Reviews
theartsdesk
Small Faces: The Decca Album (Deluxe Edition), From The Beginning (Deluxe Edition), The Immediate Album (Deluxe Edition), Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (Deluxe Edition)Kieron Tylertheartsdesk’s reissues round-up is usually dedicated to three unrelated CDs, but these spiffy Deluxe Editions of the first four Small Faces’s albums derail that for a week. This quartet – preceding the posthumous Autumn Stone – are testament to a band developing at lightning speed during the headlong rush towards their inevitable fragmentation. One of Britain’s greatest, they created accessible, zeitgeist-infused hit Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Einstein on the Beach was meant to be one of the jewels in the crown for the Cultural Olympiad. The celebrated 1970s collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs - which Susan Sontag claimed to be one of the greatest theatrical experiences of the 20th century - was receiving its UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre last night, thirty-six years after it was first created. And what we got was a technical shambles.Pretty much everything that could go wrong technically did go wrong. Lighting cues were botched. Drop cloths rose prematurely. Stage hands wandered on from the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Even in this age of desperate reality TV, you have to have doubts about any show that tries to convert “celebrities” into serious contenders in an alien field. Is it serious or a padded-out joke? To an extent we’ve been here, or close by, before. Can it be four years since the first Maestro came to our screens, featuring eight celebrity contestants vying for the chance to wield the baton at the Proms and, eventually, launching the winner, Sue Perkins (narrator this time), on a new career as a comedy conductor?On the basis that if it worked once as a novelty, it might work again given a decent Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Life was altogether richer when Dennis Potter was around to provoke us, to make us look queasily at the corrupt, hypocritical or despairing aspects of our lives, ever entertainingly, with a wink and a song. Whenever a Potter play or serial was to air on television, one knew there would be plenty to talk about.The talking points of Brimstone and Treacle when it was made for the BBC in 1976 involved the devil, a rape, and the fact that we couldn’t actually watch the play – it having been banned by the Beeb’s director of television, who described it as “brilliantly written and made, but Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Before he started making regular appearances on BBC Two's Mock the Week, Stewart Francis was an accomplished comic of some years' standing on the circuit - and that experience shows in his extensive UK tour, Outstanding in His Field, where he proves to be a slick performer whose set is delivered with exquisite timing.The audience at the Wycombe Swan let a few of his (very good) gags fly past them, mostly those about him being a Canadian, but no matter. Like fellow punster Tim Vine, Francis has a high joke count - puns, one-liners, non sequiturs, surreal invention and running gags - meaning Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Try this for high concept. Following a fatal car accident involving his family, LA cop Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) gains access to two parallel realities. Every time he goes to sleep, he crosses between the two – in one, his wife survived the crash while his son died; in the other, he’s a widower but his son lived. The two realities parallel one another in every respect: in each he has a different therapist, a different stereotypical sidekick, and a different murder to solve.The procedural element is the least successful aspect of what’s otherwise a compelling pilot with a unique emotional Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2 Peter Hill (piano) (Delphian)Book 2 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier doesn’t often appear without Book 1. It’s sometimes unfairly perceived as drier, more academic than its predecessor. Bach’s didactic aim for Book 1 (“for the profit and use of musical youth desiring instruction”) remains apposite. Sensible pianists won’t underplay this, and what you want to hear is something akin to an interesting lecture delivered by a charismatic guru. And Peter Hill fits the bill – hearing him play Bach is a little like listening to a friendly primary school Read more ...
ash.smyth
This retelling of the Cymbeline story opened – or at least appeared to open – with the entire cast contributing their tuppenceworth on the issue of what the story of Cymbeline actually was. And fair dos. A “late” and abnormally tortuous Shakespearean number, Cymbeline seems not only to have been constructed out of the usual fragments of ancient British history and “borrowed” chunks of Italian literature, but also from itinerant bits of other Shakespeare plays! Romantic antics, warring dynasties, poison plots, nation-building myths, randy wagers, skulduggery in bedrooms, banishment, ill-gotten Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As an art school the Bauhaus has a reputation for being the cradle of modernism, famous for establishing an alliance between art and industry which produced enduring design classics such as Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs, Josef Albers’ silver and glass fruit bowl and Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe lamps. But that is only part of the story.When the school was set up in Weimar in 1919 the image used to embody its aims and ideals owed nothing to new technology. Illustrating the prospectus was a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger (pictured below right) intended to evoke the era of great cathedral Read more ...
ash.smyth
He trudges about in the snow somewhere. He cooks. He sleeps. He chops wood and saws branches. He reads. He looks like Darwin. He makes hot drinks. He does not do spring cleaning.This is a more-or-less complete synopsis of Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea, a “study” (I think is the correct technical term) of some bloke, somewhere, living in the wilderness, who clearly does not hold down a day-job.He takes a shower.It’s shot on old cameras – in black and white, naturally – for the flickery, old-fashioned look, and in that arty thin-screen ratio. All terribly prize-winny and Jim Jarmusch, of course Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The best playwrights have an antenna-like ability to pick up, and respond to, the new conflicts and fault lines that appear in society. Over the past five or so years, the antagonism between the baby-boomer generation, who are now parents with everything, and their kids, who have nothing but debts, has increasingly intensified. And no play articulates this conflict better than Mike Bartlett’s latest, which opened last night, in a production starring Victoria Hamilton and Claire Foy.The curtain comes up on a pair of contrasting English brothers, one young and hippyish (Kenneth) and the other Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”There’s something about da Mosto that makes TV producers come over all unnecessary. In their view there is no one more ruggedly handsome and intrinsically Italian than he. Thus, in Shakespeare in Italy, if he wasn’t captured driving his red Alfa Romeo down country Read more ...