Reviews
Veronica Lee
What a dicey subject for debate Michael Johnson opened here, one that has scuppered the career of academics and social commentators alike, and which will have made many of his audience feeling deeply troubled. Johnson, now 44, competed at three Olympic Games between 1992 and 2000, won four Olympic gold medals at 200 metres and 400 metres, and still holds the world record for the latter.The starting point was his realisation that, at the Beijing Games in 2008, the eight sprinters who lined up for the men's 100m final, who hailed from four countries, were all descended from West Africans Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
As the clouds continue and the rain pours down, the Sackler Gallery at the Royal Academy is filled with sun-dappled scenes from France. The anthology is a potpourri of paintings culled from the remarkable collections put together by the millionaire race horse breeder and art obsessed Sterling Clark – the fortune inherited from his grandfather’s involvement with the Singer Sewing Machine company - and his French actress wife Francine. Current renovations and expansions for the Clark Institute, founded in 1955 by the couple in the university town of Williamstown, Massachusetts, and one of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The most famous hotel in Havana is the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, since the 1930s the only place to stay for writers, mobsters and, most of all, film stars. During the city’s film festival, the Nacional is the hub, with dozens of filmmakers sitting in the garden bars that overlook the Gulf of Mexico.I mention this, because unfortunately the short films in the portmanteau 7 Days in Havana seem to have been conceived on bar napkins in this very hotel. Three of the stories not only have scenes at the Nacional, but are about filmmakers. And most of the contributions draw on picture postcard images Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Storyville documentary strand must rank as one of the special glories of British television. As its opening titles unfold in different languages, we can only celebrate programmes that still give time to international stories, told in their own time, and allowing an eclectic, sometimes oblique view on their subjects. Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, a film by George Carey (pictured below), serves as a rallying cry to endorse exactly that.The “Mr Jones” of the title was a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, whose career in the 1930s and before took him to both Hitlerite Germany and Soviet Russia, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It was one of the better Olympic culture ideas that Wales, Scotland and England should combine in a Dance GB night, with the three “national” dance companies all creating something new. But a risk that had little Wales holding its breath in fear, up against the might of English National Ballet and Scottish Ballet. And who would have expected the 12-strong National Dance Company Wales to emerge as unexpected heroes?Truly this wee troupe stepped up to the plate, nabbing the world-famous Christopher Bruce for their choreographer, and being rewarded with the audience hit of the night of a rather Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The Queen made a rare visit to Glasgow yesterday. Now as luck would have it Liz 'n' Philip did too, apparently driving by my office on their way to George Square for afternoon tea and a quick chorus of long-to-reign-over-us (at least until 2014), and in the process lending this opening paragraph a rare note of topicality. However I'd be very surprised if the pair of them received quite so rapturous a welcome, or experienced as many people take an icy command to "bow down to me" so literally, as Shirley Manson on her triumphant return to the Barrowlands.Such is the fickle nature of pop music Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Taming of the Shrew celebrates its own rumbustious, raucous (mis)behaviour, so why shouldn't Shakespeare's comedy be granted a production that follows suit? From an opening gambit involving bodily fluids sprayed in the direction of the groundlings to a food fight later that would put the bad boys of Posh to shame, Toby Frow's directorial debut at Shakespeare's Globe turns up the volume to consistently giddy effect.That the staging also finds uncommon delicacy in a play that can seem as "cursed" as its eponymous heroine speaks to the dream team of Samantha Spiro (pictured below, mid- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
By the time she went to college to study to become a singing teacher, Joyce DiDonato had been to exactly two different American states: Kansas and Colorado. New York and San Francisco were as yet unvisited, Europe and Asia as yet undreamed of. It’s a story DiDonato herself tells with practised humour. Jump forward 20 years and there isn’t a continent or metropolitan hub unconquered by this supreme mezzo-soprano, whose career may have taken her impossibly far from her Kansas beginnings, but whose sunny, unpretentious workmanship is still pure Midwest.Last night at the Wigmore Hall it was Read more ...
bella.todd
"I can’t live without horse flesh, if it’s only a piece of cat’s meat on a skewer.” So declares Patricia Hodge’s gung-ho racing fanatic Georgina in this straight-down-the-line revival of Pinero’s 125-year-old caper, which requires cast and audience to subsist on the theatrical equivalent of the latter.A rarely-seen drawing-room comedy about a put-upon vicar tempted into risking money and reputation on a horse, Dandy Dick was partly written in Brighton and possibly inspired by its racecourse. Hence its selection to launch Theatre Royal Brighton Productions which, under artistic director Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Let’s be honest – there is no non-cynical way to justify remaking a barely 10-year-old franchise film. With a Batman “reboot” already on the cards for after Christopher Nolan ends his directing tenure with the upcoming Dark Knight Rises, and a similar fate rumoured to be in store for the Twilight saga, Hollywood seems to have embraced its inner Ouroboros and resigned itself to an infinite cycle of re-stagings.In one sense, there’s nothing especially wrong with this. Superheroes have often been compared to modern-day mythological figures, and just as we think nothing of three or four different Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Regina’s Spektor’s kooky New York piano gal shtick sure divides audiences. For every person who finds her a perfect antidote (I refuse to say adorkable) to all that’s mainstream and soulless, there is someone else who wants to punch her on the nose for singing “on the Braa-dio-uh-oh” instead of “on the radio.”Mind you, it’s not all icing sugar. She might have started her career sounding like an ad man's idea of a pixie dream girl, but time has proved she really means it. Still, it can get a bit syrupy, no? Well, last night it didn’t. Thumping out power chords and belting out slogans like “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A drama featuring mayoral politics and an unsolved death. Hm. What’s the Danish for déjà vu? By the end of episode one of Blackout, you were wondering when Sara Lund was going to strut into the town hall in her Faroe Isles pullie and attitudinal denim, stare at people very hard and seem ever so gradually to lose the plot. Not that there’s much plot to lose in Blackout. The Killing’s belle dame sans merci could knit it up in three hours, no bother.Which is lucky because this is British television drama, where they tend to have no faith in the concept of the slow narrative burn. Three hours is Read more ...