Reviews
geoff brown
Their bicentennial years may have been and gone, but even Mazeppa’s wild horse wouldn’t be able to stop the world’s top pianists playing Chopin and Liszt almost every month. Last night Maurizio Pollini and his aristocratic art returned to the Royal Festival Hall for a recital featuring both composers, each on either side of the interval. Pollini also brought his Steinway-Fabbrini touring piano – a Steinway from the Hamburg factory, titivated inside with extra refinements by the piano technician Angelo Fabbrini. People clustered round it in the interval snapping photos, as if they’d spotted a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner’s institute, and – most memorably – claimed the whole town of Port Talbot as their stage for Owen Sheer’s The Passion last Easter. Setting themselves the challenge of producing 12 productions in their first 12 months, this building-less company have somehow turned a modest (not to say meagre) £1 million a year subsidy into a living, risk-taking tradition of national theatre. Their latest play, Peter Gill’s Chekhov adaptation A Provincial Life, not only marks a rare visit for the Read more ...
judith.flanders
NDT2 is a fascinating beast. The “junior” company of the venerable Nederlands Dans Theater, it features dancers on the cusp of maturity, aged generally between sixteen and their mid-twenties. Here, in choreography created especially for them, one can watch talent develop. And since the grown-up NDT-ers are known as some of the most exhilaratingly talented dancers in Europe, that is something very special.After a rather choppy decade with several artistic directors coming and going, NDT itself now has the British-born and -trained choreographer Paul Lightfoot at its helm. For NDT2, with Passe- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the smoke from Julian Fellowes' upcoming Titanic mini-series for ITV becoming visible over the horizon, Channel 5 nipped in with this startling new spin on the tale of the doomed liner. It's not widely known that when the Nazis were riding high in the early part of World War Two, they hit upon a plan to turn the Titanic story into a blockbuster propaganda film, designed to throw contempt and ridicule over Britain's ruling elite.Using a variety of film historians and critics from Germany, Britain and the USA, as well as the recently rediscovered production diaries kept by the film's Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What is it about the Sixties that keeps drawing us back? Surely, it can’t just be that anniversary thing – 50 years on? Perhaps, in these care-worn times, we just like to revisit our don’t-give-a-damn anti-heroes, having their cake and eating it, pleasuring their mates’ marriage-weary wives, arranging abortions if things go wrong, downing pints in the pub. That was the life.Recently, we had Alfie Elkins, Bill Naughton’s scallywag, brought to life again. Now comes Arthur Seaton from Alan Sillitoe’s famous first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, freshly adapted for the stage and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. That it’s such a shambles will be a particular disappointment to (the innumerable) fans of David Tennant, for whom this represents his first filmic foray as romantic lead.Writers Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski give us Read more ...
josh.spero
The great problem for holistic detective Dirk Gently is that he lives in a post-Moffat/Gattis-Sherlock era. How can any private investigator shine after the wit, intrigue, technology and bromance of that show? It helps that Gently, created by Douglas Adams, is a largely different beast: a picker-up of random threads, a believer that logic will never take you as far as chance. But he stands small in Sherlock's shadow.The plots of this first episode of three were unlikely. A man was murdered after developing software which allows you to input the wished-for ending of a course of action then Read more ...
ash.smyth
If you had felt so inclined, you could have watched three straight hours of War Horsiness last night. Now, I’ve seen the play of Michael Morpurgo’s novel and figured I got the mechanics of its impressive stage-craft (Sky Arts 1, 7pm). And, having seen it, I had absolutely no intention of watching Steven Spielberg gloss the already highly questionable boy-goes-to-war-on-account-of-a-horse message for the big screen (ditto, 6pm). So I opted for Channel Four’s War Horse: the Real Story - and pretty much got what I expected.Billed as “extraordinary and deeply moving”, War Horse was actually Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film. This year, with the Cultural Olympiad swallowing up everything for its year-long national pat on the back, independent artistic thinking is at a premium. AV, however, have not only escaped the Olympiad's clutches but have upended the boastful spirit of 2012 with a theme that is about as co-optable for national self-aggrandisement as a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fokine, the founding choreographer of the Ballets Russes, wrote on Anna Pavlova’s death, “Pavlova will be the dream of many generations, a dream of beauty, of the gladness of movement.” The superb array of international stars of ballet last night showing up at the Coliseum to honour Pavlova a century later had to set you thinking, all over again, about why this particular ballerina remains worldwide the epitome of what people imagine about the ballet.Pavlova had miserable beginnings - she was the illegitimate child of a laundry-woman in St Petersburg, and once she entered the ballet world she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There was a time when Jackie Mason was the pre-eminent New York Jewish comedian. He had started his career in those postwar Catskills hotels catering to vacationing Jewish families from New York City, which became known as the Borscht Belt. The circuit spawned a list of talents including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers, among many, many more, and it was a phenomenon that prompted the film Dirty Dancing. So due respect to a veteran who has been in the business for several decades and now, at the age of 75, is performing his farewell UK tour, called Fearless.What a shame I can't bid him Read more ...
josh.spero
Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an emphasis on the varied materials in use today, a capacious but not unlimited mission. The other reason is that the work is just damned good.The gallery, which has just extended its premises from Haunch of Venison Yard through to Bond Street, where its new entrance sits, inaugurated this engorgement with some of its most revered and freshest artists. Read more ...