Reviews
Ismene Brown
There are times when critics sheathe their quill tips, others when they don’t. Rupert Pennefather, the tall blond Englishman who has been earnestly promoted by the Royal Ballet as hard as they can to be the next Jonathan Cope, has attracted some devastating notices, and last night’s emergency outing as Romeo isn’t going to fatten his cuttings file. This new run of MacMillan’s feverish Romeo and Juliet was intended to open with the famed partnership of Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta, heading a rousing supporting cast. But Acosta was injured, and instead up stepped Pennefather, and never Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Saturday evening's By The People - The Election of Barack Obama helpfully illustrated some timeless truths about the art of documentary film-making. Its co-authors, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, had spent two years enjoying priceless backstage access to Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency, first as he saw off Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then during the Presidential campaign itself.Then they were allotted a priceless two-hour broadcast slot, which is tantamount to film-makers' nirvana. Yet, loaded down with all the goodies the documentary gods could provide, they went Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If ever you wanted to understand the art of acting and how it gives life to words on the page, this is a good place to start. Actress Linda Marlowe, under the direction of Di Sherlock, has adapted Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 collection, The World's Wife - which gives a wry, subversive and feminist voice to characters (real or imagined) written out of history, mythology and the Bible - and gives the words form on stage. It is an exquisite treat.Playing 19 characters from Delilah and Mrs Herod to Frau Freud and the Kray Sisters, Marlowe expertly goes from one to another with just the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Have I Got News for You, the world viewed through Paul Merton’s eyes is not quite as others see it. He makes the random connections of the lateral thinker, thinks jaggedly round corners, and competes manically to have the last word, the last laugh. He also likes you to know that he knows stuff. Last night Paul Merton went to Germany to make a documentary. He’d never been before. You rather fancied that Germany viewed through the Mertonian prism might come up looking a little different, perhaps even a little funnier. But no, I didn't laugh once.In Merton's Germany it's business as usual, Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
If Gordon Brown had slipped and fallen on the ice this weekend you could have expected at least a dozen conspiracy theories to have emerged on the internet. Why was David Miliband spotted studying a weather map the night before? Why had the PM’s aides suggested that particular pavement? And who controls the gritting lorries anyway? The worldwide web is many things, and one of them is this festering, bottomless pit of paranoid conjecture – rich picking for a tough-minded series like BBC Two’s The Conspiracy Files, whose latest chosen subject was Osama Bin Laden. Or rather the lack of him.There Read more ...
David Nice
They're still bringing Beethoven and Shostakovich to London, enriching the mix a little with the cross-referencing of Alfred Schnittke, but the personnel of the Borodin Quartet have changed again. Patriarch cellist Valentin Berlinsky, there at the start over 60 years ago, passed on his bow to Vladimir Balshin before he died. Balshin is a worthy successor, especially since Berlinsky's tone had become translucent to the point of dematerialising and his successor's is rich indeed, but is "Borodin Quartet" now more a brand name than a vital entity?Well, continuity Read more ...
David Nice
If your heart feels frozen while the ice glitters outside, warm it by reading Hans Christian Andersen's sharp, witty and enchanting fairy-tale The Snow Queen, or listen to the best bits of Prokofiev's erratic but often characteristic late ballet The Stone Flower. You could also drag yourself out into the cold to face Michael Corder's full-length choreography based on the Andersen story, selectively fitted to chunks of the Prokofiev score and interspersing them with other lyric highlights of the composer's Soviet period, but that would have to be a third-best option.Something ought to have Read more ...
fisun.guner
The latest official royal portrait, and the first painted portrait featuring the Princes William and Harry, hangs in a small room at the National Portrait Gallery among a selection of royal portraits of the Windsors. There’s the rather quirky one of the Queen Mother, painted in 1989 by Alison Watt, an artist who sought to capture her sitter “as ordinary as possible”. What our attention seems most drawn to is the china cup turned upside down on the arm of the Queen Mother’s armchair. Eh?Then there is the immensely engaging portrait of Charles and the boys taken in 2004 by Mario Testino. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s always interesting to ponder why some comics don’t invite critics into their shows. Billy Connolly or any other comedian has a perfect right to do so and to sell the seats that would otherwise be warmed by reviewers’ bottoms, after all. Heaven forfend the comics' families might go hungry for the loss of that revenue or that their charitable foundations would struggle to pay their tax bill without it. And. of course, the non-invitation could never be because the comics are arrogant so-and-sos who believe themselves to be above criticism but who, strangely enough, still quote critics on Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Endure this bafflingly pointless, sparsely staged and hopelessly dated musical, and you might find that the prospect of bloody death in the jaws of an enraged tiger somewhat loses its sting; you certainly won’t care whether that’s the fate in store for the show’s bland balladeer hero. A curious concoction of forgettable chirpy ditties, half-hearted satire and lots of twee larking about that is reminiscent of children’s television from 40 years ago, The Lady or the Tiger's downright weirdness doesn’t make it any less unrewarding.Apparently the original 1975 production, at the Orange Tree’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For Horizon's fascinating investigation into the ancestral relationship between man and dog, a record-breaking number of illustrious boffins had been compressed into 60 minutes of television. We met Dr Anna Kukekova from Cornell University, who has been conducting research into which gene makes silver foxes (dogs by any other name) either tame or wild. I'm sure other viewers were as thrilled as I was to make the acquaintance of Dr Adam Miklos, from an unprounceable university in Budapest, who delivered shards of insight into the way humans instinctively understand the shades of meaning Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Perception was everything last night in Garfield Kennedy’s fascinating if, at times, frustrating documentary, The Trials of Amanda Knox. Was the American student who was convicted last month of murdering her British flatmate in Perugia, Meredith Kercher, a scheming hussy into (very) extreme sex games, or just an averagely adventurous twentysomething turned into a scapegoat by an Italian judiciary that had already convinced itself of her guilt? Kennedy’s film considered the evidence, and it also detailed the concomitant trial by the media - and there, to a degree, is a problem. Because this Read more ...