Reviews
Nick Hasted
In Park Chan-wook’s strange Cannes prize-winning thriller, a husband is discovered mangled beneath a mountain, and pretty widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t noticeably upset.Brilliant young detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) becomes obsessed as their breaths synchronise in the interrogation room, a piquant tremor after the erotic floods and earthquakes of Park’s The Handmaiden (2016) and Stoker (2013). Back home, Hae-jun cooks sensuous food for his quick-witted, beautiful wife, domestic and sex life decent enough. Yet even as the murder case closes, he spies on the widow, voyeurism Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the third week of April 1967, Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid” topped the UK’s single’s chart. Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String” was number two, and The Monkees’ “A Little Bit me a Little Bit You” snapped at her heels. Englebert Humperdinck’s recent number one “Release me” was at number five. All very pop, very mainstream.The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” was in running too then, as were Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne” and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever”. But other chart entries like Whistling Jack Smith’s “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”, The Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s the second night of a four-night run at the London Palladium of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour – no other Dylan jaunt has taken an album for its title – and it begins with a blast of symphonic violence from the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The house lights fade to black, the symphony segues into a modal tune-up on stage, Dylan and his four-piece – second guitarist Bob Britt is not here tonight – barely visible in silhouette.And then it begins in a flurry of piano keys and guitar, the stage becoming eerily lit from below, and Dylan leans in to a song from the early 1970s, “ Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cynical might think Pearl Cleage’s play had been expressly written to address the over-riding issues in today’s USA – abortion and contraception rights, gun control, homophobia, racism. But the cynical would be wrong, as Blues for an Alabama Sky was written in 1995. What is notable is its timely scheduling by the National Theatre.Cleage has written a period play, set in the Harlem Renaissance during Prohibition, that works as a tribute to the major players of that movement. Their names are bandied about by the characters as their associates and colleagues – the poet Langston Hughes, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of the song “Two Ribbons” Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth of Let’s Eat Grandma do a brief schoolyard pat-a-cake hand-game. The song is a guileless ode to female friendship, love even, a paean to their own bond, which was strained at one point by the travails of a music career.Of course, it’s a piece of theatre, but the pair also emanate a very real sense of young women enjoying each other’s company, revelling in the sheer creative fun they have together. It’s a big part of their appeal. Kate Bush would be proud of them.Three albums into their career, the Norfolk duo are still Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ten minutes before The Orb got on stage at the Hare & Hounds, Alex Paterson was standing in the building’s courtyard with a big old spliff in his hand “clearing his head” and getting ready for action. So, it was good to know that some things don’t change.The audience of this sold-out 30th anniversary celebration of the ambient house trailblazers’ second album, UF Orb, similarly largely looked like they could quite easily have been there the first time round too. A room full of mainly 40- and 50-something blokes, with a surprisingly small smattering of female counterparts, were packed in, Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, Francis Jeffrey began his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion with a provocative denunciation of romanticism: “This will never do,” he complained. “It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system.”William Boyd’s latest excursion into fictional biography, aptly entitled The Romantic, is the fourth of the “whole-life” novels he has made his speciality, following The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015). It will almost certainly do, as far Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.The little stub of plot around which McDonagh has built his narrative is bafflingly simple. It’s 1923. Colm and Pádraic live on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland called Inisherin. They’re long-standing friends, and every evening they go to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the third time I’ve heard Path of Miracles live this year and I’d happily hear it another three times before Christmas. I reviewed the amateur Elysian Singers sing it in February, and the BBC Singers took it on for the first time in May – but last night’s triumphant version by Tenebrae was surely the best of the lot. This is a profound and moving piece, symphonic in its scope, surely one of the masterpieces of the recent choral repertoire, back where it started, with Tenebrae.Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles, which describes the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, was Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Marshalling a mass of bodies around a stage is what all choreographers do. But nobody does it quite like Crystal Pite, the Canadian whose half-hour piece "Flight Pattern" – a comment on the global refugee crisis – was a hit for the Royal Ballet five years ago, earning an Olivier Award.She now returns with a full-evening extension of that material, adding two new sections that address equally big subjects, not least the rights of children to life and safety. This, along with a final section dealing with what Pite calls “the ultimate border crossing”, makes sense of the work’s over-arching Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ben Vanstone, the showrunner for Channel 5’s hit revival of All Creatures Great and Small, originally foresaw it as stretching over four seasons, but has subsequently revised his opinion. With the third series ending and the fourth already in preparation, he now foresees broader horizons. “Everything in this show plays out slower than you think it would,” he commented.Fortuitously, All Creatures… has proved to be the ideal tonic – or maybe that should be “sedative” – for a world where the wheels are apparently coming off. Amid economic turmoil, political madness and a European war which might Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
This is not a play for the squeamish: here be blood and cum and unsavoury descriptions of genitalia, male and female, that make you wonder why humans relish sex so much. And it’s all played out in the close quarters of the small in-the-round space of the Orange Tree.The set is dominated by a large Tracey Emin-ish unmade bed, on which the two actors play out their past and present. Above the seating, on all four sides, are long panels where a graphic display shows a pulse line that suddenly flatlines. When the dialogue starts, the text is projected here too.Not that we spend that much Read more ...