Reviews
fisun.guner
There was a time, not long ago in fact, when contemporary art could seem all too wrapped up in its own juvenile cleverness. It was all about being ironic and irreverent. Certainly a lot of it was achingly self-referential. But we eventually got fed up with all that. What’s more, we now live in less frivolous, more fearful times: recession has hit and the sea waters are rising, ready to flood us out and turn our congested cities into swampy, primitive marshland, like an apocalyptic J G Ballard novel.So now the mood music is sombre, more earnest. Artists have once again turned their attentions Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For a choreographer the moment your work becomes a classic is when the audience tells you that you’re casting it wrong. I’ve seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake more than a dozen times for professional reasons since it first took off from Sadler’s Wells nearly 15 years ago, and it’s not Adam Cooper’s blinding image all those years ago that’s telling me the press night cast last night wasn’t delivering what the work is worth. It's because I have come to own this piece in my own imagination.I don't say this is Ibsen with wings, but the potency of Bourne’s rewrite of Swan Lake lies in the true Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six.” Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, broadcast on the radio in 1955, offered young listeners a flavour of his aromatic observations of small-town Welsh life better known to adults in Under Milk Wood.The old roué might very well have wondered how a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This film was never going to be nominated for any awards, but then it probably doesn’t need critical acclaim - the first reworking of the glorious 1950s Ealing Studios comedies (which were based on Ronald Searle’s cartoons), released in 2007, was the third-highest grossing independent UK film ever. St Trinian’s 2 is more of the same: loud, silly and rollicking good fun.No joke is considered too old or too obvious in the immensely daft yarn scripted by Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft, directed by Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson. The plot (using the term loosely) concerns a 420-year-old Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A banner year for the Almeida Theatre continues with Rope, director Roger Michell's taut, tense production of the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play better known from the subsequent Hitchcock film, starring a peculiarly cast James Stewart. Performed in the round - a first in my experience at this address - and without a break, the staging gradually tightens its own invisible noose around an audience sufficiently rapt that even a silly visual flourish at the very end can't sour one's enjoyment.Michell's good sense - more radical than it might sound - is to take absolutely seriously a scenario Read more ...
aleks.sierz
She’s the most famous young pout in Hollywood. And her first West End appearance has already sparked a media frenzy, making this contemporary version of Molière’s The Misanthrope the hottest ticket in town, with massive advance bookings already guaranteeing anyone associated with the show a credit-crunch-proof Christmas. Of course, I’m talking about Keira Knightley – I mean, who isn’t? But what about the play, which opened last night with a barrage of paparazzi flashbulbs? And how does La Knightley shape up?Written by Martin Crimp, this take on Molière’s 1666 tale about the sourpuss Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Sixteen years ago, Tom Hanks was in Seattle, pining sleeplessly for Meg Ryan. In 2009, though, romantic comedy has a rather different complexion and, in another corner of the Space Needle city, two best buddies flirt with a gay affair, even though both of them protest, just a little too much, that they are straight. The American independent comedy Humpday is a curious mix of bromance and mumblecore - and please read on even if those two appellations are utterly foreign to you (read on too, even if they aren't, of course).The story turns on the uneasy friendship, a friendship which might just Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hip hop is the new ballet. Instead of mostly girls in tutus, mostly boys in tracksuits; instead of pointe-shoes, trainers; instead of arabesques and fouettés, handstands and windmills; above all, instead of nice, nasty. The smell on stage is burning rubber from the shoes; the atmosphere is electric; lights fractured; discipline razor-sharp. Some armies and ballet companies would crawl over broken glass to have the ensemble unanimity that’s displayed in Boy Blue’s cracking show Pied Piper at the Barbican.Contemporary dance companies and pantos could learn a lot from the fun factor and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Will she? Won't she? Ooh? Ah? No to the Mazurka? Yes to the Barcarolle? We were an audience on tenterhooks last night as flu-ridden Ingrid Fliter coughed and spluttered her way through her Chopin recital at the Wigmore Hall, chopping and changing her programme every five minutes as her fever came and went. The amassed audience willed her on enthusiastically. London was falling in love with Fliter.The staggering first half, full of weighty, melancholic Chopin works, begged one question: where was all her power coming from? Here was this pretty, petite Argentinian unleashing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The recent low-budget hit Paranormal Activity has been laughably hailed by delusional critics as “the most frightening movie ever made”, but it barely scrapes the foothills of the hair-raising ghastliness depicted in The Exorcist. William Friedkin’s demonic-possession shocker was released in 1973, but even today you wouldn’t want to watch it without keeping a large brandy and the off switch within easy reach. This documentary in 5's series The True Story, which tries to find rational explanations for movies, sought to explore the real-life story that the movie, and prior to that William Peter Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A truly terrifying sight this afternoon. The Wigmore Hall: full of children. A group of 50 10- to 13-year-olds were filing in to hear their first classical concert. On this one event a lifetime’s attitude to an entire art form would be based. It was make or break time. The concert would have to have been very carefully chosen. Hm. What had these wise teachers picked for these impressionable young rookies to ease their ears into the tough world of classical music? A lunchtime chamber recital of the works of Guillaume de Machaut, Harrison Birtwistle and Johannes Ockeghem. My instinct was to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A funny thing happened to the movie musical of late: a genre thought to be moribund learned once again to sing, even if - as so often happens in education - there have been some truants along the way. In recent years, we've had Chicago and Hairspray, The Producers and Sweeney Todd, all of them adapted from Broadway shows familiar to UK playgoers as well. Now, along comes the riskiest of them all, Rob Marshall's Nine. And not for the first time, the last is best, though Nine is also likely to polarise reaction more sharply than any of these other titles have so far.The Read more ...