Reviews
Sam Marlowe
One look at Tom Scutt’s meticulous design for Jeremy Herrin’s production of this savage Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and you know you’re in the 1970s. Wood veneer and faux leather lend a shiny, wipe-clean surface to this desolately unhappy home, where everything is in shades of brown: beige carpets, beige walls, beige lives. When laughter comes, it is often choking; Herrin’s direction is so mercilessly precise, and the acting so acute, that though it is undeniably funny, the play leaves you bruised and punchdrunk.It begins, with quiet, cruel deliberation, with two women in that ugly, expensive room Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Immediately before Barry Adamson started his performance, the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was treated to a few fragrant verses about arts cinemas and the homeless from Yorkshire poet Geoffrey Allerton. The keen-eyed soon twigged that Allerton was actually a fictional construct, part-Simon Armitage, part-Freddie Trueman, created by comedian Simon Day. A beautifully idiosyncratic prelude to a pretty idiosyncratic headline set.When Barry Adamson stalked on stage, posing at the top of a short staircase on a white Austin Powers shagpile, it would have been easy to mistake him for Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts. As its daring do-gooder, it features boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe, now a man and here a father who, in his continued battle against evil, is hardly Read more ...
ash.smyth
Watching Bullets, Boots and Bandages last night, I found myself recalling a tutor from my Master’s year whose favourite hobby was lampooning the “sloppy thinking” of other noted academics. His personal bête noire, he more than once informed us, had many years ago written a book averring that leadership was the most important thing in war; then, later, another saying that actually technology was the key; after which came a volume on the paramount importance of strategy; and then one concluding that wars were in fact won and lost over logistics.Saul David agrees with the last bit, at least. “ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne’s Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy - the world of quantum mechanics, cosmology and chaos theory suggests ideas about the randomness of our daily lives. And there is nothing quite so random as love.In the appealingly titled Mathematics of the Heart, Dr Paul MacMillan – a bearded boffin from Middlesex University – has a problem. He is a professor of chaos theory, and his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Poor old Stephen Hough. The Liszt double. Again! Was he not at all Liszted out after last year's epic bicentenary? Were we not Liszted out by last year's epic bicentenary? Hough has been living, breathing and eating these two pieces for the past year and a half. The familiarity might have bred contempt. Amazingly it hasn't. In fact, all the prep work of last year appeared to make this performance of the first two piano concertos one of the most satisfying I've heard.The works are well known to us today. The rhetorical gestures, the reveries, the roulades are pure Liszt, the epitome of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The work of the photographer, theatrical designer, narcissist, snob, careerist, and exceptionally talented Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), including 18,000 vintage prints, negatives and transparencies, contact sheets and 45 books of cuttings are at the Victoria & Albert Museum. They have all been brilliantly culled for the alluring and significant exhibition of some of Beaton’s royal portraits, billed as A Diamond Jubilee Celebration. Sir Roy Strong put Beaton firmly back on the map after he had gone out of fashion with a dazzling 1968 compilation at the National Portrait Gallery. He is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of a certain vintage will recall with fondness their childhood years (or those as parents of small children) gathered in front of the television on Sunday evenings between 1976-1981 to watch The Muppet Show. But The Muppets movie, their first big-screen outing in 12 years, is no lazy exercise in nostalgia; it's bracingly original and postmodern, with dollops of self-knowing humour and irony.It's also produced by Disney (which now owns the Muppets brand), making the accusation that, with its message of anti-corporate greed, the film is the work of pinko communists so much funnier. As Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a brave sitcom writer who dares to write a bleakly comic drama, without canned laughter, in which nothing very much happens and where a long-married couple natter away about the mundane details of their lives in the half-hour after they come home from work. But twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne have done just that, and the result, Roger and Val Have Just Got In, is a thing of quiet beauty.It debuted on BBC Two in 2010 and, given little fanfare by the corporation, still gained a solid and devoted following, instantly hooked on this delicately woven story about Roger and Val (Alfred Read more ...
howard.male
We humans think we’re the bee’s knees don’t we? We’ve got language, music, art, cars, fridges, bank accounts. Essentially we’ve left all of the other planet’s creatures faltering on the starting line. Well, if that’s what you believe then it may have come as a surprise to see a chimp on last night’s Super Smart Animals solving a number-centred memory challenge that we oh-so-superior primates couldn’t even begin to do, and doing it so quickly and effortlessly that the chimp was suspected of having learnt it by rote.Welcome to a world which of course has always been there, it’s just that we’re Read more ...
fisun.guner
Sitting for Lucian Freud was quite a commitment. Unlike Hockney, whom he painted and who painted him, Freud was a very slow painter and he was methodical. Paying close attention to detail and absorbed by different textures, he was intent on building up surfaces meticulously, layer upon layer. This meant that sessions would usually go on for several months, sometimes years. And because Freud felt that their presence affected the surrounding space, like the ripple effect on water, he even required his sitters to continue to sit for him even if he was occupied with painting the crumbling plaster Read more ...
peter.quinn
Naturally 7 represent the point where close-harmony singing, beatboxing and spookily accurate instrumental imitation meet. The US septet call it "vocal play" - the voice as instrument - and last night they sent dopamine levels soaring in the Barbican. The group conveys the beat-driven swagger of hip hop, the freewheeling improv of jazz and the trenchant emotion of soul, often within the confines of a single song. Their arrangements, courtesy of MD Roger Thomas, possess such textural imagination and technical finesse that they're able to traverse genres seemingly without artifice.Part of the Read more ...