Reviews
graham.rickson
The plot of this rarely performed Gilbert and Sullivan spoof melodrama is gloriously amusing. The male heirs of the Murgatroyd family suffer under a witch’s curse which forces them to commit a crime each day, or suffer an agonising death. Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd has fled the ancestral home and now lives under a pseudonym, meaning that his younger brother Despard has had to assume both the baronetcy and the duty to commit the daily crime. Unlike his older brother's dastardly penchant for stealing babies and robbing banks, he finds it hard to progress beyond forging cheques and fiddling expenses Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Marcus Brigstocke, like God, is everywhere. No, strike that - the star of (and I may be missing a few here) Argumental, The Now Show, I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off and The Late Edition is currently performing God Collar, a show about rational atheism, so let’s drop the deity assumption. Whether God exists depends on your personal faith choices, but we know Brigstocke absolutely does exist because at any given time he is appearing on television and radio, sometimes on several channels at once.Not that I mind his ubiquity, as Brigstocke is a very bright man who clearly Read more ...
David Nice
Is Donizetti's fustian operatic mash-up of Sir Walter Scott worth staging seriously? On CD, stupenda Sutherland and divina Callas continue to give us goosebumps with their darting, florid stabs at poor mad Lucia. If the difficult-to-achieve match of bel canto and dramatic intensity rests only with the lead tenor, as it did last night, what's left? Well, this revival of David Alden's 2008 production still looks stunning, well in line with ENO's high visual style so far this season. The expressionist mania bursting out of those sets and costumes, though, can't often be supported by a Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
In taking on a new name last year, Retrospect Ensemble and director Matthew Halls were aiming to get rid of the “early music” label that had been stapled on to them in their previous incarnation as the King’s Consort. When I spoke to Halls last April he was positively a-tremble at the thought of putting on Brahms and Schumann with his newly rebranded group. If you think that sounds like what a lot of these so-called “early music” conductors have been doing, you’re right – it’s very much the done thing to have an illicit romp on the leather sofa of romanticism. And why not? If it works it’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a problem with Nelson Mandela. He is, it is universally agreed, a remarkable man. His profound humanity is undoubted. He is on first-name terms with saintliness. When eventually he shuffles off his mortal coil, every newspaper on the planet will hold the front page. The problem comes when you stick him in a drama. Drama calls for its characters to go on a journey, to be visited by doubts, to overcome demons, to keep an audience guessing. Madiba, to use his Xhosa clan name, is all things to all men and women. Apart from scriptwriters.Not that that stops them. He has cropped up in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Okay, now that you’re a citizen of Dystopia, and you’ve reached the regulation old age, it’s time to check into an approved care home. Please enter the Ark, and take your allotted bed. A government official will be with you in due course. Yes, that’s right, just take those pills and you will be fine. Will you be expecting visitors? Okay. Any problems, just ask Nurse. In Tamsin Oglesby’s satirical new drama, which opened last night at the National's Cottesloe space, the biblically named Ark is not a means of salvation but an instrument of euthanasia.We start with a family which, in its Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is it legit to joke about races and creeds and the parents of infamously abducted children? What’s the difference between Carol Thatcher using the term “golliwog” and Richard Herring doing a routine about having his iPhone stolen by a kid on a bike who is, incontrovertibly, of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity? The answer is it’s all about intention. Which is where the moustache comes in.In cultivating a small trim growth on his upper lip, Herring has alighted on a symbol that can go one of two ways. Depending on whose face it’s on, it represents either murderous evil or sublime comedy. But the global Read more ...
David Nice
Yes, he can make the music smile when it needs to as much as he does himself. Had we but cash enough and time, many of us Londoners would travel more often to witness what further heights young Latvian Andris Nelsons can persuade the already world-class City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to scale. It was certainly worth the trip to hear how Richard Strauss's colossal Alpine Symphony could sound in Birmingham's Symphony Hall - a venue which, compared to London's less monster-friendly Royal Festival Hall and Barbican Centre, rolls back the roof and lets the air into the big Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You can't ever expect immediate liftoff from a rusty old Lada. Spluttering, shaking and rattling make up as much of the first few minutes of the experience as that of actually moving. But then, before you know it, you're halfway to Plovdiv, and you wonder what you were complaining about. It's what happened last night with Libor Pešek's Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Juddering through the first two pieces (the Polonaise from Dvořák's Rusalka and Smetana's winning Polka from The Bartered Bride) at leaden tempi, the stringed body barely hanging on, the brass and percussion engine sputtering Read more ...
howard.male
A man on stilts may look precarious, but after a lifetime of occasionally seeing men on stilts we’ve become used to trusting that they are not, at any moment, going to topple over backwards and break their necks. So it was uniquely disconcerting – even slightly frightening - to see such a man (in the generic man-on stilts apparel of red and white striped trousers, multi-coloured waistcoat and waxed moustache) come crashing to the ground, inches from my feet, pulling a spotlight from the stage as he did so. A spotlight that, moment before, had been trained on the rather wonderful Vinicio Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
With a wackiness rating of 7.5 and a subject-matter (precocious teens coming of age over one long summer) that scores off the chart for over-familiarity, there seems every likelihood that Youth in Revolt will inspire audience revulsion. Luckily the film has on its side the unfussy directing style of Miguel Arteta (who has the warped buddy movie Chuck and Buck, as well as several episodes of Six Feet Under, in his favour), as well as a lively if not-as-smart-as-it-thinks-it-is script adapted by Gustin Nash from C D Payne’s novel (the first in the “Journals of Nick Twisp” series). The clincher Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What do our elected representatives in Westminster know? Apart from, clearly, how to fill in an expenses claim form. You can file all the usual complaints about Tower Block of Commons, a series in which MPs take up residence in sink estates. It uses the tired old Wife Swap format of sadistically throwing its subjects in at the deep end to watch them sink or swim. The editing is visibly manipulative. After every commercial break it recaps the entire story for its goldfish audience. And that title is, as per, naff. But strip away modern documentary grammar and after the first instalment you Read more ...