Reviews
Veronica Lee
This is the Jacobean tragedy that probably gave Quentin Tarantino his best ideas - by the end of the night the body count is almost in double figures through stabbings and strangulations. But even as the fake blood flows and the gurglings mount, Jamie Lloyd's sturdy but sometimes sluggish production of John Webster's masterpiece (c 1614) isn't exactly gripping.Lloyd, who recently directed a romping version of She Stoops to Conquer down the road at the National to great acclaim, has fewer directorial flourishes up his sleeve here. Oh, he tries to sex it up – we first see the duplicitous Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Little more than a year since The King’s Speech hit pay dirt at the Oscars, David Seidler’s tale of a prince stuttering between duty and impediment takes to the stage. Rather than a speedy and cynical exploitation of the film’s success, the move actually reflects Seidler’s original ambition for his story; and while we might reasonably have feared déjà vu and a pale shadow of the film, what we discover is a thematically richer, yet equally delightful experience.For those who have been in a different realm these past 12 months, the king in question is George VI, who reluctantly replaced his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The first major retrospective of the videos, photographs and sculptures of Gillian Wearing is a deeply disturbing experience. Her videos can be just a few minutes, or as long as an hour, but are not sequential narratives. They can be dipped in and out of - unlike many video artists you do not have to acquiesce to her time scale. But take a lot of time: they are more than worth it, and repay repeated viewings.Throughout she plays with notions of truth and deception. People speak with voices not their own; in later work both her subjects and her accurately entitled self portraits are masked Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Drake’s routine is divisive; he’s attracted hip-hop’s most loyal following in a somewhat unconventional way. By using self-doubt as his signature complex, he’s taken something traditionally uninteresting and made it his calling card. The cringe factor in his lyrics seem, from the outside, best suited to an album at the tail-end of a career, but that’s without considering his charm, his astute ear for a chorus, and how unashamedly, loveably contrived and cheesy his whole shtick is. At his second sold-out night at the O2, 25-year-old Canadian Aubrey Drake Graham proved to be a master of Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The most shocking moment in this feature-length episode of Mad Men – for which the phrase “long-awaited” seems an understatement after a 17-month hiatus – is a quiet one. It’s not a moment on the level of a man getting his foot severed by a lawnmower, or Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) out-of-nowhere proposal to doe-eyed secretary Megan (Jessica Paré) in last season’s finale. The moment comes when Don, a man who has built a house-of-cards false identity around his passion and creative ingenuity as an ad man, casually admits to his new wife, “I don’t really care about work.”It’s just one of many Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
No greater proof of the potency of the current Handel revival can be found than the London Handel Festival, now in its 35th year. The festival continues to fill concert halls and churches across London every Spring with the composer’s chamber repertoire, but it is the annual opera that remains unquestionably the main event. No matter how abstruse the choice (and this year’s Riccardo Primo – unperformed in London for some 20 years – is surely as unfamiliar as it gets) audiences return, lured by the energy of the festival’s Musical Director Laurence Cummings, and his cast of young singers from Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Ambrose Akinmusire is the new jazz sensation, the messiah of the post-bop trumpet. With his hyper-talented and youthful quintet, the 29-year-old Californian delivered a set in Bristol that rang all the changes from the soft and lyrical to high-energy heat.Akinmusire took the stage following an at times dazzling opening performance from the equally young, gifted and black British pianist Robert Mitchell. The American trumpeter started with a kind of alaap, a jazz equivalent of the prelude to a raga when the lead instrumentalist explores the tonalities of his chosen mode. It was as if Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It can't be often that producers are faced with the agreeable problem of trying to shoehorn in several talents when devising a debut solo vehicle for a stand-up making the transition to television entertainer, but Hit the Road Jack's makers had that challenge with Jack Whitehall. Can he do jokes, spoof sketches and documentary-style pieces, followed by a bit of Candid Camera-like comedy, then chat-show banter with a celebrity guest? Yes all of that, most of which he makes a decent fist of.Following hot on the heels of Sarah Millican, Whitehall has been launched on to our screens with his Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home. In Tiny Furniture the colourfully calamitous, low-key adventures of Dunham’s alter Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The dazzling Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca delighted a packed Barbican last night – but part of the fun was seeing him negotiate the balance between more soulful, minimal playing and sheer technically brilliant extravagance. Is he more an heir to Chucho Valdez, the consummate sophisticated Havana Jazzer, or to Ruben Gonzalez, the more lyrical pianist of the Buena Vista Social Club, into whose shoes he had the tricky task of stepping for their live tours? The set lifted off with the driving beat of the self-penned “80s”, also the opening track of his new album Yo. It enabled the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the most refreshing aspects of current Latin American cinema, most evident in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, is a particular brand of off-beat romantic comedy – one with echoes of the literate and quirky US independents of the Eighties and Nineties, of Hartley, Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, but laced with melancholy and shards of realism that are specifically Latin.Bonsai, from Chile, is a delightful example of this. Adapted from Alejandro Zambra’s novella by writer/director Cristián Jiménez, it is an individual and wonderfully playful film, teasing us with intimations of rom-com, before Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There is nothing quite so exciting as witnessing the debut of a fresh new voice. But young writers can be rather frail creatures, and their exposure in the high-profile Royal Court Young Writers Festival might sometimes highlight their failings as much as their virtues. In actor Hayley Squires’s first play, which opened last night, there is plenty of evidence of a fiery new talent coming into the world, but also some doubt about the writer’s ability to mould her insights into a compelling story.The situation is distressingly common. Bobby, a young soldier from Kent, has been killed in Read more ...