Reviews
Annabel Bai Jackson
No mental health condition has become quite as kitsch as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Its tacky shorthands – the hand washing, the germaphobia, the clean freaks – have made their way into everything, from Buzzfeed listicles to The Big Bang Theory. As for literature, there’s a gaping OCD-shaped hole. Depression gets William Styron’s Darkness Visible, psychosis Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. But the implicit cultural understanding of OCD as “quirk” has made it unworthy of literary treatment: insufficiently disturbing for trauma plots, and too specific to be a metaphor Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been 14 months since the release of Wardruna’s most recent album – Kvitravn. However, repeated waves of Covid have since prevented them from going a-viking and bringing their new show to live audiences around the UK.Nevertheless, both the band and their fans’ patience was finally rewarded this week, as Einar Selvik’s seven-piece band of Norsemen and women came to Birmingham’s Symphony Hall for the first time. However, anyone who might be thinking that a 2,000 plus seater might be a bit of a stretch for a relatively niche group of artists whose sound falls somewhere between ambient folk Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there really such a thing as an unmissable show? Depends on your taste of course, but for sheer hype this event takes some beating: two-time Olivier Award-winning star Ruth Wilson (last seen doing her sinister stuff in the BBC’s His Dark Materials) has teamed up with boundary-smashing director Ivo van Hove (whose A View from the Bridge was a decade highlight) to stage Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue about a woman waiting for her lover to phone. Part of the hype is the hot cakes effect — the show is in the West End for 31 performances only.Wilson plays the unnamed woman, a role which both Read more ...
Richard Bratby
JS Bach’s Passions as music theatre? Well, why not? Whatever the aura of untouchability around these works, they were always conceived as part of a bigger picture: a communal sacred ritual in which the divide between performer and audience wasn’t so much blurred as nonexistent.Anything that gets us closer to that experience surely serves Bach’s ends; at any rate, something needs to be done to break these works out of the curious sterility of so many modern concert performances or the frosty purity of the recording studio. In that light, English Touring Opera’s decision to tour the St John Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s not hard to see, watching Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre, why Franz Xaver Kroetz is one of Germany’s most staged playwrights.Born in Munich in 1946, he’s known for unflinching portrayals of poverty and what it does to people. Directed sensitively by Diyan Zora, this production is a masterclass in what critic Richard Gilman dubbed “the theatre of the inarticulate” – but it does leave us yearning for a little more depth.The inarticulate in this case are the Meier family, of 1970s Bavaria. Martha (Anna Francolini) looks after the home while her husband Otto (Michael Shaeffer, pictured Read more ...
Robert Beale
Continuing the joint BBC Philharmonic/Hallé celebration of Vaughan Williams, Sir Andrew Davis took on the job of presenting three substantial works on Saturday.Toward the Unknown Region has given its title to the entire series, not a bad choice of phrase for the career of a composer whose intellectual curiosity and visionary capacity never left him: the phrase is that of the poet Walt Whitman, and the piece itself is a setting of a five-stanza poem for chorus, orchestra and organ.It's early Vaughan Williams, written when he was working on the music of The English Hymnal, and in many ways it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Two years ago, the fourth season of The Last Kingdom (Netflix) found the Saxon saga not quite hitting peak form, possibly reeling from the fallout of the haunting death of King Alfred (David Dawson). Happily, any doubts are blown away with the arrival of 5, in which the show’s trademarks of knotty dynastic rivalry, anguished romantic entanglements and horrifying eruptions of bloodthirstiness are all roaring ahead at full blast. Sadly, they say this series will be the last, though a feature film may be in the works.Some things have changed (we are now without Ian Hart’s stalwart Beocca, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The four years of Angela Hewitt’s globe-trotting “Bach Odyssey” confirmed time and again that she brings a nonpareil artistry and authority to the most demanding, and rewarding, of all keyboard repertoires. Yet the Canadian pianist, as we already knew, carries plenty of other arrows in her musical quiver. At the Wigmore Hall on Saturday, her mixed programme blended some choice Bach – four selections from the Well-Tempered Clavier’s second book – with a brace of Mozart sonatas, along with works by Ravel and Chabrier. Her recordings of the latter pair’s solo piano pieces emphatically prove her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’m a sucker for traditional vitrines and the procession of old style display cases installed by Ali Cherri in the Renaissance galleries of the Sainsbury Wing look very handsome.During his residency at the National Gallery, the Lebanese artist has been researching evidence of trauma in the collection. Of course, images of torture, murder and cruelty abound in paintings of the humiliation and crucifixion of Christ and the many martyrdoms portrayed in gory detail for the edification of the faithful. It’s amazing how we can gaze with disinterested curiosity at open wounds, severed heads or Read more ...
David Nice
After the turbulence of masterpieces over the previous three evenings – Janáček, Britten, and the greats featured in this duo’s Fidelio Café fundraiser for Ukraine – it was balm to feel the air and leisure of the first three miniatures in this beautifully-planned programme.Extra magic came from the physical distancing: more often Kolesnikov and Tsoy sit alongside one another at a single keyboard, but at opposite ends of two more or less interlocking grands, eye co-ordination on the visual front and the space you could hear in the acoustics of beautiful St Luke’s paid off. The partners are Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Even blessed with youthful confidence, when the Coral first stepped out on the Barrowland stage 21 years ago to support the late, great Joe Strummer it’s hard to imagine they could have foreseen that they’d be able to return to the same stage over two decades later. Yet much like the former Clash frontman that night, here were the Liverpudlian group armed with a considerable back catalogue to delve into, and an audience eager for nostalgia, in the form of a run-through of the band’s debut album.The Coral themselves have changed in that time, of course, increasing to a seven-piece for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ti West’s slyly self-referential horror film about a Texan porn shoot subverts expectations. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre/Debbie Does Dallas genre mash-up promised by the premise, pumping out head-spinning sex and gore, is in fact a muted exercise in craft, with memorable ideas on desire.From the moment blonde Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) steps out of the Bayou Burlesque club beneath a mural of an alligator snapping at a bikini bottom, and the camera pans to the industrial estates and belching refineries behind this particular American dream, West wittily depicts sex as small-town escape and Read more ...