Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
You wait years for a guitar group with brothers to reunite and then two come along at once. The Maccabees return might have attracted far less attention compared to the Gallaghers hitting the road again as Oasis, but as they strolled onstage on a humid Glasgow night the ecstatic reaction from fans suggested it was a sight many had not expected to see again.There are many obvious differences too, given that the London fivesome never dented the public consciousness in the way of Manchester’s finest. And while the Oasis reunion has served up a glorifying of the Britpop era they provoked, Read more ...
David Kettle
Refuse, Assembly George Square Studios ★★★★Maks works as a bin man in a small Ukrainian town. His little son might get picked on at school and told he’s smelly because of his dad’s occupation, but Maks is content with his lot, his soulmate of a wife Valentyna, his sense of connection with the community and its colourful characters, and also the feeling that he’s actually contributing something to their lives. Even to that of flirty, lonely Yelena, whose isolated house sits at the very end of his run.There are moments early on when writer Lucy McIlgorm’s touching drama looks like it’s heading Read more ...
David Kettle
What new light can the age-old legend of Faust selling his soul to the devil shed on colonialism in Africa, slavery, the rape and destruction of the natural world, the exploitation and murder of the continent’s people? It’s a question you may well still be asking yourself after experiencing the visually spectacular but thematically opaque Faustus in Africa! from Cape Town-based Handspring Puppet Company and director/designer William Kentridge.There’s a lot to admire in the show, which arrives at the Edinburgh International Festival in a reworking of the company’s original 1995 production – Read more ...
joe.muggs
The long, hot summer of 2025 has been something else, right? Hate rallies, creeping authoritarianism, a weird reluctance to discuss the extremity of the weather even as everyone scrambles to buy air conditioners...But also a slightly delirious sense of fun as people get out and about in the sun – exemplified by the eruptions of joy of DJ AG’s spontaneous pavement sets featuring unknowns and megastars, broadcast online as a super-democratic antidote to all those videos of DJs alone or surrounded by too-cool-for-school party people. Anyway, it’s all quite exhausting. I was feeling burned Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I have a baby in me,” says Lydie (Naomi Ackie; Mickey 17). “What? Right now?” says her friend Agnes (Eva Victor), who may not be entirely thrilled at the news. “Are you going to name it Agnes?”Eva Victor (Rian in Billions) stars in, writes and directs their debut feature, which was produced by Barry Jenkins’s production house, Pastel. It’s divided into five sections, beginning and ending with The Year with the Baby. Its silly humour can be irritating, as can the dialogue, and it’s not as incisive as Girls, Fleabag or I May Destroy You, with which it has some themes in common.But it addresses Read more ...
David Nice
Pianist Bruce Liu wasn’t the only star soloist last night, though he certainly had the most notes to play. Attention was riveted by at least five Philharmonia members and their maverick principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali as percussionist in a joyful Prom.First off the mark was Antoine Siguré, probably the most compelling orchestral timpanist I’ve ever encountered. Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, daughter of two of Los Folkloristica’s founding members, gifted him solo rollickings which gave her Antrópolis the nature of a concerto, punctuated by snatches of music from Mexico City’s Read more ...
David Kettle
Imprints, Summerhall ★★★★Keep your wits about you for this appropriately tricksy, sometimes elusive but beautifully put together show from young company the Palimpsest Project. For a work that’s ultimately about memory, Imprints is just as unreliable, misleading and red herring-filled as its subject matter, and it takes something of a clear head to work your way through its maze of figures, objects and incidents from a barely recalled teenage encounter at a Christian summer camp.Charlie’s back home from art school, which means awkward conversations with former schoolmates from whom she’s Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
At first, I had my doubts about Puccini’s Suor Angelica in this concert performance at the Proms with Sir Antonio Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.With the big band (up to and including Richard Gowers’s organ) arrayed far behind the conductor, the singers marshalled in a line in front, and the extensive ranks of the London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir rising on all sides, the Royal Albert Hall seemed to have turned Puccini’s late (1918) chamber opera – the detached final third of his portmanteau trilogy Il Trittico – into the form that this venue once loved best of all: an Read more ...
David Kettle
The Ode Islands, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★ I might be going out on a limb here, but you’re unlikely to encounter anything quite like The Ode Islands elsewhere on the Fringe – perhaps anywhere, to be honest. That’s both in terms of form and content. Let’s get the first of those out of the way: Irish-born, Hastings-based solo performer Ornagh (yes, she’s single-named) dances, acts and lip-synchs sandwiched between two screens, interacting with intricate CGI both as a backdrop of psychedelic landscapes and in the foreground as monsters, demons and more. The effect isn’t always 100% faultless, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A sticker on the cover of American Dust is says it’s “an ode to the beauty of the American Southwest,” specifically the High Desert area within the wider setting of California's Mojave Desert. North-East of Los Angeles, this region contrasts with the city’s urban and suburban sprawl by incorporating scattered settlements.Eve Adams lived in Los Angeles. Now resident in the High Desert, this landscape is primary to her fourth album. In contrast with its title and inspiration, American Dust is not a desiccated rumination on the impact of remoteness with sparse arrangements and instrumentation. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
For Delius – then a young man, visiting Norway in the late 1880s to walk in its mountains – his first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was nothing less than an epiphany. Already high on the grandeur of nature in a country defined by its shimmering fjords and austere mountains, he found the text to be an intoxicating affirmation of the glories of the world in a humanistic universe.It took him several years to complete A Mass of Life, the choral work defined by many as his masterpiece, which was eventually brought to the public attention in 1909 at a London performance Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a Proms paradox that’s familiar to Early Music fans. Some works are too challenging – too big, too expensive, too uncommercial, too obscure – to do anywhere else. The trouble is, the Royal Albert Hall is the absolute last place you’d want to hear them.So you go, and half-hear, half-imagine a performance that requires you to fill in the blanks of acoustic, space and detail, superimposing cathedrals, ducal staterooms or Venetian balconies as required. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the full Monteverdi either.Luckily for us, Hervé Niquet and his Concert Spirituel had done quite a lot of Read more ...