Reviews
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Best Coast has always been the quintessential California band, an identity the duo has embraced so fully that the artwork for their latest album features the bear that is the state’s mascot. It would be clichéd to remark on the unsuitability of the band’s sun-kissed fuzz-pop for the sort of damp, drizzly evening that soaks through three layers, so it was a relief that frontwoman Bethany Cosentino did it for me. “We thought we’d bring you some sunshine,” she said, introducing “Summer Mood” from buzzworthy 2010 debut Crazy For You, “but I guess not. We like it though.”But then, that’s the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can: The Lost TapesKieron TylerDespite being compiled from previously unreleased material, the extraordinary The Lost Tapes is as wonderful as last year's 40th Anniversary edition of Tago Mago. This archive trawl outpaces previous exhumations like Limited Edition, Unlimited Edition, Delay ‘68 and Prehistoric Future by a very long distance. Not because it’s a three-CD set, but due to the sheer quality of what’s heard. Can still had material on the shelf equalling what they issued. Little is from the post-Damo Suzuki configuration of the band (it’s roughly half-and-half between the Suzuki and Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Britten: Serenade for tenor, horn and strings; Nocturne; Finzi: Dies Natalis Mark Padmore, Britten Sinfonia/Jacqueline Shave, with Stephen Bell (horn) (Harmonia Mundi)Britten’s Serenade and Nocturne are still indelibly associated with the voice of Peter Pears. His tenor, undeniably characterful, could never be described as a thing of beauty, and his 1960s recordings of both works show him sadly past his prime. Mark Padmore’s new recording is terrific - his voice is expressive, beautiful and terrifying by turns. Britten’s unique talent for word-setting deployed unnerving skill in the Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Mary Shelley and all her works have dogged the footsteps of contemporary theatre — in a way that’s a bit reminiscent of her most famous creation. Last year, there was Frankenstein at the National and this year a revival of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (about the Shelley/Byron ménage) on the fringe. Now, following the success of their Brontë, Shared Experience theatre company are back in London with a new Mrs Shelley docudrama.The good news is that Mary’s story is a perpetually interesting one. Born in 1797, she was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin and Mary Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Sex Pistols played their final live show on 14 January 1978 in San Francisco. According to the third and final programme in the Punk Britannia series, “for many, it would be the end of punk”. It certainly was for ex-Pistol John Lydon, who'd form Public Image Ltd. Taking on the task of tracing what happened next was a challenge. Nothing was neat. Loose ends, new strands and evolution of the existing meant it couldn’t be. If this programme succeeded, it was in portraying the turmoil that came in punk’s wake.Bringing order where there is chaos is always difficult. As an overview of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The RSC’s Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking “What country friends is this?”, we by contrast find ourselves in familiar territory. Like this season’s opener, A Comedy of Errors, both Twelfth Night and The Tempest take their birth in the water. But as the triptych progresses and comedy turns to uncertainty and ethics, so Shakespeare’s drama itself suffers something of a sea-change.Jon Bausor’s designs are a miracle of twisted ingenuity, defeating Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Once again bringing to screen the seemingly unfilmable (see also Naked Lunch and Crash), the audacious David Cronenberg takes on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel - a novel which in the last decade has become frighteningly pertinent. Respectfully retaining much of DeLillo’s original dialogue, Cosmopolis is a paranoid, loquacious nightmare, a sly, searing study of the alienated super rich, a meditation on greed, emptiness and jealousy. It’s set almost entirely within the comfortable cocoon of a stretch limousine which, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost science fiction-style space. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Henry V is a play with so many layers, and such ambivalence, that it can suit a multitude of purposes. When Laurence Olivier made his film version in 1944, it was as a propagandist rallying cry, a reminder of what was at stake in a war that was far from won; 60 years later, Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress production at the National Theatre was a bullish anti-war statement, lent potency by the country’s then current excursion into Iraq.Dominic Dromgoole’s new production at The Globe, which completes the theatre’s extraordinary Globe to Globe season, highlights another facet of the play, namely Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's a great PhD to be written about why comics are so keen to dress as old biddies, from Arthur Lucan and Benny Hill to Dick Emery and Les Dawson, by way of any number of panto dames to the most noble of them all, Dame Edna Everage. To this esteemed list of comics should be added Brendan O'Carroll, whose Agnes Brown is an astonishing creation, a foul-mouthed Dublin widow whose passions in life are bingo and poking her nose into her children's lives.Mrs Brown first saw the light of day on radio in Ireland in 1992 and then in a series of books. In 2000, one was adapted into a film with, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Visualise a large lost property office, such as that for Transport for London at Baker Street, which inspired this production, its racks stuffed with thousands of items, from false teeth to umbrellas, prosthetic limbs to mobile phones. You name it, it’s been lost – and found. Why, only the other day, some loved one’s ashes were left on the tram between Manchester and Bury.Now, think what tales each of those items could tell about their owners and the circumstances of their loss on a journey, especially the journey of life itself. That is the trigger for Jackie Kay’s new play, Manchester Lines Read more ...
bella.todd
You wouldn’t be surprised, in the programme for Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece The Great Gatsby, to find instructions for gentle exercises to stave off deep-vein thrombosis. With a run-time of eight hours, during which every single word of the novel is spoken on stage, in one sense Gatz is no adaptation at all. It’s a marathon of textual faithfulness, a triumph of great literature over the much fabled waning modern attention span, and something of an endurance test during which "tender is the tailbone" starts to seem like a good subtitle.But Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is always easy to remember the first time: 11 November, 1974, Hammersmith Odeon. Sparks. I cannot recall the exact seat where I was sitting when I lost my rock 'n' roll virginity, but it was the second stalls block on the left and the seasoned gig-goer on my right tipped me off that you can tell when a band is going to do an encore because the roadies leave the amps turned on. Look out for the red light. Sure enough, Ron and Russell Mael returned to do their biggest hit to date, "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us".Nearly four decades on they were back in West London last night with Read more ...