Reviews
aleks.sierz
In prehistoric Britain, life was full of Hs. It was hard. It was horribly hard. It was hardly happy. And, according to Jack Nicholls, whose debut play has a typically noisy Royal Court title, The Shitheads, it was also hilarious and heartless. Performed in the venue’s upstairs studio space, this tale of life some tens of thousands of years ago is co-directed by David Byrne, the venue’s artistic director, and Aneesha Srinivasan. But although they take the opportunity of the Court’s 70th anniversary to nod to its heritage of horrid horrors by staging a story full of hideous and hateful events, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut plunges two young country brothers into Nineties Lagos’s joyous energy and febrile politics, as they seize a unique chance to bond with their loving but largely absent dad. Often shot at the low angles of a child’s worldview and in intimate close-ups only dimly apprehending the full picture, it is a requiem for both Nigerian hope as the 1993 election is stolen and fleeting paternal ties, and a fervent celebration of Lagos and fatherhood.We first meet 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) playing with 8-year-old Aki (real brother Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In November 1975, UK music weekly New Musical Express included an article by Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Alive To The Jive Of The Sound Of '75.” Recently in New York, he was revealing what he had discovered.The bands looked at – and he saw most saw live – in his prescient round-up were Blondie, The Heartbreakers – “the first N.Y. punk supergroup” – a “new-look” New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Shirts, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Tuff Darts.
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Central to what he covered in this remarkable role call was a venue: the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I still retain a vivid memory of a concert in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2013 at which Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta sat at an upright piano with their backs to the audience and played excerpts from his Játékok collection of progressive teaching pieces, interspersed with arrangements of Bach chorale preludes for piano duet (Pictured below). The audience might have been eavesdropping on an afternoon of private music-making. But what in fact took place was the distillation of the essence of music – its directness and detached spirituality – into a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.We meet Jim Hacker, now over 80 but once the PM, in the handsome but untidy Georgian master’s lodge of the Oxford college named after him, built on the funding he secured from a Russian oligarch. Griff Rhys Jones plays him with a little too much gurning and an over-emphatic Read more ...
Robert Beale
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen 20 years ago, is still one of the jewels in Opera North’s treasury. It was revived in 2013 for their “Festival of Britten”, and now is back with a fresh top music team and a cast of (mainly) young British singers, several in company debuts, which bodes extremely well for them and for us. Chief of this new generation is John Findon in the title role. I admired Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’ quality as Grimes in the original and the first revival, but Findon’s performance equals and in some respects excels it.The revival is co-directed by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bart Layton’s class-conscious pulp fiction gives Chris Hemsworth his most convincing lead role since Thor as Mike Davis, an LA jewel thief on one last job while tentatively facing his hollow life. An all-star cast including Marvel compadre Mark Ruffalo, pictured bottom right, and Halle Berry happily sink into character parts to give the familiar heist set-up flesh and bone.Mike’s ice cool hijacking of high-end diamonds along LA's 101 freeway almost gets him a bullet right at the start. His empty, expensive apartment, glum servicing by a prostitute and hand-wringing discomfort on an actual Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Visual artists gave up on titles long ago, resorting to neutral labels such as Untitled. Choreographers still feel bound to tag their works descriptively, which can be a challenge if the dance is about everything or nothing. The Irish director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan found a neat solution in MÁM , the 80-minute piece he made when he first arrived in West Kerry in 2019, choosing an Irish word that means so many things, and so many different things, that as a title it can only suggest everything and nothing all at once. A mountain pass, a burden or obligation, a handful of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would you want to marry a spy? After watching Betrayal, probably not.Writer David Eldridge has used the paradigm of the secret world as a means of exploring relationships both personal and professional, and how one is liable to corrode and distort the other. A quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi is dropped in as a clue – “the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces.”The Persian link is apposite, since the story orbits around an Iranian plot to stage a terrorist outrage somewhere in the Manchester area. Our somewhat flawed protagonist is MI5 agent John Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2007, Pina Bausch was preparing her company’s latest “city piece”, this one based on a visit to Kolkotta. But she was also brewing up something special, a work for six of her long-serving women dancers, created separately from the city piece but out of the same set of questions.Even if Bausch hadn’t somehow sensed the need to do something for her female troupers while she could (she died suddenly in 2009), the piece is inherently like a memorial, a call for the dancers to be remembered. Indeed, they insist on it. These are regular self-exposers, anyway – a line of beauty queen contestants Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong is continuing to put his own stamp on landmark works of the mainstream repertory with the Hallé. This time it was Beethoven’s Third, "Eroica", Symphony. That’s not to say that his programmes are devoid of novelty for the orchestra’s Manchester audience. He’s made Unsuk Chin the “Featured Composer” for the present season, and her subito con forza, written as a tribute to Beethoven in 2020, represented her in this concert. It’s a piece of which the Hallé gave the UK premiere (in the BBC Proms of 2021, under Sir Mark Elder), but except for those listeners who attended its Read more ...
James Saynor
“We will sacrifice our souls for you!” yells out a class of kids in The President’s Cake, nominally addressing a leader hundreds of miles away – the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein. The slogan the children are forced to spew by their paranoid teachers is, on one level, mindless enough. On another, it goes to the heart of this exceedingly good movie: How much do you have to sell your soul in a dictatorship falling apart at the seams?Set in 1990, not long before the first Gulf War, the film follows frantic days in the life of nine-year-old Lamia, who lives in a one-room wicker house on a wicker Read more ...