Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
War might be good for absolutely nothing, but it does provide bands with some easy names. Before the War on Drugs headline set, Warpaint took to the stage, and despite a muted reaction to the quartet they were on enjoyable form. They’re unlikely to ever be topping the bill in arenas in their own right, but maybe that’s a good thing, and the funky closing double header of “New Song” and “Disco//Very” whipped by with pace and verve.Then again, the War on Drugs themselves seemed a long shot to become an arena band, even with a sound considerable in scope. Perhaps their booker had over-estimated Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Dear Earth, Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis is a mixed show of artists who address the parlous plight of our planet. The issue obsesses me, so anyone who braves the pitfalls of exploring this difficult subject has my sympathy.One challenge: how to create work about climate change that doesn’t make your audience suicidally depressed? Another: how to translate anger, despair and activism into good art that can inspire as well as enlighten? The exhibition amply demonstrates how hard this is.One of the most impactful pieces is shown outside. Peter Kennard who, for decades, has made politically Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Young women who were riveted by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones columns in the 1990s are now probably of the age where the menopause is, or has recently been, a bigger concern than landing your own Mr Darcy. Which is why Bridget Christie’s The Change (Channel 4) has arrived with ideal timing.I don’t mean Christie’s series is “the new Bridget Jones”. About the only significant crossover between the two – a prickly stance towards misogyny and lesser male infringements aside – is their obsession with keeping tabs on their daily round. Fielding sent up her own love of logging calorie counts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year Jennifer Lawrence won critical plaudits for her war-trauma drama Causeway, which seemingly signalled a bold new direction for her career, but how she got from there to No Hard Feelings is a bit of a mystery. Nothing about it feels quite right. Sometimes it seems to want to be a gross-out comedy, occasionally it seems to think it’s distantly related to The Graduate and wants to give us a dose of ironic social commentary, and every now and again it gets a bit weepy and emotional, but never in a way that makes you want to join in.Lawrence, now a venerable 32, plays Maddie Barker, a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Benoit Jacquot’s handsome period production of Werther has been quietly putting in the miles for the Royal Opera. Since its premiere in 2004, this unexceptionable staging – “this wall, this fountain, this cool shade” all present and laboriously correct – has supplied a London star vehicle for everyone from Joyce DiDonato and Isabel Leonard to Juan Diego Florez, Rollando Villazon and Vittorio Grigolo. Now it’s the turn of Jonas Kaufmann – or, at least, it was supposed to be.No announcement was made, but it was evident from his opening “Je ne sais si je veille” – almost lost under Antonio Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Is everything loss?" the great Oliver Ford Davies once asked on the National's Olivier stage, in the closing moment of David Hare's masterful Racing Demon. That question informs another masterful play, James Graham's Dear England, newly opened in the same space.This stirring portrait of Gareth Southgate (the remarkable Joseph Fiennes) and the England squad that he continues to lead takes the national temperature and finds it wedded to defeat; what's most remarkable is that the three-hour drama then dares to go the distance and insist upon hope because, well, what other choice have Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall Hilary Hahn brought her residency to an end with a collaboration with the exciting Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, a notably youthful and ethnically diverse group, who brought with them a notably more youthful and ethnically diverse crowd than the hall usually entertains.The programme was American music, combining a couple of mid-20th century masterpieces with newer works by living composers. The older music largely came out ahead.Although I have known and loved the Samuel Barber String Quartet for 30 years I had never previously heard it live. I don’t Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Frederick Delius composed an opera called A Village Romeo and Juliet; Donizetti composed a sort of village Tristan and Isolde, but called it L’elisir d’amore – The Love Potion. The hero, Nemorino, inspired by the Tristan tale, buys an elixir off a passing quack, in the hope it will make the beautiful, capricious Adina fall for him.But, arguably like Wagner’s, the potion is fake (red wine, in this case, probably throat lotion in Wagner’s), and Nemorino gets his girl because he unknowingly inherits a fortune, the village girls fawn over him, and Adina becomes jealous.How much of this agreeable Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Standing just inside the door of the Whitechapel’s downstairs gallery is a luggage trolley laden with parcels (pictured below, right). This forlorn object looks as if it’s waiting to be collected, but the owner seems to have gone AWOL.The packages are labelled, not with names and addresses but descriptions of the contents, as if they had come from a museum archive.“Bima curtain,” reads one label. “Large, dark blue velvet cloth with heavy gilt ribbon trim and gilt fringing. Condition: torn in several places, much stained, creased and damp when found.” The items were retrieved from the gutter Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland temple to every anti-Elgarian current in post-war British music.With transformative daring and dash, they made it sound like a work that even the Aldeburgh Festival's founder-saint himself might have appreciated. (Benjamin Britten once confessed himself “absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes”.) Indeed, the middle weekend of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The alternative title of Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play School Girls, The African Mean Girls Play, might indicate that it’s a super-bitchy account of high-school rivalries, here with a west African accent. Which it is. But it’s much more besides. The school in question is an elite boarding establishment in Ghana’s Aburi Hills. Here two alpha females collide and slug it out for top-dog status. The year is 1986, almost 30 years on from Ghana becoming the first African nation to gain independence and 25 years before the event that inspired the play.In a programme note, Bioh states that what set Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pete Fij and Terry Bickers are bathed in muted red light. They are sat side-by-side, Fij with an acoustic guitar, Bickers with a vintage 1970s CMI hollow-bodied electric. Behind them, oil wheel lighting gloops and bubbles gently, bespattered with glowing green circles cast by the stationary disco ball hanging high above them. “It’s surprising to see how much life you can fit into the back of a van,” sings Fij, dolefully, then adds, “It only took two trips.”The line, from the song “Broken Heart Surgery”, sums up part of the duo’s appeal, combining, as it does, a world-weary mournfulness with Read more ...