Reviews
ash.smyth
Footage of wiry East African men and women breaking the tape in marathons and distance track-events is now more or less synonymous with the highest achievements in top-level sport, and it won’t come as a surprise to those who’ve lived through more than a couple of cycles of the Olympic Games to be reminded that the medal-winners in the long-distance running events are no longer, generally speaking, from “round here”. The headline of Jerry Rothwell’s grass-roots feature documentary, though, is that, actually – at least for the last two decades or so – a disproportionate number of them don’t Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Looking at CCTV footage of a school hall in Cardiff through Adobe Flash Player in the corner of a webpage and listening to the attendant interference, bells, buzzes and bleeps might not sound like the cutting edge of theatre. But by the time National Theatre Wales’ tech wizard Tom Beardshaw closes the live stream of Tim Price’s electric new play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning with the school pupils and soldiers we have been watching taking their bow, this is exactly what the "audience" are convinced we have witnessed.NTW Director John E McGrath, having overseen one of the most radical Read more ...
geoff brown
A mischievous part of me firmly believes that from the mountain of dubious art works produced in the world since the 1980s, the most dubious of all have been the percussion concertos. I know I’m being somewhat harsh, for I’ve thrilled along with most audiences to James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – far and away the best piece ever premiered by Evelyn Glennie, instigator of this percussion avalanche. But these ears have also been witness to enough trivial and meretricious concoctions to feel at least some trepidation before the launch of another percussion world premiere.Having Colin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As far as Elizabeth Taylor was concerned, it was the movies that got small as her brand of sumptuous diva-ishness became almost more than even Hollywood could support. Her jewellery collection, however, grew ever more grandiose, and when it was auctioned last year it fetched a record-breaking $135m. One piece alone, the historic La Peregrina Pearl (which had been worn by a string of Spanish queens and by Mary Tudor), sold for more than 11 million bucks.Michael Waldman's shrewd and witty film craftily used this parade of Taylor's priceless baubles as an index of her triumphs and affections. Read more ...
josh.spero
I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself. The shame is that it's all a hoax, and not in the manner of Shovlin's earlier projects concerned with fictional people: the maths is cod, the belief absent - even the pauses for thought are artificial.The original covers of the Fontana series are distinctive - Vasarely-ish geometrical designs in the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Religious mania is bad for your love life. In Enda Walsh’s revamped 1999 play — which has already been seen in Galway and New York, and opened in London last night — a 33-year-old man (played with immense conviction and enormous presence by Cillian Murphy) invites us inside his mind to explore the dark and dangerous caverns of religious enthusiasm and psychological collapse. Be warned: it is a strange, tormented and rather weird trip.Set in Inishfree, which the programme reminds us is an Irish town celebrated in WB Yeats’s 1892 peace-yearning poem, the play is a monologue which tells a Read more ...
ash.smyth
“I’m a doctor of psychology,” Pamela Stephenson began her Fame Report last night, the better to establish her intellectual credentials while taking our minds off her orange face and massive boobs. She said this from a balcony somewhere that looked very much like it might be in LA (tossing her platinum hair in the wind as she spoke), then she hopped in a cab to the West End – because you can do that if you’re famous – where, in between letting slip that she’d once been a fêted comedian and, more recently, a third-place finisher on Strictly Come Dancing, she giggled a lot about whatever red- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the golden age of the movies that was 1952, The Bad and the Beautiful must have seemed quite a radical attack on the industry. A gorgeous opening sequence suggests that we are to be treated to an unadulterated love letter to the pictures: the camera moves in on a director perched on a huge boom (pictured below) as he swoops down on an intimate scene featuring a prone young actress in a lowcut gown. Then comes a phone call which, when he hears the name, the director refuses to take. The caller, we learn, is Tinseltown’s hottest hotshot producer, now fallen on lean times. A director needs a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Forget opera-glasses, the must-have accessory for the contemporary opera-goer in London is fast becoming a sturdy pair of wellingtons. No sooner had we all dried off from our voyage into The Heart of Darkness at the Royal Opera House (where Edward Dick’s watery set lapped dangerously close to the orchestra pit) than we find ourselves up to our knees in the boggy marshlands and treacherous pools of Sam Brown’s Jakob Lenz. The mire of psychological collapse has rarely been so vividly rendered, even on the opera stage (surely madness’s truest artistic home), but while visuals were striking, they Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Funny how things turn out. As Damon Albarn has morphed from Blur’s Fred Perry-sporting jackanapes into the thinking man’s musical adventurer, flitting from opera to Malian music to cartoon conceptualist, Graham Coxon has opted to pursue the low key and lo-fi, seemingly happier hanging out on the margins than infiltrating the mainstream.Coxon is currently touring his eighth solo album, A+E. It isn‘t a bad place to start: A+E is a tremendous record, easily the best thing he has done as a solo artist and up there with his best work full stop. A harsh, furiously inventive collection of 10 noisy Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year. It wasn't immediately certain that we weren't going to get Barenboim the splashy ringmaster again. The first Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits through doors, no footlights. And so on.I imagine that he didn’t envisage theatre-in-the-round, but he longed for some way of breaking the custom of formal staging (“nothing left to the imagination”) and tidy dialogue. He wanted actors playing “for the audience, not with it”, sometimes even having their backs to the audience whilst speaking. Read more ...