Reviews
Simon Thompson
There’s a lot to shout about in this Orpheus, especially the way it looks. In a thin year for staged opera at the Edinburgh International Festival, they’ve gone for an eye-popper with this staging of Gluck’s most influential work. Premiering at Australia’s Opera Queensland in 2019, its star attraction is the Brisbane-based Circa Ensemble, a group of acrobats, circus artists and physical performers whose antics light up the stage.As the opera begins, we see a solitary female performer suspended from the top of the proscenium who gradually dances, rotates and levitates her way to the stage Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel ★★★★ Everything about Eric Rushton is lo-fi. His delivery, his movement about the stage, his interactions with the audience. Even the subject matter of this show – mental health, lost love – is low-key. Yet with his deadpan delivery and finely wrought gags, he commands the audience and delivers a lot of laughs.He tells a personal story, although one or two set-ups may have some comedic licence. But the core of Innkeeper – about how Rushton has come to handle his sometimes fragile mental health – has the imprimatur of lived experience.He takes us back to Read more ...
David Kettle
The Horse of Jenin, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★ Alaa Shehada bounds onto the stage, all muscular energy and swaggering self-confidence, for what’s effectively a cross between stand-up and solo theatre. Is it wrong to joke about Palestine? Definitely not, the larger-than-life, matey Shehada clearly thinks, finding plenty that’s funny, or certainly much that’s bleakly ironic, in his native city of Jenin in the West Bank, its cast of flawed, colourful characters, and its strange and awkward ways of life. With the threatening spectre of Israeli occupation constantly in the background.In many ways, Read more ...
James Saynor
Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough.But this French kissing-and-clobbering epic opts to recast its romantic leads midway through as they jump from teens to twenties, and it’s one reason why the Hauts-de-France Romeo and Juliet – directed by Gilles Lellouche – wrings few tears or heart-skips over its two-and-three-quarter-hour Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
You can't explain stage presence like Anoushka Shankar’s. It just "is". When she steps out in front of a completely packed Royal Albert Hall, and utters a welcoming, exploratory, London-ish “Hi... welcome to my Prom… Oh, my God!”, a friendly connection with audience is made. Instantly and with disarming ease.Then come memories: she thinks back to having participated with her father in the Ravi Shankar Prom in 2005 and her further three appearances since then, notably one in 2020 with no audience: “It’s so much nicer to have you guys all in here.”And then, from the moment she starts to play, Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk crafted a fine programme for their EIF recital, centring around Brahms’ relationship with the Schumanns. He famously met them in 1853, when Robert Schumann declared him the next great thing in German music. The following year, however, Robert attempted suicide, launching a decline that lasted until his death. Brahms stayed close to Clara until her death in 1896, in response to which he wrote the Vier ernste Gesänge. The only “originally scored” thing on the programme (★★★★) was Brahms’ Second Cello Sonata, which Grynyuk and Elschenbroich Read more ...
David Kettle
The Fit Prince (who gets switched on the square in the frosty castle the night before (insert public holiday here)), Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★They’ve created an affectionate but merciless send-up of Princess Di; they’ve lampooned Gwyneth Paltrow, her lifestyle brand Goop and her (ahem) unfortunate skiing collision; and they’ve even got their claws into the horror show that was the movie version of Cats. Awkward Productions – aka real-life couple Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – have a well-rehearsed arsenal of tried-and-tested techniques for skewering those who deserve it (or, in many cases, don Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Canadian-Korean director Celine Song burst onto the scene with her debut feature, Past Lives, two years ago, a bittersweet film about a woman torn between her first love, a Korean, and her current one, her American husband. Song is back with another woman at a crossroads, but in Materialists her heroine’s decision is much less painful to make, and far less affecting. This film is a curio: if Song’s name didn't appear in the opening credits, you would see it as a well cast mainstream romcom for grown-ups, with passages of seemingly sober analysis of the nature of love and marriage. It Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I will fly around the world just to forget you” are the opening words of “It Hits Harder,” the first track on New Radiations. The song is about a farewell. The album ends with “Sad Satellite,” where the titular heavenly object is used as a metaphor for distance, when the gap is increasing between the narrator and the subject: the latter a character who is “sucking me dry” and “took me for ride”.It’s not hard, then, to construe the tenth album from the Nashville-based Marissa Nadler as one permeated with partings – cleavages which create distance. If analysed, detachment can bring perspective Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Water surged through this Prom from first spray to last drop. But there was nothing damp or diluted about Edward Gardner’s helmsmanship as he steered the London Philharmonic Orchestra through a succession of liquid rhapsodies: three from the early 20th century; one from 1993.Aigul Akhmetshina, the star mezzo (and ubiquitous Carmen) who sang in Ravel’s Shéhérazade song-cycle, went with the flow herself in a notably collegiate performance that impressively blended her own sumptuous instrument with the lush orchestration around the vocal line. On paper, this looked like an almost overloaded Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Freakier Friday there were the two film versions of Freaky Friday based on Mary Rodgers’s lively, perceptive 1972 Young Adult novel, the foremother of all body-swap movie comedies (including Big).In Rodgers’s story, a feuding mother and daughter magically switch bodies for a day. The author was absolutely aware of this ingenious setup’s queasy-comic possibilities. Her 13-year-old narrator seethes at not being allowed to attend boy-girl parties that feature “kissing games”, and struggles when her child-mind is cast into her mother’s adult body and is forced to deal with responsibilities Read more ...
David Nice
Performers and public alike always treasure a beautiful and, in this case, remote setting for a music festival. But people matter as much as sense of place. When the players work together in various combinations for the duration, and tell you this is the highlight of their musical year, you know the achievement is utopian. And that was certainly the case with eight dynamic Bulgarian instrumentalists and three visitors new to the magic of Kovachevitsa.The Off the Beaten Path Chamber Music Festival isn’t the first Bulgarian institution to bring culture to this perfectly preserved but not Read more ...