Reviews
Matt Wolf
What, you mean you didn't know that Annie Oakley, the American sharpshooter whose career hit its stride in the 1880s, was honoured by Winston Churchill but had no use for Adolf Hitler? Then you've been spending too little time in the ever-eccentric world of the maverick director Richard Jones, whose Young Vic revival of Annie Get Your Gun, the 1946 Broadway musical classic, is about as anti-Broadway as a staging can get.Purists will be enraged by a production that plays fast and loose with things like time period, setting, and anything resembling conventional casting. But take Jones's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. But that’s OK as long as the raw material is strong, and this saga of post-punk, pre-New Romantic gadget-pop was often fascinating and sometimes even thought-provoking.Not that they didn’t Read more ...
james.woodall
Beckett is less forbidding now than he might have seemed when he was alive, and certainly when his work was first performed. Over the last two decades, crueller and darker plays than his have been written, though none have matched his lyric ingenuity and his pained, sometimes devastating irony remains unsurpassed. Can Endgame, the bleak successor to Waiting for Godot and perhaps the oddest dramatic masterpiece of the 20th century, still hurt us? And what, I feel it legitimate to ask, might lie behind a desire to revive it in the West End?For Simon McBurney of Complicite, never shy of a tough Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Hung is about a teacher with an enormous penis who becomes a gigolo, which might sound like prime Judd Apatow real estate, but is a surprisingly tender foray into the male and female sexual psyches. Part two of HBO’s current male midlife crisis fixation is a completely different kettle of fish-out-of-water to Eastbound & Down – quirkier and less boisterous – and its pedigree (written by the creators of The Riches and shot by the director of Sideways) tells you a lot of what you need to know. Oh, except did I neglect to say that it’s deeply, satisfyingly funny?It was also a bit slow Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What are the politics of comedy? The great thing about Trevor Griffiths's 1975 classic, Comedians, which opened last night in a solid revival directed by Sean Holmes, is that this subject is debated with grace as well as humour. As six apprentice comedians attend a night class run by the veteran stand-up Eddie Waters, they find that their hunger for stardom clashes with his desire to use comedy to make a difference, to change society. Is comedy just a piece of harmless fun, or can it be used as a tool for social engineering?Played by Matthew Kelly, Waters comes across as avuncular, hurt and Read more ...
sheila.johnston
It would be an understatement to say that the auguries weren't good for Wes Anderson's first animated movie, the world premiere of which opened the London Film Festival last night. The distributor - Twentieth Century Fox, by a neat coincidence - was coy about screening it to critics, the trailer (below) was teeth-grindingly unfunny and an uncommonly candid feature in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week reported deep tensions on the film's London set.Apparently Anderson didn't take a shine to the idea of a year in Blighty and instead went to ground in Paris, airily stating that, having set Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Where to start with reviewing the "Diaghilev" evening of new choreographies at Sadler’s Wells last night? With the cool clean head of Wayne McGregor’s or the hot poxed genitals of Javier de Frutos’s? Well, as it’s a 100th birthday party for Diaghilev's iconoclastic Ballets Russes, there’s no harm in pointing out that the poxed genitals are an awful lot more amusing (with the accent on awful) than the familiar McGregorian chant of BSc theses to swot up while watching his dances.I have nothing against cerebral good taste, especially with the calibre of stage partners offered here by McGregor in Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Is John Prescott’s post-political TV career a form of atonement, a retirement gift to his lovely wife Pauline and a chance for her to share centre-stage in place of the diary secretary? Whatever the reason, Pauline Prescott has taken to the limelight like an MP to expenses, benignly batting her mascara-crusted eyelashes as the couple take another of their Jag-chauffeured tours, a faintly ludicrous Old Labour twist on King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visiting East End Blitz victims.Last year’s BBC2 documentary Prescott: the Class System and Me threw up no great insights – unless you count Read more ...
mark.irving
Damien Hirst's new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is evidence of a deal between nervous guardians of the past and a contemporary artist seeking to burnish his future historical credentials. It stinks. Entitled No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst - the clunking allusion to Picasso's Blue Period marks out the scale of Hirst's ambition - it presents 25 paintings that we are assured are actually by Hirst rather than a cohort of assistants.The emphasis on these paintings as autograph works is rather sweet, pandering to those for whom certificated originality is the first hurdle Read more ...
james.woodall
A play featuring false imprisonment, family members losing and re-finding each other, fathers and sons, forgiveness and reconciliation: it sounds like late Shakespeare. Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream is indeed just post-Shakespeare - from 1635 - and hails from a culture, Golden Age Spain, which determinedly pushed drama on from where Shakespeare left it, producing over decades a torrent of story-rich plays at a time when England seemed to have given up the dramatic ghost.Life Is a Dream is by far Calderón's best-known work, outside the Hispanic world at any rate, and in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Terry Gilliam set toupees a-flutter with a feisty piece in the Sunday Times about the pandemonium surrounding the release of his new film, firing off broadsides at Tracey Emin and gossips who spread malicious rumours about the late Heath Ledger, and deploring the bureaucratic bloat which he reckons has capsized the BBC. “I’m good at being angry – it’s an occupation,” he growled.It was reminiscent of the younger Gilliam who masterminded his own school of satirical collage with Monty Python, when weekly deadlines forced him to run on boiling adrenalin. But it’s a shame a bit more of this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A familiar Herzogian weirdness was on display at last night's Herzog documentary double bill. And not all of it was cinematic. The organisers of the Herzog retrospective had matched up out-of-the-way venues to specific Herzog movies, and these movies to suitable companion acts. Last night’s two documentary portraits of American evangelicalism, Huie’s Sermon and God’s Angry Man, were separated by a live gospel choir, which cajoled and corralled the audience into spiritual, vocal and happy-clappy fervour. It totally out-Herzoged Herzog and transformed a night of edgy, recherché cinephilia Read more ...