Reviews
Guy Oddy
Jim Jones has been around the block a few times, plying his garage/punk/rock’n’roll schtick – most notably with his last couple of outfits, the Jim Jones Revue and Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind. Back in the ring with his new crew, the Jim Jones Allstars, however, he’s subtly changed the template to bring some serious old school rhythm and blues to the party as well.As part of this change, Jones has recruited some brass into the band, with a couple of saxophones to add a bit of vim. His eight-strong crew still look as if Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds had crawled out of South London though. Trilbies Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Two years on from Sean Holmes’ production and seven on from Emma Rice’s (both of which featured diverse casts), Elle While takes a turn with the old warhorse’s lovers and fairies, its sparring couples and its Morecambe and Wise-like shambles of a play-within-a-play. The question hangs in the air – what to do to excite audiences, some of whom are so familiar with A Midsummer Night’s Dream that, a row behind me, they were laughing a beat before the punchlines were delivered?The result of such consideration is a bit of a mishmash of things that work, some that don’t and quite a lot in- Read more ...
David Nice
Until last night, I’d only heard the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO at home, “Riiklik” standing for “National”) live in unfamiliar contemporary epics, with Kristiina Poska and Anu Tali respectively conducting Lepo Sumera’s Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, and Olari Elts just before his 2020 appointment as Music Director championing an Erkki-Sven Tüür triptych. This was a test of how they'd fare in more familiar repertoire. They passed with flying colours.Arvo Pärt's Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten was the first work by the Estonian master I ever heard in concert, when a then Read more ...
David Nice
Any chamber music festival that kicks off with Czech genius Martinů's Parisian jeu d'esprit ballet-sextet La revue de cuisine and ends its first concert with Saint-Saëns's glory of a Septet for trumpet, piano and strings is likely to be a winner.This one was. It transpires that this year's curator Kathryn Stott – Steven Isserlis will follow in 2024 – is not only a remarkable pianist but also an inspired programmer, bringing to the 10 players of Ensemble 360, core of the fabulously enterprising Music in the Round, an unfamiliar repertoire and special guests with whom they made sparks fly.I Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fridtjof Ryder’s debut feature made a strong impression at last year’s London Film Festival, and its cinema release ought to give the Gloucester-born director’s career a hefty shove in the right direction. Although that doesn’t mean that Inland is an especially easy-viewing experience.Ryder, who was only 20 when he shot the film in 2020, deals in silences and absences. There isn’t much of a narrative, more of a cracked mosaic of memories, impressions and lurking anxiety, but Inland builds a powerful atmosphere of loss and brokenness. The photography is ominous and watchful. Events seem to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
One of the singers smashes out a jittery pulse on a shaman drum and the 50-strong choir intone a chant, while at the front a tenor who looks like a doorman you wouldn’t mess with spits out what sounds like a threat from between gritted teeth. It is the Estonian National Male Voice Choir performing Veljo Tormis’s Raua needmine (“Curse Upon Iron”) and it is utterly entrancing, invigorating – and just a little bit scary.The Estonian Tormis (1930-2017) wrote almost exclusively for voice, usually engaging in some way with Estonian folk traditions. But if this suggests bucolic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A standing ovation part-way through a concert is unusual. Conductor Jules Buckley gestures to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus that they should rise. Beside Buckley, Father John Misty stands looking from the conductor to everyone else on the stage, to the audience. Seemingly, in the midst of this, he’s thrown.That this is an overwhelming experience is summed up a little later by Buckley when he interrupts the magic to speak from his podium. “This is pretty crazy”, he declares before getting into acknowledgements and an explanation of how this evening’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Phil Wang has an interesting background: he has a Chinese-Malaysian father and a white English mother, was born in the UK, and spent his childhood in Malaysia before returning to the UK at 16. His comedy has always mined this rich seam, and now in his latest touring show, Wang in There, Baby!, he mines it a bit more with his opening gags.First up is a discussion about rice, and very informative it is too, as he discusses the different positions English and Chinese people take on it – and what you're really eating when you order fried rice in a restaurant. There's more food-related material as Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re going to be locked in an auditorium with a crazed soldier for over 90 minutes, you need to be overwhelmed by the human frailty and baseness in Büchner’s still-shocking stage play of the late 1830s, the spiderweb beauty of Berg’s 1925 score to match it and a vision in various stage pictures. Director Deborah Warner, conductor Antonio Pappano and set designer Hyemi Shin deliver on all fronts.Though each of Shin’s stunning images is perfectly composed, and so well lit by Adam Silverman, there’s less unity in Warner’s production than there was in, for example, Richard Jones’s Welsh Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“This audience is very diverse, isn’t it?” joked one of the audience members at Fucking Men at Waterloo East Theatre, a reworking of Tony-winning writer Joe DiPietro’s seminal 2008 play (itself a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, written in 1897).True in one sense and not in another: the crowd was mostly gay men of a certain age. But then, Fucking Men does what it says on the tin – it’s about gay men falling in and out of bed, and a few other places besides.The format (carried over from La Ronde) is pleasingly circular: 10 scenes, post- or pre-coital, with one character from the Read more ...
David Kettle
Anyone expecting to see the Big Yin himself, Gary McNair breathlessly explains as he dashes on stage, should nip out and ask the box office for a refund. It’s an ice-breaking gag that sets the tone nicely for McNair’s fast-moving, often snort-inducingly funny tribute to Billy Connolly, whose production by the National Theatre of Scotland is touring the country until the end of June.And yes, there’s an undeniable resemblance between the two men, something that Glasgow-based actor/writer McNair puts to good use at certain key points in his big-hearted celebration of the legendary Scottish Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Brighton Festival has a knack for choosing children’s theatre that is in equal measure as magical and captivating as it is simple and easy to understand. It’s an equation that means both adults and children alike can be sure to have an experience that promotes creative imagination, stimulating conversation and calm reflection.Dan Colley’s retelling of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s tale A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings consists of two storytellers, a kitchen table and a cast of tiny figurines in front of a cardboard set. The pair inform us that “we tell the story because we like it” and issue a Read more ...