Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
This raw, joyous, irreverent take on Joan of Arc made headlines before opening night for its depiction of the fifteenth-century warrior saint as non-binary. Yet what shines out in Charlie Josephine’s fresh, deliberately pared-down script is that all of us struggle to fit precisely into the categories that language assigns to us. There’s no sense of the erasure of the female struggle in this re-examination of Joan’s legacy – the play features many strong women, not least the king’s mother-in-law, Debbie Korley’s stylishly fearsome Yolande of Aragon. The fact is that Joan of Arc was by anyone’s Read more ...
David Nice
Asked which work suits capricious Albert Hall acoustics best, I’d say Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, partly due to the choral billows – this year there’s been an extra thrill about massed choirs – but also because the Kensington colosseum haloes this spiritual journey of a soul. Best singer in the space? Based on years of Proms experience, surely the palm should go to tenor Allan Clayton, ringing of tone and so clear in diction that you can hear every word.So the work and the protagonist were assured before a note had been played. What really allowed everything to take flight, though, Read more ...
India Lewis
Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into something stranger, however, when I learned that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America and the book’s subject is the permanent holiday of the so-called “Angel of Death” – a poisoned chalice of a life in unending, hidden exile.Recently translated into English by Georgia de Chamberet, Guez’s book won the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. It is, ostensibly, a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Who tells your story? Something of a theme in new musicals since Hamilton posed the question in those long ago pre-Covid, pre-inflation days. In Ride, the once famous cyclist who had hardly ever ridden a bike, Annie Londonderry, circumvents the problem right at the start, because she will – and she’ll also, a little reluctantly, tell the story of Annie Kopchovsky, the Latvian-born mother she once was.It was three years ago that Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams found Annie’s story and started to develop it as a musical, a version winning the Vault Festival Show of the Week in 2020. It Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.It seems somehow out of place to express cavils that the tone of this encounter is supremely respectful, that Herzog does not press Gorbachev into commentary on events of history beyond those in which he was immediately involved. Though today’s Russians would hardly agree with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Dave Edinburgh Awards went abroad this year – Australian Sam Campbell won for best show at the Fringe, while American Lara Ricote won best newcomer.Campbell won against strong competition from Seann Walsh, Liz Kingsman, Delightful Sausage, Alfie Brown, Colin Hoult and Larry Dean, while among those on the newcomer list were Leo Reich and Josh Jones. Those who missed the Queenslander's ultra-silly and goofy hour, Comedy Show, at the festival may be waiting a while to see it as he has yet to announce any more UK dates, but Ricote has just announced she is appearing at Soho Theatre in London Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A strong team of musical chefs can blend and spice Bach’s mighty Mass in B Minor in a variety of different ways, and still prepare a feast to savour. We don’t know exactly why Bach felt compelled to bundle his decades of genius into this late portmanteau showcase, only that he did – and that its credible interpretations can span contrasting views.With the Dunedin Ensemble, John Butt has brought both historical rigour and searching musicality to a reading of the work that strips its forces down to a vocal minimum while never stinting on its impact as a whole. However, when Butt directed (from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of The Capture arrived three years ago, theartsdesk liked it so much that we reviewed it three times. Writer-director Ben Chanan had successfully, and addictively, tapped into a secret dystopia of blanket digital surveillance and so-called “correction”, in which anyone might be manipulated by shadowy state agencies to serve their own hidden agendas.That sense of an apparently “real” world subsumed by a malign virtual facsimile which can be rewritten and modified at will again underpins this second series. As we saw in a chilling opening scene, the technology could even Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Voces8 Live from London, now in its seventh iteration, has progressed from streaming choral chamber music from an empty studio to an 80-strong visiting choir in a packed Christ Church, Spitalfields. In doing this the festival has retained its best features – a variety of repertoire, collaboration with a range of ensembles – while adding scale and the warmth of a live audience.The final concert of the current series of ten saw TUKS Camerata (pictured below), a student choir from the University of Pretoria, singing both alone and alongside Voces8 themselves, in a programme called “Hope” Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous upper circle. To shut off nearly half the concert hall for a world class orchestra that has crossed the Atlantic shows either a healthy disregard for the fickleness of audience taste, or a near suicidal disinterest in box office revenue.That, you could say, is what festivals are all about, an approach that might have found some justification in a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Academy 2 may not be the biggest venue in Birmingham, but it was packed on Friday evening for the first gig of Dope Lemon’s much delayed Rose Pink Cadillac tour – to support an album that was finally released after delays of its own back in January. In fact, such was the mass of bodies waiting in anticipation for Angus Stone’s crew to take the stage that it took the best part of half an hour just to get served at the bar before the action started.Dope Lemon eventually took to a stage that was wrapped in a fog of dry ice, illuminated by blue stage lights, dressed like the Grateful Dead in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In late August 1962, Liverpool’s Swinging Blue Genes were booked to play Hamburg’s Star-Club for the first time. At the opening show of their season, they were booed and the curtain was pulled across them. The audience took against their mix of skiffle and trad jazz. A musical rethink was needed.In mid-May 1964, The Swinging Blue Jeans, as they now were, were booed while touring the UK on a bill with Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Animals, King Size Taylor & The Dominoes, The Other Two and The Nashville Teens. They were pulled from the dates. The R&B and rock ’n roll fans in the Read more ...