Reviews
howard.male
While the rest of the country has been busy discussing the knitwear of Denmark’s answer to DCI Jane Tennison, I found myself bereft of anyone to share my unbridled enthusiasm for this Australian adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. Even at the virtual watercooler of Facebook, only one person gave me a thumbs up when I wrote a paragraph on its excellence. Why a fairly generic murder procedural should inspire such obsessive devotion while a completely original and gripping family drama is relatively ignored is something of a mystery.But perhaps it’s because The Slap dared to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Example seems a most unlikely sex symbol but the four-fifths full Brighton Centre (capacity 5100) contains multiple gaggles of young women in their late teens and early twenties who want a piece of 29-year-old Elliot Gleave (EG = Example). My pal Don is bemused. “He looks like a bloke you’d see at a bus stop,” he exclaims above female screams. He does, albeit more stylishly dressed and with a hint of Edmund Blackadder (series one) about his severe fringed haircut. This vocal, partisan crowd – also, it should be noted, filled with men of a similar age - appear willing to lap up anything Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign Nutcrackers being beamed into the UK on a lot of holiday dates. So the dance industry reckon to sell up to half a million Nutcracker seats mostly in London in a bit over a month?I’m tallying up Royal Ballet (20 performances), Birmingham Royal Ballet (28), English National Ballet (35) and Matthew Bourne (47) live, not to mention New York City Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He would not hesitate to wake up employees at all hours to yak about ideas. He could fire an underling in the seconds it took for the elevator to ferry him to or from his fourth-floor office. He shouted, like, a lot, even at Bill Gates. Especially at Bill Gates. And yet the great and the good last night all queued to waft smoke up the posthumous iHole: Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet, Norman Foster, who invented the glass airport, Stephen Bayley, who invented designer waffle. No one in this hagiographical walk-through of a life in gizmos seemed inclined to suggest that Steve Jobs Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Conor McPherson's 2000 play is one of the Irish writer's most memorable works, and this revival comes soon after his less acclaimed latest play, The Veil, over which we shall draw, er, a discreet veil, debuted at the National. It reminds us that McPherson at his best is a writer of humanity and compassion and, as a former toper who is now a non-drinker, one who understands the lure of the bottle. Abbey Wright's seasonal revival of Dublin Carol (it's set on Christmas Eve) is a Donmar production shown as part of the theatre's Resident Assistant Directors scheme in a 12-week season at Trafalgar Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?When director Carol Morley read a Sun headline announcing the macabre discovery in 2006, she pined for those answers, putting ads in the London press, the internet and even a black cab, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Will the app clicker replace the page turner?” asked Alan Yentob’s state-of-play rumination on the book. It’s a cutely phrased question and, as everyone reading this will be familiar with the digital world – this is theartsdesk, after all – a fair one. Will zeroes and ones make the book redundant, a sort of totem, or will it adapt, taking on the new forms presented by the digital world? The programme didn’t answer the questions, but at least it did show the possibilities.A hunt around the BBC’s various websites revealed that Books – the Last Chapter? was known as Books –the End of the Affair Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The play-within-a-play device has honourable antecedents - playwrights from Thomas Kyd and Anton Chekhov through to Bertolt Brecht and Tennessee Williams have flirted with it, while Shakespeare loved it so much that he used it in several of his plays, most famously in Hamlet. Michael Frayn had the idea for Noises Off, which he wrote in 1982, when he was standing in the wings at a performance of Chinamen (a one-act farce performed as part of The Two of Us), which he had written for the late Lynn Redgrave, and thought that the backstage goings-on were even funnier than the onstage action.In Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two.As you walk around them, the threads visually overlap to produce shimmering moiré patterns. The structure is extremely simple, but rather than diminishing its impact, figuring out how it is done only enhances its mesmeric effect. The installation is titled Web and weaving threads of light through Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Oh, the joys of eccentricity. Welcome to the Vanderhof family of misfits. The head of the household, Grandpa Martin, refuses to pay any taxes, preferring to keep snakes on a hatstand. Good for frightening off the tax inspector, who unexpectedly drops by.Other members of the three-generational New York family variously make fireworks in the attic, bake strange candy, play Beethoven on the xylophone, produce unrecognisable masks and write unsuccessful melodramas. Daughter Essie moves around the place as a hopeful hopeless ballerina, aided by an explosive Russian teacher, Olga (Maggie O'Brien, Read more ...
mark.hudson
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken. It left Kiefer and his fellow New Imagers overshadowed and, in a paradox that is absolutely typical of the art Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This was the television equivalent of the slaves in ancient Rome, who used to run alongside their imperial masters whispering in their ear, "Remember, you are mortal." Long before the tantrums, bombast and megalomania of The X Factor, there was New Faces, ITV's Birmingham-based talent show. Its theme tune was Carl Wayne's "You're a Star!" Alf Lawrie's film revisited the 1986 finalists of New Faces to find out how the last 25 years had treated them, and it proved to be an unassuming gem of observational film-making.None of the finalists went on to become the next David Bowie, some Read more ...