Reviews
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback.The opening sequence of episode one was a blinder, a self-contained mini-drama about a motorist stopping at a decrepit service station to use the facilities, then finding himself pursued by a malevolent articulated truck, looming ever larger in his rearview mirror as he sings along to "Bette Davis Eyes" on the car radio.The cat-and-mouse pursuit was shot with filmic grandeur, as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens would clash with damaging consequences, a forewarning acknowledged that year by Culture’s Two Sevens Clash album.Yet Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing Everywhere collects “Voices,” “Hong Kong Garden’s” B-side, and Two Sevens Clash producer Joe Gibbs’s single “Prophesy Reveal,” a version of "Two Sevens Clash" voiced by Marvin Pitterson in his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The restrictiveness of conventional gender identities explains the extreme body horror of Titane, in which a pregnant rookie firefighter frequently invoked as Jesus bleeds car oil from her vagina and from the stigmatic splits in her swollen belly. The miracle of Julia Doucournau’s luridly beautiful Palme d’Or-winner is that the memory of the violence puncturing the film's first half recedes as loving tenderness takes hold.Protagonist Alexia (first-time actor Agathe Rousselle magnificently channelling punk snottiness and catwalk hauteur) may be a serial killer who’s been impregnated by a car, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells ★★★★Shirley Ballas (main picture), released from her day job as head judge on Strictly Come Dancing, certainly knows how to make an entrance, and as the Wicked Queen she does here in a range of fantastic costumes. She swashes her buckle – well, swishes her frock – with aplomb.Although Ballas's is the name above the title, the driving force of the show is Leon Craig in the Dame role as Nurse Nellie. He's terrific, much aided by a sparkling, family-friendly script by Paul Hendy (who can't resist a pun), and Damian Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was never going to be a bumper year, just a bumpy one. With theatres dark until May or later, the usual 11 or 12 months of potential live-dance going was reduced to four or five. There was one bright shaft of optimism in late spring, and another in the autumn, when the gloom-clouds parted to allow a few weeks of almost-normality. But now we seem to have come full circle. In the past 10 days three out of London’s four Nutcrackers have either closed or been drastically postponed – one of them to this time next year. The show must go on, it will go on. Just not yet.That doesn’t mean that, for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everybody in the comedy industry started out with so much hope that, finally, things could get back to normal in 2021 – and for a while they did, and there were some gems as live comedy returned to clubs and theatres.In live comedy, which operated for part of the year, Jason Manford and Alfie Brown – two comics who couldn't be more different if they tried – delivered great shows, while it was clear that Olga Koch (pictured right) had been using her enforced layoff to work on some very solid material for her new show. Sadly, not all comics had used the time wisely, and there were a few Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's so much stuff on TV, in all its many multi-streaming hats, that I somehow haven't got around to watching Succession. Apparently it's the best TV show ever made.Oh well, there's bound to be another one along in a minute. Theartsdesk's eagle-eyed reviewers have found plenty to amuse themseves with elsewhere during 2021, and we parade our particular predilections below. Adam SweetingIt's a Sin, Channel 4 When I reviewed the first two episodes of Russell T Davies's shattering, but also where appropriate very funny, take on how the AIDS crisis hit Londin in the 1980s, I could have Read more ...
theartsdesk
Despite its much delayed start, 2021 was a great year for the visual arts, and institutions and artists alike showed their resilience in agile and sensitive responses to unprecedented conditions. The plastic arts took on a new significance as people adjusted to life without human touch; equally, the experience of viewing art online revealed the extent to which tactile qualities are experienced through looking. Here are some of our thoughts on the best of the year just gone.*Seeing paint on canvas, walking around a sculpture and looking at the textures of plaster, stone, metal and wood was as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title might provoke a quick double-take. Wasn’t A Very British Scandal that series about Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw?Duh, of course not! That was A Very English Scandal (though both of them are produced by Blueprint Pictures). But was it really a great idea to tag this plushly-produced, starrily-cast, historically-based three-parter as though it’s just the latest product to trundle off a televisual production line? We look forward to the box set where it’s bundled in with A Very English Education, A Very British Brothel, A Very British Hotel Chain Read more ...
David Nice
As the catastrophe unfolded in 2020, it seemed reasonable to speculate that the biggest orchestral works – Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies, Strauss tone poems among them – probably wouldn’t be heard live in our concert halls for years.Yet see how adaptable and uncrushable our great performing artists are. Following four and a half months of mostly scaled-down or middle-range opuses streamed online, the London orchestras adapted with alacrity. Simon Rattle welcomed an audience back into the Barbican, wondering at “that sound you make with your hands” for a nicely-tailored London Symphony Read more ...
David Nice
January to mid-May 2021 were the bleakest Covid months, yielding only the occasional livestream at least half as good as being there (Barrie Kosky’s magically reinvented Strauss Der Rosenkavalier from Munich, a film of Britten's The Turn of the Screw around Wilton’s Music Hall more imaginative than the actual production). The burden then fell, in England at least, on the country opera houses. It was clear from the start that the operatic heroes of the year would be the administrations of Glyndebourne, Garsington, Grange Park Opera, The Grange Festival, Longborough, plus others we didn't Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The archive release which had the greatest impact, and still does, was Linda Smith’s Till Another Time 1988-1996. After it turned up, the reaction to a first play was instant. How could this have escaped attention? The compilation opened the door on a brilliant artist, one previously known to a particular audience.Till Another Time raises the point that it’s impossible to keep on top of everything, to know about everything. Even though she issued new releases until relatively recently, Smith had slipped through a personal knowledge crack. Thankfully, that’s now rectified.That’s one aspect of Read more ...