Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Although focusing on London’s Tube network, Confessions From the Underground brought up issues that aren’t unique to Britain’s infrastructure. Increasing usage versus declining levels of staff. Employees working against targets while being pushed to cut corners. It could have been the NHS or schools, but last night's documentary about the tube allowed the staff of London Underground to raise their concerns.This could have been an eyebrow-raising selection of accidents and near misses that've been hushed up. Instead – apart from a looking into the questionable response to a dust cloud at Read more ...
geoff brown
At last, a bag of sweets! In earlier concerts from Vladimir Jurowski’s LPO series Prokofiev: Man of the People? much time was spent consuming the composer’s flat soufflés, experimental rock cakes, or the fancy dish that was really haddock. Interesting for the brain, maybe, but the diet on occasion has been hard on the stomach. Not that any of this impinged on audience numbers: the season has definitely proved Jurowski’s happy lock on the London Philharmonic’s audiences. They will follow their artistic guru and Principal Conductor almost anywhere.But for this last concert of all, the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Charlize Theron proved her acting chops, and won an Oscar in the process, playing a serial killer in the movie Monster, but surely her brilliantly realised Mavis Gary in Young Adult is very nearly as monstrous, albeit in a different way. Emotionally fixated to the point of pathological single-mindedness, Mavis is every "psychotic prom-queen bitch" (the film's words, not mine) you may think you left behind in school but haven't. And though she's as fine-boned and alluring to look at here as Aileen Wuornos was both pasty and pockmarked, don't be fooled. Beauty truly is skin-deep.The result is a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Oberon in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream was the hurdle at which the ferociously promising young Sergei Polunin refused when he quit the Royal Ballet last week, and whether it was the deceptive complexity and difficulty of it that caused his sudden exit, last night’s opening gave his replacement, the brilliant Steven McRae, such a run for his money that it wouldn’t be surprising if the role had indeed left Polunin in a blue funk.Ashton’s balletic reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is almost 50 years old now and its charms and nimble wit seem enhanced every time one sees it. So Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The roar with which Leonidas Kavakos and Emanuel Ax dispatched Beethoven’s mighty Op. 30 C minor Violin Sonata – flinging off the writhing semiquaver coils of the Finale with desperate vigour – was enough to remind anyone in the Wigmore Hall last night of the serious talent of this Greek violinist. It was not however quite enough to banish the memory of the evening’s whimpering start – the ragged gesture in the general direction of the Violin Sonata in A Op. 12 No. 2 – with which we opened.From the flurry of competition wins that launched his career, Kavakos has built a mature performing Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been nearly a century since modernism decreed that “art” is whatever is produced by an artist, and “an artist” is whoever claims to be one. Mostly I agree with this, and my eyeballs tend to roll back in my head when the conversation moves on to the “my three-year-old could do this” refrain. But I’ve got to say, with David Shrigley, a lot of me spent a lot of time in the Hayward thinking, “Um, is this art?”I suppose the very fact that the work I was looking at made me think this way is a mark in its favour: it made me think, it made me consider what art is, or isn’t. But what I ended up Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking a year later, but with polymath Philip Ridley’s amazing debut, The Pitchfork Disney, in 1991. Now, with this long overdue revival which opened last night, we get another chance to sample a powerful and imaginative drama in all its glittering and eerie strangeness.Set in a dimly lit room in the East End of London, the play starts by showing the hermit-like existence of Presley and Haley Stray, a couple of 28-year Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Chemical Brothers have long had one of the most vital shows around. It’s a visual spectacular that can only be likened to peak-time Pink Floyd or Jean-Michel Jarre, yet precision-tooled, without the bombast of those acts. Their long-term visual designer, Adam Smith, is mostly responsible and now he’s shot a concert film of the electronic duo’s appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan last year. Smith has directed a few bits and bobs before, notably the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit, and he’s the perfect choice to take the Chemical Brothers experience into the cinema.He doesn’t, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With its mistaken identities, a meddling mother, a chest of precious jewels, gulling of fops and two pairs of thwarted lovers, it's easy to see Shakespearean overtones in Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 masterpiece. And because She Stoops to Conquer's witty and intelligent heroine, Kate, outsmarts her would-be suitor Marlow, it's even more tempting to see it as having shades of The Taming of the Shrew, only without the difficult bits for modern audiences.Whatever else it may be, She Stoops to Conquer is a delightful and warm-hearted comedy of manners that is as relevant today in its depiction of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not a genre which springs too many surprises. Ever since Sir John Harvey-Jones strode into shot a good 20 years ago, the template was set for the sort-your-life-out documentary. Expert enters, throws up hands in horror, delivers a quantity of home truths, exits. Like the talent contest, it’s a flexi-format, applicable to kitchen cleanliness, child-rearing, the high street and, in the case of The Hotel Inspector, mouldy B&Bs on their uppers. In The Fixer, Alex Polizzi has checked out of hotel salvage and turned her attention to putting a smile on the face of ailing businesses.In Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Laura Veirs may be increasingly seen by some as an “undiscovered gem”, but to others she still comes over a bit too corn-fed to warm to. Of course, the much applauded Year of Meteors and July Flame contain some mighty pretty moments, but there’s also a sense that they belong to a slightly smug American West-Coast eco-culture. But now, recent mother Veirs has released an album of “children’s folk songs,” gaining rave reviews. Would last night's show find her fuzzy and huggable, intimate, or just a little too worthy?When Veirs walked on stage in a “vegan chic” vintage pea-green dress and horn- Read more ...
ash.smyth
As if by way of riposte to Birdsong’s ever-so-pensive treatment of late, last night’s Royal Marines: Mission Afghanistan brought warfare back to the 21st century with an uncompromising thump. In Episode 1: Deadly Underfoot, Chris Terrill joined Lima Company, 42 Commando, as they took over from their Marine colleagues at Toki base, in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand. This was in the tenth year of the war – as the greatest of narratives would have it – and the Taliban, so Terrill assured us, were “on the back foot”. There was, presumably, no pun intended.For 50-odd minutes we Read more ...