carrying is a sawn-off shotgun.Gus Van Sant’s first feature film since Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) is itself something of an oddball project. Fraught and compelling, with Al Pacino as a very nasty businessman, it's based on the true story of a hostage crisis in Indianapolis in 1977 and is a tense, claustrophobic depiction of the little guy pitted against a corrupt banking system. Though Read more ...
David Nice
When the joyful energy at the final curtain - love briefly triumphant in the power-dominated world of Wagner's Ring - is as insanely high as it was at the end of a dizzying first act, that killer of a forging scene, you know this is a winner. Andreas Schager is a battle-hardened Siegfried, knowing no fear at full pelt but having to work harder on softer tones now, and his still-boyish enthusiasm learns all the febrile, physical lessons director Barrie Kosky asks of him in the third instalment of his challenging new Royal Opera Ring. It's a combustible meeting.We also witness Kosky developing Read more ...