Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not often you find yourself advised at the start of a West End performance that “mobile phones, photography and fellatio are not permitted”, but then The Hurly Burly Show isn’t exactly your average theatrical fare. The first time the West End has seen a major burlesque revue, the show’s move from a small cabaret club in Soho to the Garrick Theatre reflects a changing attitude to this ancient art. If you believe the hype, women across the UK, in bedrooms, boardrooms and the tinned-goods aisle of Tesco, are all shedding their clothes and donning nipple tassels – in the name of female Read more ...
david.cheal
Bouncy: if there is one word that sums up this hot young Northern Irish band, that would be the one; there is a Tiggerish enthusiasm to their music that encourages bouncing, clapping, arm-waving and generally having a good time, which is exactly what happened at last night's gig: a festive atmosphere prevailed, Two Door Cinema Club played a short, sharp set that lasted for little more than an hour, and they sent the crowd out into the early spring night buzzing.A year ago Two Door Cinema Club were, as their choochy-faced singer Alex Trimble noted during this show, playing the Hoxton Bar and Read more ...
howard.male
On first hearing about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy at the prospect of reviewing them. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to either give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, rather embarrassingly, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no limits.But this visual treat of a film wastes no time in informing us that there is no room for pity in the story of this resilient Read more ...
graham.rickson
Trying to introduce children to classical music is a tricky business. The benchmarks are still Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Poulenc’s Babar – both characterised by witty, quirky music and strong storylines. Opera is a harder sell – there’s the slowness of it, the sheer lunacy of characters striding about on stage expressing their inner feelings at full volume, accompanied by a 70-piece orchestra. So credit is due to Opera North’s education department for commissioning Errollyn Wallen’s Cautionary Tales! in response to requests for family-friendly opera.Aimed at children aged six Read more ...
David Nice
What kind of Aida would you prefer: one in which singing actors stretched to the limits find Verdi's human volcano of emotions beneath the cod-Egyptian rubble, or a stand-and-deliver production with a stalwart cast of beaten-bronze voices? Having had a taste at least of the former once in my life, I wasn't very happy to succumb to the latter in this Covent Garden revival. It was the wall of sound in the big Act II ensemble which made me at least willing to be convinced.And then I wasn't. And then I was again. It's that kind of a show, a reminder of the bad old repertoire days at the Royal Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As a young man searching for a way to make a living in Paris, Antoine Watteau briefly tried his hand at engraving fashion plates. He seems to have had a natural affinity for cloth and drew its folds and creases with such apparent ease that you can almost feel the slipperiness of satin and hear the rustle of taffeta as it moves with the body. This was just as well, since he didn’t attend the Academy where students did life drawing and learned anatomy. For most people such lack of training would have been a serious setback, but by copying the work of artists like Rubens and Veronese, Watteau Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Like so much fine music, Gerald Barry's new work began life as detritus. Feldman's Sixpenny Editions, which received its world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, are elaborations on the tacky little Edwardian jingles whose browning dog-eared scores are still to be found in music shops up and down the land selling in big plastic buckets for 5p. This - "as well as other kinds of trash", Barry admits in his tip-top programme notes - was the music he first grew to love. And out of these dearly beloved sows' ears, he's made eight extraordinary silk purses.Unusually for such Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
James Nesbitt has always looked full of himself and too bumptious for comfort, so who better to play a smart-arse neurosurgeon who prides himself on his rock-steady hands and steely nerves? "What really matters is how well you handle losing," he bragged to his attending team of young doctors as they gathered round the latest sawn-open skull, delivering the line with the air of a riverboat gambler striking a match on the sole of his boot.He was showing his underlings how to insert a pressure-relieving catheter into the patient's head, a bread-and-butter routine – a no-brainer, even – within Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Many of you will know Ed Byrne from his appearances on BBC shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You, where his sardonic take on current affairs marks him out as a sharp-tongued and quick-witted comic. Now he’s touring with a new show, Crowd Pleaser, which I saw at the Anvil in Basingstoke; like his previous live work, it’s another well-constructed evening of smart observational comedy.The Irishman’s live material tends to be more personal than the kind he does on TV, although here there are some intelligent political references - for instance, to the limits of democracy when Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Published in 1987, Norwegian Wood was the novel that turned Haruki Murakami from writer to celebrity in his native Japan. With over 12 million copies sold internationally and a cult of devoted readers waiting fretfully, the notoriously unfilmable book finally makes its screen debut under the direction of Tran Anh Hung. Described by the author simply as “a love story”, this most conventional of Murakami’s narratives picks through the emotional detritus of a teenage suicide, exposing the strands of grief and sexuality that bind our hero Watanabe to the women in his life.“Life is too short to Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps to my left, the Egyptian rooms. But then again… here are some sensual sculptures of curvaceous semi-clad women from India (main picture), while a little further on there’s a Chinese hand mirror and some boot buckles, the latter with Chinese dragons whose wings are of turquoise.Afghanistan, a country whose recent war-torn history is part of our Read more ...
fisun.guner
An artist as inventive and as protean as Picasso, and one who ceaselessly absorbed influences throughout his life, will inevitably present an ever-changing face to the world. Hence, we have an apparently inexhaustible supply of exhibitions devoted to him. Two UK exhibitions last year were of particular note: the ambitious but skewed Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool, which interpreted the work solely through the single, distorting lens of Picasso’s “political activism”, and the Gagosian Gallery’s Mediterranean Years, which, in simply highlighting Picasso’s playfulness, was by far the more Read more ...