Reviews
Veronica Lee
The journey from the Edinburgh Fringe to a UK tour or London residency can be a fraught one. What works in the context of the world's biggest and best arts festival, where even in established venues there's often a whiff of “let's do the show right here!” shambolism, can, in the confines of a professional theatre space, be met with irritation rather than affection.But no such worries with Adam Riches' show, Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches, which won the Edinburgh Comedy Award last August - his anarchic character comedy has transferred nicely from a sweaty temporary venue in the Scottish Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Such a pity about Beatrice and Benedict! As a musical visualiser, a creator of musical tableaux, a radio composer avant la lettre, Berlioz had few equals. The Damnation of Faust is surely the greatest radio opera ever written. But for some reason he had no grasp of the stage. Benvenuto Cellini is a lifeless succession of spectacular tableaux. The Trojans must have more superb music per square yard of ineffective drama than any work of comparable length.As for Berlioz’s singing-telegram version of Much Ado About Nothing, it would have merited that title all too well if Berlioz had risked it. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a 13th-century mystic whose poetry had a formative influence on Dutch literature. Though influenced by the courtly love tradition, the subject of her poems was the love of God and the mysteries of the divine. She was probably not a nun but a beguine – a devout noblewoman in a self-denying contemplative order that carried out works of Christian charity. There is a suggestion in her letters that she may have been exiled from her sisters and yearned to rejoin them.So it is with the novice (Julie Sokolowski) named Hadewijch who’s cast out of her rural monastery at the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The problem with being the closest major European capital to the United States is that touring American orchestras always visit us first or last. When they hit London, they're exhausted. This was very noticeable the first time the New York Philharmonic dropped by with their new chief conductor Alan Gilbert a few years back. They were a pale and baggy-eyed lot compared to the alert team I'd seen and heard just a few months before in New York. This time exhaustion wasn't the problem. They hadn't performed Mahler Nine since early January when the fourth movement was interrupted by the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anything new to say about becoming a parent? Not really. But about 20 years ago it certainly looked that way. It was around the time feminism had gone mainstream, and also when newspapers began swelling in size and needed extra content, so columnists started writing a great deal about motherhood. They reported from the frontline of epidurals and breastfeeding as if it was breaking news, as if they were the first generation ever actually to give birth. This egregious phenomenon flew in the face of the wise old saying that your own baby is of course the greatest miracle, but no one Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Challenging the boundaries of reality and the way in which characters exist in and redefine their worlds has become something of a hallmark of director Pawel Pawlikowski. Considering his previous film My Summer of Love, one critic wrote of it as a study of worlds that “exist somewhere on the periphery of normality”. His new film The Woman in the Fifth pushes this further, revealing in a second-half twist that the boundaries of what we had assumed to be reality actually exist in the imagination, somewhere close to madness, to a darkness inside. Rich in mood, and evocative in its images of a Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Who’d have thought that a long-gone turning point in the story of cinema would be the high-concept theme of the 2011/2012 season? Hard on the heels of The Artist, the lauded silent movie in which a stubborn star can’t, or won’t, make the transition to sound, comes all all-singing, all-dancing treatment of the very same era and story in Singin’ in the Rain.That’s not all either: a major subplot of Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo rediscovers and reinstates George Méliès, the great pioneer-director of silent cinema, as he languishes in obscurity in 1930s Paris, while over at the National Theatre Read more ...
Andrew Perry
Five minutes before stage time at the Lexington, the latest retro-soul diva from the mighty Universal conglomerate hovered outside the ladies’ toilet downstairs, holding a crutch and looking decidedly nervous. Ren Harvieu was one of the nominees in the BBC’s Sound of 2012, and has been groomed for the past two years in the same Kid Gloves stable, which churned out Duffy and Amy Winehouse. Thus the nation will doubtless soon become readily conversant with her exotic French-Canadian surname, and know that the first one is short for Lauren. Unlike many such major-label racing certainties, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
King Lear was the play that launched Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory 12 years ago. The company, under the inspired artistic direction of Andrew Hilton, opened its 2012 season with a brand new production that displays all the qualities that have made this remarkable company unique in Britain.The strength of all the shows has always drawn on the special atmosphere and architecture of the building. The theatre space at the Tobacco Factory is not just in the round. It is so small and relatively low-ceilinged that actors and audience are drawn into an alchemical vessel which Andrew Hilton has, Read more ...
graham.rickson
As an evening out, Angus is about as nutritious as the midget gems dispensed by one of the heroine’s confidantes (and offered in heaps to the audience waiting in the foyer). Directed by Ryan McBryde, this stage adaptation of Louise Rennison’s chirpy bestsellers just about hangs together, even though the moments where it succeeds most effectively are the points which most explicitly reference other coming-of-age narratives.Rennison’s source material does well in evoking the clumsiness, the sheer awkwardness of adolescence. And the familiar ingredients are all here: a quirky band of close Read more ...
josh.spero
The most finely judged thing about Lowdown on BBC Four is how it takes the tradition of broad Australian humour and makes it broad enough to cover the Outback without causing a breach in laughter or taste. The taste in this comedy of hacks is, of course, bad, but that's what makes it so good. The bogan element in Australian culture - it's their equivalent of the hick - is turned into the comedy of the unspeakable, and is always very, very funny.Now, I'm not the first man to laugh about anal fissures - for yucks it's somewhere up there with lacemaking and Elizabethan constitutional history - Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Drum rolls, fiddles and flutes were all in action last night at the Donmar Warehouse to herald the beginning of an era. After ten successful years under the direction of Michael Grandage, it was the turn of the theatre’s new Artistic Director Josie Rourke to step forward and lay her claim to the West End’s most intimate space. If Rourke was making a statement with her first production, Farquhar’s broad comedy The Recruiting Officer, then it was one loud with capital letters and laden with exclamation marks – an exuberant, joyous shout of arrival.We all know where we stand when it comes to Read more ...