Reviews
judith.flanders
It takes a lot of work to make a show look as unconsidered and chaotic as this one: thought and care and time and attention all have to be paid before something so random can be achieved. But as so often with Tillmans, the nagging questions persist: is randomness, are the offhand and the casual, valid as ends in themselves? Because Tillman’s über-hip affectless cool has become very tiresome indeed. Even worse, it’s becoming predictable and dull. Tillman's eye, as ever, remains wonderful, but I remain doubtful about the form in which he chooses to convey his ideas.Some of the most recent Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps we'd better get the Prokofiev part of the opening concert out of the way first. I have a real problem with Russian whizz pianist of the moment Denis Matsuev. His iron-clad technique and heavyweight thunder still leave some room for quieter playing, but where were the atmosphere or the bright nimbleness in the tour de force of the Third Piano Concerto? True, you feel safe in Matsuev's hands from the word go, and fiendish elements in the solo role which Prokofiev wrote for his own chameleonic keyboard genius and which stretch even as marvellous a pianist as Martha Argerich to the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
n Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, Larry David plays the fourth-wall-breaking narrator and protagonist Boris Yetnikoff. In his early sixties, Boris is an atheist, hypochondriac, divorcee, failed suicide, blowhard existentialist, and world-class curmudgeon, who’s abandoned his career as a nearly-Nobel-level physicist. He’s the most acridly loquacious - and easily the funniest - Woody Allen manqué yet, vehement in his conviction that life is futile, ready to assume that he has thyroid cancer, who wakes screaming “The horror! The horror!”, as mouthed by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (and Apocalypse Read more ...
graham.rickson
Yorkshire folkies The Demon Barbers have used English dance in their live shows for several years. Time Gentlemen Please takes the idea a step further, integrating contemporary dance stylings within a cast of more traditional types. Thus three hip-hop dancers barge into a musty pub and you’re immediately aware of their sense of displacement. Their moves are jerky and uncomfortable, their body language hinting at deep unease. Then on come the clog dancers.
Damien Barber, one of the Demons, writes in the programme that to try and reach a larger and younger audience it was necessary to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s biblical tale it was performed by dancer Lindsay Kemp at the Roundhouse in London, back in the 1970s, in a production that was high on dope, incense, strange vocal drawling - and which transported you very quickly to hippie heaven. Choked by clouds of fragrant perfume, weird in its singsong language and thrilling in its strangeness, this seemed like an ideal way of realising the crazy vision of this odd piece. But theatre is not about being faithful to fond memories, it’s about the constant restaging of classic plays, so this new version of Wilde’s 1892 play Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Films about rock stars usually fail, because it's impossible to recreate whatever larger-than-life qualities made them unique and famous in the first place. You frequently end up with a slightly embarrassing party-piece impersonation that captures some of the mannerisms but misses the essence of the character.John Lennon continues to exert a strange fascination for film-makers, doubtless because he's the Martyred Beatle, but previous biopics have shrewdly homed in on lesser-known aspects of his life, so you weren't constantly comparing the celluloid version with what you knew of the real Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The second season of the Bridge Project - a transatlantic relationship forged between between Kevin Spacey, artistic director at the Old Vic in London, theatre and film director Sam Mendes, and Joseph Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music - which aims to make theatrical connections in a series of cross-cast co-productions with American and British actors, has opened with a double header of Shakespeare. At first sight, As You Like It and The Tempest may not appear obvious bedfellows but, as Mendes (who directs both plays) points out in his programmes notes, they both Read more ...
fisun.guner
It took Picasso four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child, or so he said. For Brancusi it wasn‘t a case of relearning childhood, but of being careful not to lose it in the first place. “When we are no longer children we are already dead,” he said. A little further down the food chain of contemporary art, Grayson Perry, the delightful transvestite potter who accepted his Turner Prize award as alter-ego Claire (because he likes to feel the prickle of humiliation when he’s dressed like Milly-Molly-Mandy in a crowd), evokes the spirit of Alan Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You'd be forgiven for thinking that an opera that - in all seriousness - climaxes to the words, "Farewell, little table. You seemed so large," might need a small, but firm, slap in the face. But you'd be quite wrong. Manon is really quite froth-free. Its operatic brothers-in-arms are Lulu and The Rake's Progress, charting as they all do the rise and tumbling fall of an innocent at the hands of a corrupting city; its allusive musical ways reach out to Debussy and Puccini. The point is, it's a modern work. Add director Laurent Pelly (of La Fille du régiment fame), Anna Netrebko and young Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Tragedy reminds us how to live,” declares Moira Buffini’s democratically elected heroine, Eurydice. It’s a reminder the playwright herself and her latest work, Welcome to Thebes, is eager to provide. Following on the well-worn heels of last season’s Mother Courage at the National comes a new play that once again places women in the front line. Leaving to Brecht the barren fields of Western Europe, Buffini sets up her stall in the fertile dramatic ground of contemporary Africa – a place where gang-rape and murder are just the prologue.Within this political reaction chamber Buffini collides Read more ...
neil.smith
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather trilogy has been here of course, his 1982 flop One From the Heart leading him to declare bankruptcy and spend a decade or more doing derivative hack work to pay off his debts. This time around, though, he has taken a self-sufficient route, using profits from his Californian vineyard and other businesses to finance modestly budgeted indies that enable Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer of North London pop phenomenon N-Dubz – or, if you prefer, Tula Constavlos, her cousin Dino Constavlos and their schoolfriend Richard Rawson – are easy to mock, and Channel 4 know it. The first episode of this showbiz slice-of-life documentary about the ebullient trio is so slathered with the kind of hideously knowing upper-middle-class arched-eybrow voiceover that characterises the whole of the channel's T4 youth programming strand that you have to wonder if they actually credit the viewer with the ability to form an opinion at all.It's true there are occasions when N Read more ...