Reviews
fisun.guner
When Jake and Dinos Chapman first came to the attention of a wider public at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition, their work came with a parental warning: a sign barring under-18s. After all, naked child mannequins sporting surprised-looking anal apertures for mouths and erect penises for noses were not, until then, the Royal Academy’s usual fare.But the Chapmans, whose works have always delighted in puerile humour, have never been convinced by the notion of childhood innocence. What's more, even at their most macabre and apparently shocking, their imagination has always had Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a journalist with a sense of pride about what we reptiles can achieve, sometimes I shudder at the awfulness of what passes for journalism. The licence fee in theory confers on the BBC some moral purpose higher than that of the base commercial stations, doesn’t it? (Given that it implies Commercial = Bad, Public Service = Good.) So a BBC Three documentary on shoplifting should probably be an example of higher journalism? Maybe something that rams home deeper truths either about the distinction between good and bad, or about disturbed individuals?Look, I know what BBC Three fare is. Just Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the charm-cum-cheek of a naughty schoolboy, Patrick Monahan is an instantly likeable presence whose latest show, I Walked, I Danced, Iran, is a lop-sided but very funny hour-and-a-bit of observational comedy. Monahan is a veteran of several Fringes and a regular on The Paul O’Grady Show on Channel 4. His physical verve is dampened only slightly by ligament damage, caused by “pratting about” at the previous evening’s show but his pronounced limp doesn’t stop him sliding down the stairs from the balcony to make his arrival, although he does retreat to a stool at several points.Patrick Read more ...
fisun.guner
When Simon Hales, a 20-year-old university student, fell from a 20ft wall during a tipsy night out, nobody knew whether he would pull through. He'd suffered a horrific brain injury and would spend the next five weeks in a coma. Luckily, he did pull through, though nobody could recognise the newly awakened Simon from the old Simon. His mother told us that her son "evidently wasn’t Simon”. She loved him, she said, but “what I'm looking for is the son that I had to come back". Simon emerged from his coma in what seemed at first to be a blissfully unaware state. He could remember nothing of his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Domestics of varying kinds have always figured prominently in the cinema, from Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Mary Reilly. (Julia Roberts playing the hired help? Uh, don't think so.) But there's rarely been as sullen and indrawn a family employee as the stone-faced Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the eponymous nana, or maid, in the Chilean film of the same name. The script posits that Raquel has been working for the clearly prosperous Valdes family for 23 years and is going to carry on doing so, and what difference if she's an agent of destruction who hoovers Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If there's one festival in Britain where people are ready for the rain, it's the Green Man. After all, nobody goes to the Brecon Beacons to sunbathe, right? The weekend, which began the spate of boutique and specialist festivals that dominate the summer season now, remains one of the most spirited in the UK, and its crowd seems to be one of the hardiest even when, as this year, the deluge is near-continuous. It helps that the site is both beautiful and sloping, so it wasn't able to turn into a grim waist-deep mudbath; the real saviour of the festival, though, is that attention to detail in Read more ...
theartsdesk
When Sarah Millican won the If.comedy newcomer award two years ago, it was with one of the most accomplished shows I had ever seen at the Fringe - by newbie or veteran - and now the South Shields stand-up has made critics reach for the superlatives again with another hour of superbly crafted comedy.Sarah Millican, The Stand ***** Entitled Chatterbox (a name she was given at school but a quality that, she slyly tells, she is now making a living from), is on the face of it Millican talking away to the audience about the everyday concerns of her life. But it’s much more than that as makes Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art dedicated to Mozart, Shakespeare and Britten. Ambitious indeed of a bunch of Cambridge undergrads and alumni to mount The Magic Flute and the operatic Midsummer Night’s Dream side by side. Did they pull it off? Just, in the case of the Britten, which is saying something given a score which is... well, again, intricate and mysterious are the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?Whatever the reason, the point in such intriguing programmes is not to come out cursing at being served minor-league Read more ...
howard.male
There is a lot of talk about the contestants' experience of Big Brother but little about the viewer’s experience. During its decade on air there was a drop-off of both the red tops' shock-horror coverage and the intellectualised justifications put forward by the quality press, and inevitably this resulted in viewing figures also declining with each passing year. But I confess I remained an avid viewer. It’s not what you watch, it’s how you watch it, I would say to baffled friends to justify my addiction.But however much I spoke of how BB was an education in not taking people at face value, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comic Greg Davies has made us wait for his solo debut - he’s in his early forties, appeared at the Fringe as part of sketch group We Are Klang for a few years and more latterly has been starring in The Inbetweeners on Channel 4 as Mr Gilbert. Before that he was a drama teacher in a secondary school for 13 years. But boy, was it worth the wait.Greg Davies, Pleasance *****Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog is a run-through of his life so far, done as a sort of classroom lecture, complete with blackboard and chalk, and a book with short stories he dips into from time to time, including one about how Read more ...