Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Rossini's La Cenerentola is not an opera that I'd normally recommend to anyone with even half a brain. It takes the simple if mildly nauseating little tale of Cinderella, pads it out with parental abuse and drawn out cliffhangers, and ends in a pass-the-sick-bag denouement of "Goodness Triumphant". Yet, in an act worthy of the fairy godmother herself, Glyndebourne has transformed the piece into something unmissable. As ever with this classy East Sussex institution, the thing that raises proceedings above the level of panto is the extraordinary casting. The first delights that we're Read more ...
Carmel Doohan
Transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, this is a very tight staging of a very messy evening. Ten members of the Riot Club come together for a celebratory meal after “two terms out in the cold”. In a modest pub on the outskirts of Oxfordshire, they hang a bin bag on each chair, down their wine by the bottle and start on a 10-bird roast. The plan: to get “absolutely chateauxed” and trash the place in the traditional manner of their aristocratic ancestors.When Laura Wade’s play first opened, polling day for the 2010 General Election fell in the middle of its run, and reviews mused Read more ...
Angie Errigo
Had one listened to the Chiten company from Kyoto performing Coriolanus with one’s eyes closed, it would have seemed as if the stage were teeming with performers. And without understanding a word of Japanese, a theatregoer could respond to the gamut of moods and rhetoric of the play, from mob fury met with autocratic disdain to political conniving and on to maternal grief and horror: all were audibly evident in a collective tour de force of verbal dexterity, range and expression.In fact, a nimble ensemble of just five - two men and three women accompanied by a pair of musicians Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Did Magda Goebbels do her children a favour by murdering all six of them in the bunker? Her rationale, as reported in the film Downfall, was the impossibility of imagining a life after Hitler for anyone called Goebbels.Most descendants of the Nazi top brass were not afforded this ghastly reprieve, and survived into a conflicted adulthood. Not long ago a son of Reinhard Heydrich offered to fund the restoration of the Prague castle, now ruined, from which his father terrorised the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The city government was suspicious of his motives. It was his childhood home, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
J + K = zzzzzzz in this snooze-inducing latest instalment of the once-fun Men in Black franchise, which finds Tommy Lee Jones looking as pained as Will Smith does fretful, and who can blame them? Long in the making but limited in terms of rewards, Barry Sonnenfeld's film doesn't display much conviction for the story it wants to tell (and certainly has no reason to go the all-too-ubiquitous 3D route). Some will applaud the insertion of a Brit (Emma Thompson, of all people) into events and others may relish a villain who reads like the love child of Mickey Rourke and Russell Brand, but the Read more ...
Charlie Swinbourne
"37 Plays. 37 Languages." This is the tagline for the Globe Theatre's Globe to Globe season, hosting theatre companies from every corner of the world. The season may be international in outlook, yet the language used to perform this version of Love's Labour's Lost is at once home-grown, yet very different from the words of Shakespeare.His comedy is performed here in sign language, with no spoken words at all, just musical backing from a live band on stage. The genius of Deafinitely Theatre's interpretation of this play (and something that marks it out from their past work) is that there is no Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “cheapening history”, Dr Lucy Worsley is back on our screens, doing ninja kicks in Puritan dress, trying Restoration gowns for size and shamelessly discussing Samuel Pepys’s “emissions”.Worsley, who is Chief Curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, is one of a number of increasingly visible female academics (see also Amanda Vickery, Bettany Hughes and Read more ...
Andrew Perry
When these blazin’ psychedelic jazzers first landed here from Austin in 2007, there’d already been four or five years’ worth of herky-jerky cod-post-punk-reviving going on, way past the point of overdose, but White Denim were different, and obviously worth making an exception for. Initially a trio, comprising James Petralli (guitar/vocals), Josh Block (drums) and Steve Terembecki (bass), their early gigs here were explosive, crystallizing the genre-transcendent ideal of the original post-punk era, blasting through everything – 1960s beat, funk, Tropicalia, Krautrock, folk – with Texas-fried Read more ...
aleks.sierz
As the Olympic Park rises out of the desolation of East London, British theatre is also being regenerated by the sports fest that looms increasingly large on the horizon. Although it has recently lost its local authority funding, Edward Hall’s Swiss Cottage venue is no slacker when it comes to ambitious work. Having commissioned upcoming talent Mike Bartlett to adapt Hugh Hudson’s 1981 film, Hall has already secured a West End transfer for the play, in advance of its opening last night.Alluding to a line from that most English of inspiring poems — William Blake’s “Jerusalem” — Chariots of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its precocious youngsters, enchanting title, wonderful wit and delight in hand-crafted detail, Moonrise Kingdom is every inch a Wes Anderson film. This year’s Cannes opener is steeped in The Royal Tenenbaums’ director’s faux-naïf, frivolous worldview, with nearly every one of its magical frames carrying his signature. He has always presented adult strife as if seen through a child’s fertile eyes - spinning the prosaic, dark or melancholy into something altogether more quixotic. Anderson’s films are poised and peculiar, with their thrift-store chic and deadpan protagonists. Grim reality Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is a shouty lady outside the Theatre Royal in Brighton who takes strong objection to us attending tonight’s Brighton Festival performance of Matthew Herbert’s One Pig. The show is based around the life and death of a pig, from birth to plate, and includes pork being cooked. We are, she tells us as we enter, “hypocritical vegetarians with the blood of farm animals” on our hands. Matthew Herbert is not a vegetarian but she has hit on a crux contradiction about the evening (albeit in the unfortunate manner of Crazy Cat Lady off The Simpsons). Yet Herbert’s work is surely about Read more ...
Anne Blood
After a £9.2 million renovation of its new home on Ramillies Street by the Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, the Photographers’ Gallery re-opened to the public on Saturday with a slick new look and an expertly curated exhibition of works by the veteran Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Although just before the renovations began there were whispers among the photography community that the Gallery had begun to lose its relevance and critical edge, the new space and exhibition programme will surely allay any such fears.The original Victorian warehouse has been extended by two storeys, a Read more ...