Reviews
gerard.gilbert
The new series of the Glenn Close litigation drama Damages began like the previous two series of Damages – in the future tense. Someone deliberately slammed their car into the side of Patty Hewes’s car, and a grisly discovery was made in a wheelie bin. How we get to this dénouement will be revealed over the next three months. Am I up for such a commitment? Because miss just 10 minutes of this tortuous legal thriller and you’re up the proverbial creek. It’s easy to see why Damages does extraordinarily well in DVD box-set sales – if you’re going to get hooked, then it’s good to have some Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For a while, actually, it appears as if a dollop of irony might just be on the cards, and during those passages, at least, British writer-director Kirk Jones's road movie looks poised to be quietly revolutionary. But once the dictates of convention settle in, watch out! At the press screening attended, a fellow near me was crying what seemed to be tears brought on by the helpless laughter that accompanies mockery. One can only assume he wasn't moved.In fact, I went fully prepared to be touched, and for a while De Niro and Jones ensure that spectators are. We've all admired this Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Gil Scott-Heron, I'm New Here (XL Recordings)by Russ CoffeySome say Gil Scott-Heron invented rap. He certainly pioneered rhythm and blues poetry. And, famously, after an extraordinary career and just when he should have been old enough to know better, he lost his way to drug addiction. And now here he is, quite remarkably, back. He’s rediscovered his creative muse, showing again what substance there can be in hip hop lyrics. Because really that’s what this album is – a hip hop album. And ironically, given how often Scott-Heron has been sampled, here he turns the tables, borrowing sampled Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It is difficult for modern audiences to appreciate just how shocking Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was when it was first published in 1881. Its sexual and syphilitic storyline - how the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons - was considered immoral, loathsome even, and audiences must have felt deeply uncomfortable watching their Victorian, Christian hypocrisies laid bare. So how to make Ghosts relevant to today’s theatregoers?In Frank McGuinness’s rather pedestrian version, much of the play’s moral outrage becomes incidentally comic - a reference to unmarried couples living together brings Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As one of the opening captions put it, "you couldn't make it up", and this sprightly drama about the House of Commons expenses scandal duly tacked its way skilfully up the channel between satire and slapstick. Concluding correctly that wallowing in moral outrage was not the way to handle a subject whose full ramifications have yet to land on us (and them) with their full crushing force, writer Tony Saint instead deftly depicted the Commons as a kind of Swiftian monstrosity, ludicrous yet malevolent.Speaker Michael Martin, Labour MP for Glasgow Springburn, was presented as an antediluvian Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Imagine a future, a near future, in which gangs of teenage boys roam the deserted streets of the metropolis, selling hallucinatory butterflies and organising parties in squats for rich clients who have extreme tastes in sexual abuse. Imagine. This is the vividly conceived sci-fi world of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, first staged in 2005 and now revived in an old London office block by the thrilling fringe company Theatre Delicatessen.The story concerns two teenage brothers, Elliot and Darren, who help the gang leader, Spinx, organise extreme parties in which a Party Guest acts out his violent Read more ...
fisun.guner
Like Philippe Starck, whose Alessi tripod lemon squeezer is a bit like an evil-looking Louise Bourgeois spider, Ron Arad emerged in the Eighties as something of a “rock‘n’roll” designer. It’s a label that’s stuck, as has its sexy variant “post-punk”. The latter came about after his break-through Rover Chair (1981; main picture) found its first customer in Jean-Paul Gaultier. The Rover Chair was a clever salvage job: an old battered leather Rover car seat mounted on curved steel. It was perfect for the 1980s bachelor pad and, aptly, made its television debut on Top Gear under Jeremy Read more ...
David Nice
Beware of Zimermania - or, for that matter, of idolising any pianist as the Greatest Living Interpreter of Chopin. Our birthday boy, 200 years old last night (and not on 1 March), as a crucial baptismal register now seems to prove, is too big for any one artist to dominate. He looks to his French heritage for sensuality, to the Polish maternal line for Slavic weight and thoughtfulness. If a sometimes impatient Krystian Zimerman inclined more to the former in yesterday's big celebration, that's not to deny he was a worthy choice of golden-toned celebrant. It was just a pity that it all had to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
If Michael Moore's new film were a person, it would be diagnosed with a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. His Cook's Tour through the ills of capitalism spans, inter alia: forced repossessions; worker lock-ins; the breadline salaries of airline pilots, some of whom sell blood or use food stamps to pay the bills; a scam, perpetrated by a judge in collusion with a private company, to make money by sending harmless youngsters to a correctional facility; Hurricane Katrina; the election of President Obama; cats flushing toilets - in short, everything but the kitchen sink.Any one of these Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For six years from 1988, when Sinn Fein was banned from direct broadcasting, Gerry Adams could be seen on television, but not heard. Instead, actors would read his words while his lips soundlessly moved. What would the architects of that ban have said if they’d been told that one day the political face of the Provisional IRA would be given an hour on television to make a programme about Christ? "Jesus wept?" "He’s got a bloody cheek?"We already know what the Daily Mail has said. Adams has been paid 10 grand for his participation in The Bible: A History, and do they not like that. In this Read more ...
David Nice
Marie Duplessis, Alexandre Dumas the Younger's real-life "lady of the camellias", was only 23 when consumption finally claimed her. Ignore a few lines about youth in Verdi's operatic treatment, though, and there's no reason why courtesan Violetta shouldn't be a woman of advancing years who finds true love with a man half her age or more; think Chéri (Colette's novel, not the film if you please). Yet the real prompting for that stalwart of the London amateur and semi-professional music scene Chelsea Opera Group to choose Romanian-born diva Nelly Miricioiu as its traviata in concert was because Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade, much of the energy in new writing has come from black Britons. Homegrown talents such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Kwame Kwei-Armah have sent us updates about the state of hybrid, streetsmart culture, and alerted us to the experiences of minorities. In doing so, they have reinvented punchy dialogue, with stage chat that zips along with dizzy humour and linguistic freshness. Hot on their heels comes Bola Agbaje, whose latest play has just opened on the main stage at the Royal Court.Before the play starts, Agbaje sets out her stall — the curtain has the Read more ...