Reviews
Matt Wolf
No one can exactly accuse Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 play of falling into neglect. From Howard Davies's National Theatre revival to this latest reclamation by the Almeida, The House of Bernarda Alba has received six separate airings in (or near) London within almost seven years. The various treatments include an American stage musical, an adaptation relocated to Pakistan, and a puppet play performed to a pre-recorded Farsi soundtrack. Bijan Sheibani's current production is live-action, to be sure, but follows the Middle Eastern motif: this is the first Lorca revival in my experience to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker and her client, a working-class single mother who kills her baby. Inspired by the notorious case of Baby P, the piece adopts an intriguing form in order to examine the realities behind the tabloid headlines about evil mums and monstrous sinners.Moira, the social worker, visits Dawn, the single mother, and discovers to her horror that she has abused her baby. As a consequence of the case, Dawn is imprisoned Read more ...
fisun.guner
Diehard Sebaldians may seek to retrace the footsteps that formed the basis of WG Sebald’s meditative masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. Or they may choose to watch Grant Gee’s film tribute instead. Patience (After Sebald) takes as its fulcrum the German expatriate’s category-defying memoir-cum-history, travelogue-cum-novel – which was published in 1995 and is considered by many to be his greatest work – and it attempts to recreate the book's physical and mental landscape. An ambitious undertaking, it only partly succeeds.Excerpts from the novel are beautifully read by Jonathan Pryce (one is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beatles’s arrival on US TV screens in February 1964 is usually recognised as the beginning of the British Invasion of America. But this drama, focusing on chippy, upstart photographer David Bailey, his relationship with his chosen model Jean Shrimpton and their first shoot in Manhattan, floated the idea that their US visit in January 1962 was as pivotal as The Fabs’s debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. We'll Take Manhattan was significant for featuring Karen Gillan, now on her last lap in Doctor Who, in her first starring vehicle. The sense behind casting her was clear. Gillan Read more ...
joe.muggs
I first heard Zed Bias's Biasonic Hot Sauce – Birth of the Nanocloud last autumn. He may have been one of the key players in the London-centric sound of UK garage, but he was never of that scene. Based in Milton Keynes through the first phase of his career, he releases through a Brighton label and is now resident in Manchester. This is key to understanding the connections in his tracks, which reflect the clubs in those cities that sidestep metropolitan scene micro-delineation and rave parochialism and lock into a wider soulboy set of connections.His sprawling album as Maddslinky earlier in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It would be easy to begin with a reflection on how little the world has changed in the 100 years since the birth of Woody Guthrie; to draw parallels between the Great Depression and our own troubled economic times. Yet en route to last night's “Woody at 100” celebrations at Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival, I realised that to do so would constitute a disservice to undoubtedly one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century.For Guthrie’s centenary, his daughter Nora has once again opened up access to the thousands of uncompleted lyrics and writings curated by the Woody Guthrie Read more ...
fisun.guner
In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of the clan, are two detailed, tender sketches of Lucian in profile. In the right sketch the dying artist stares resolutely ahead, his gaze, coupled with the firm set of his jaw, capturing a sense of absolute stillness. The left sketch shows the artist now more gaunt, eyes closed, in death, we imagine, or possibly just asleep. Perhaps much more Read more ...
carole.woddis
The Old Vic Tunnels would seem to be the perfect place to set three of Eugene O’Neill’s three earliest plays about the sea, drenched as they are in the stench of life in the heavy engine room of merchant navy life. For the tunnels, secreted directly underneath Waterloo Station, shudder ceaselessly to the rumble of trains overhead and are saturated in their own heavy industrial atmosphere. Indeed as you enter you’re hit by the smell of dust and damp running at full blast. Come prepared. It’s dark and putrid down there. Wrap up warm.Waterloo Station’s converted railway vaults, barely two years Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The London Philharmonic’s current festival – Prokofiev: Man of the People? – is all about the question mark. While the festival’s concerts, lectures and even its classical club-night each make their own statement, the overarching spirit here is one of exploration, of questioning. Jurowski and his orchestra are peeling back the composer’s grinning modernist mask and attempting to expose the human face (or possibly faces) behind it. It’s a provocative process, and one that calls Prokofiev’s lesser-known works to testify against the evidence of such popular, high-gloss favourites as Romeo and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“Paradise can go fuck itself”: the candid words of a disillusioned middle-aged man in director Alexander Payne’s latest road-to-redemption dramedy. He’s referring to the irritating presumption that Hawaii’s idyllic surroundings in some way shield its residents from the mire and misfortunes of life. Although there’s a smattering of such sourness in Payne’s adaptation of the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, for the most part this tale of a father reconnecting with his daughters is surprisingly sweet.In The Descendants a pleasingly shaggy George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer and Read more ...
ash.smyth
When I opened my e-nvitation to write up last night’s The World Against Apartheid, I was not expecting it to come bedecked with GoogleAds for hen parties, roller discos, and custom-made birthday invitations (keyword: "part/y", one assumes). Only 20 years ago, any mail on this topic would’ve been stuffed with "End racism NOW!" leaflets, discount book offers by/about Basil D’Oliveira, and pop-up Peter Hains beseeching you to boycott your local fruiterers. Twenty years ago "The World Against Apartheid" would have been a call to arms.But now it is a history programme, and one a decade in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s about the bass and the drums. The choirboy high vocals and sugary melodies catch the ear first, but they’d be so much soufflé without the room-shaking, stomach-wobbling bass throb, the Chic-style disco drumming and its tsk-tsk-tsk hi-hat shuffle. Combined, the soft and airy, the propulsive and grounded make the audience move. Not tap a toe, but actually move – dance.Casiokids need that connection as, despite every other person at this sold-out show being Norwegian, there’s the language barrier. A rarity amongst Norwegian musical exports, Casiokids sing in their native language. There was Read more ...