Reviews
judith.flanders
A few years ago, the word was that a new choreographer was showing interesting things. His name was Liam Scarlett, and although he was very young, some work that had been seen in a workshop was looking promising. It was not long before “promising” became actuality, and Scarlett’s first piece, Asphodel Meadows (main picture), was premiered on the Opera House stage. Now in Draft Works, an evening of 10 pieces by burgeoning choreographers connected with the Royal Ballet, we once again get a chance to see works-in-progress, to get in on the ground floor and be able, later, to say, “I was there Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and intoned “Merdre!” (roughly translated as Shittr!). The effect was electric, and the scandal outlasted the show's run. In Simon Stephens’s new version of the play, which opened last night, the original story has been supplemented with a longer second half that updates the action to today, and sees mad boy Ubu tried for war crimes.As an exponent of the imaginary science of pataphysics, which is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been this way before. A few years ago the BBC screened a series called Play It Again, in which celebrities had a crack at performing on musical instruments which they had not visited in decades. Sky Arts have revisited the concept with a series called First Love, whose first six programmes went out last year and featured a usual array of celebrity suspects starring in a game of friends reunited, the musical version. The new series includes among others Stephen Mangan on acoustic guitar, Shaun Ryder on saxophone, the inevitable Alastair Campbell on bagpipes, but it begins in the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe’s slick production for the Peter Hall Company, the show has finally arrived in the West End. The part of the ailing and eccentric monarch (“a catalogue of regal non-conformities”), and indeed the play itself, may have become synonymous with Nigel Hawthorne, but after an evening spent getting to know David Haig’s altogether more robust King George, there are surely few who would question him as the role’s legitimate heir: no hint of a troubled Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Romance follows a recognisably rocky path, and visa issues don't help much either, in Like Crazy, a small but seriously affecting movie that is sure to hit many filmgoers where they live. An Anglo-American tale of love's vagaries that doesn't follow the expected Hollywood arc, Drake Doremus's 2011 Sundance Film Festival darling raises niggling questions on various plot details while getting the large-scale issues right. And when it's over, you may experience something resembling a dying fall, as if in sync with a story about how tough it is to sustain the intensity of the kind of love whose Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Abandoned attempts to bring Sebastian Faulks's World War One novel to the movie screen stretch from Soho to Sunset Boulevard. Most of these were prepared and discarded under the auspices of Working Title Films, so perhaps it's fitting that Birdsong has finally been made by the BBC and Working Title's new television division.One can only speculate what a cinema version would have looked like, though at one stage the leading characters might have borne an uncanny resemblance to Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley, but this telly-isation has worked a treat. Even two 90-minute episodes aren't enough Read more ...
graham.rickson
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.A two-minute walk from the garish delights of 21st-century Leeds, and it feels as if you’ve stepped back in time. Which is the point. Big Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It must have been gruelling to pitch. A cynical modern satire set in a motivational conference for salesmen would have been a hard enough sell on its own. So too the choric figure who comments on the action directly to camera. But the bold USP of Acts of Godrey is the script: it's entirely in rhyming couplets.There is a place for rhyme in dramatic storytelling, and for most punters that place is Molière (Racine and Corneille not being box office these days). Only the other year Keira Knightley made her stage debut in an updating of The Misanthrope to contemporary media London. In recent times Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Folk music is about roots and place and while rootedness can provide a welcome balance to the vagaries of a virtual and globalised world, it can also raise some less salubrious spirits: the British folk movement expresses at times a folksy form of insularity, in which place or nation are made just a little too sacred and exclusive. The Cecil Sharp Project, which emerged out of a week of workshopping sponsored last year by the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, avoided these pitfalls with a great deal of deftness, a sense of irony as well as a dose of humour.The assembled musicians drew from the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Francesca Zambello’s production of Don Giovanni may only be 10 years old, but is already showing signs of decrepitude. Even back in its youth in 2002-3, this staging never had much of a spring in its step, but at least there were some fantastic casts to compensate. Bryn Terfel, Anna Netrebko, Simon Keenlyside and Erwin Schrott have all taken their turn here, but even with Gerald Finley returning in the title role there’s little the current incumbents can do to do rescue this aged and confused attempt at a seduction.Set outside what appears to be a particularly ugly municipal swimming pool Read more ...
geoff brown
How do you solve a problem like Prokofiev? Not with a TV talent hunt promoted by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Not even, I’m beginning to think, with the current London Philharmonic concert series, Prokofiev: Man of the People?, devised by Vladimir Jurowski. Prokofiev’s uneven output; his parade of masks, making it hard to decipher what the composer is thinking and feeling: these form the principal difficulties, especially when the popular works are put to one side in the programmes and the gargoyles and dead dogs march in. We had a couple of those in last Wednesday’s London Philharmonic concert Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle. His attitude to women is expressed by his dated vocabulary – “bint”, “bird” or just “it”. And he’s always on the fiddle.Half a century Read more ...