Reviews
Ismene Brown
Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney are too famous to need defining in terms of racial culture, and yet they make a lot of it in the spiel about their offering Confluence, closing the two-week Svapnagata festival at Sadler’s Wells this weekend. When both of them last night were using their contemporary and classical roots with such unselfconscious richness, it was a jolt to read programme notes ponderously attacking “purists” as if the music and dance world were full of Nick Griffins burning to send them home somewhere.Such special pleading taints the actual art they’re giving, because no defence is Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
There are so many ways a dramatic production of Messiah can go wrong it is almost unbearable to think about it. Certainly, there was a palpable buzz of nervousness in the Coliseum about last night’s audience as they took their seats. Did English National Opera really think it could pull it off? Could it avoid the pitfalls into triteness that surely lurk at every corner? How would the chorus manage it? And please God, let it be better than Glyndebourne’s 2007 St Matthew Passion.How do you go about staging Messiah anyway? It hardly provides a rip-roaring narrative stream, and there’s a danger Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let’s be kind to Eddie Izzard. The guy has not long finished running 43 marathons in 51 days in aid of Sport Relief and the undeniably noble effort would take the puff out of anyone. And just the day before this show, he had run a half marathon further along the South Coast from Eastbourne to his childhood home town of Bexhill-on-Sea to reopen their refurbished museum. So maybe the lacklustre performance I saw at the cavernous Brighton Centre was one-off and he’ll be back on form for the rest of his tour.Izzard’s trademark comedy (“bollocks with more bollocks on top”, as he calls it) is Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
That queen of solipsism, Katie Price, hasn’t been the only person on TV this week seeking “closure” (loved the short but savage Graham Norton spoof of Price on Monday night's show, by the way), and a new documentary series, We Are Family, is offering four collections of relatives the chance to settle their differences on camera. And no need to dine on wichetty grubs either. In fact the opening clan, the Minchews, was put up in a country-house hotel as its members patched up their feuds and prepared to embrace the sentiment of the eponymous Sister Sledge ditty.The eight Minchew siblings, or Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Thank God for Les Arts Florissants. Without the assiduous efforts of this pretty, chic French ensemble and its expat American conductor William Christie, one of the great periods in musical history, that of the French high baroque, would still be shrouded in darkness. What would we now know of the Debussy of the 18th century, Jean-Philippe Rameau, or of the silky solemnity of Henry Desmarest, or of the festive André Campra, or of that arse-licker par excellence Jean-Baptiste Lully? Virtually nothing. And my ears for one would be the poorer.Last night we received portraits of each of these Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When is enough? The template usually cited as the perfectly proportioned lifetime for sitcom is Fawlty Towers. It ran for two series, 12 episodes - in and out, no mucking about. The Office deliberately kept the same hours, give or take the odd Christmas special and an entire American remake. Disappearing off the other end of the scale was Only Fools and Horses, which adopted the opposite tack of keeping faith with its characters as the contours of their lives changed. Gavin and Stacey, whose creators Ruth Jones and James Corden are knowledgeable students of the genre, has always had the look Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If it’s not quite the time of year to start making New Year resolutions, then it’s not far off. Everywhere, you can read the signs: bright lights on the main shopping streets, merry cash registers ringing and the sound of yule logs being felled in empty forests. Plus chronic gift anxieties and a grim foreboding about the coming Election Year. In Michael Wynne’s new comedy, The Priory, which opened last night at the Royal Court, a New Year’s Eve party gives us a taste of what’s to come. And that taste is pretty astringent, a bit like Bombay gin laced with cranberry juice and topped off with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
London builds on its metrosexual status in Mr Right, a dreary gay-themed indie in which the metropolis by default becomes the star. There's nary a homophobe in sight - not to mention a traffic snarl-up or tube strike - in brother-sister filmmaking team David and Jacqui Morris's view of the capital, which looks giddy and rife with possibilities throughout. Shame, then, about the script.I suspect the film itself would come across as suffocatingly banal and solipsistic under any circumstances, but doubly so at a time when the London theatre is dealing with so many of these issues in infinitely Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
"Welcome to the second night of my depressing acoustic tour," said Malcolm Middleton by way of introducing his set. The statement plays on his well-established reputation for miserabilism. Later on he asked the audience, "Enjoying yourselves?" to which a smattering of "yeahs" could be heard. "Then I'm not doing my job properly," deadpanned Middleton. The Glaswegian singer-songwriter, who was one half of boozy alt-folk rabble-rousers Arab Strap until 2006, sat alone in a spotlight, his sole instrument an acoustic guitar, and continually dropped downbeat comments, but his pithy songs of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
J S Bach was very much at the spiritual centre of this cunningly devised programme for the South Bank’s current Alfred Schnittke fest: Between Two Worlds. But by the time we emerged shaken but, in my case, not stirred by Schnittke’s preposterous 3rd Symphony the entire Austro-German symphonic legacy had flashed before our ears. Well, not flashed exactly, rather ground to a halt from a slow rewind of ever diminishing returns.But back to Bach. His Chorale “Es ist genug” is the music of sorrowful farewell passing through Alban Berg’s orchestra in the closing pages of his Violin Concerto and only Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A filmgoing acquaintance has personally drafted a set of guidelines to increase her chances of a good time at the cinema. It’s a fairly hardline set of strictures. No sequels, for one. Not to mention the ban on cartoons. And in the most random cull, she will see no film with a two-word title in which the first word is “The”. It’s by no means a foolproof system. She gets to miss The Godfather on rule three and The Godfather 2 on rule one. The Godfather 3 is additionally outlawed under rule two. Maybe it’s just that elongated time of year again that gently coaxes out the curmudgeon in one. But Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The mechanism for securing a publicity still from the BBC is as follows. Go to the relevant website, log in, look for the photographs that illustrate the programme, then take your pick. For Dame Shirley Bassey: The Girl from Tiger Bay there wasn’t much of a selection. Only one image, in fact, at least that I could see. It finds Alan Yentob perching like a prize-winning schoolboy on the edge of the sofa, while the prize leans intimately on his shoulder. We need Imagine, especially now that the guillotine is slowly and insubordinately lopping Lord Bragg’s coiffeured head off over on the other Read more ...