Reviews
Tom Teodorczuk
When Brendan Coyle, playing a modestly magnetic widower and sales rep called John in this revival of Conor McPherson's 2004 play Shining City, first appears on stage, he looks thoroughly bewildered. His eyes dart back and forth as he initially struggles to find his bearings. He has arrived at the office of the therapist Ian (Rory Keenan) whom he has sought out in an attempt to understand why he keeps seeing the ghost of his dead wife.Such confusion seems apt. The intimate, understated Theatre Royal Stratford East, has served up some gems over the years – most recently its 2018 London Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Music in London has faced down plagues, puritans, philistines and planners over the four centuries spanned by the Aurora Orchestra’s season-opener at Kings Place on Saturday. This concert in the venue’s “London Unwrapped” strand filled its main hall without distancing for the first time since the capital’s (and the world’s) latest pandemic struck. Accompanied for several works by the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, on their own in others, a score of the Aurora’s players were led by their founder-conductor Nicholas Collon on a journey from the first Elizabeth’s city to our own, by way of the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s well worth tracking down one of the September 29 special cinema screenings of Ric Burns' lovingly made documentary portrait of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, or seeking it out online. Famous for his vivid, insightful descriptions of people living with disabling conditions (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars), Sacks was born into a brilliant Jewish family of doctors in north-west London in 1933, but after studying medicine at Oxford, spent most of his working life in America. Burns had the luxury of making the film with full co- Read more ...
David Nice
British opera’s attempted answer to The Magic Flute, and its presentation as the opening gambit of Edward Gardner’s eminent position as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, leave me queasily ambivalent.After all the smoke and lighting of the LPO’s online series, there’s barely a hint of theatricality in this plain concert performance, with the only concession to lighting the constant red on the Royal Festival Hall organ: is it not an opera but a choral symphony with eight soloists? Then you remember what wonders good directors and designers have achieved with The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Looking for answers to what qualifies an album for a makeover and its attendant return to record shop racks can cause heads to spin. Multiple variables are at play but, still, it merits pondering. Market factors come into consideration, including the prices fetched by original pressings, even if the album isn’t obscure.Take Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, originally released in June 1997. The band’s third album was then issued in a collector-friendly range of formats and packages. The double-album version currently sells for around £260. The CD edition – with Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Much has happened in the five years since your reviewer braved the steep rake at The Other Palace and saw The Last Five Years (not least my now getting its “Nobody needs to know” nod in Hamilton – worth a fistful of Tonys in prestige, I guess) so it’s timely to revisit Jason Robert Brown’s musical. Jonathan O’Boyle’s 2020 production transfers from Southwark Playhouse to the Garrick Theatre, with some of the show's flaws remaining, but others addressed. The common ground is that a relatively young audience (some not much older than the work itself, now past its teenage years) loved it and that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is the story of a boy and a building. Sixteen-year-old Youri (newcomer Alseni Bathily) lives, with his telescope, in Cité Gagarine, a vast red-brick Sixties apartment complex in Ivry-sur-Seine, an eastern suburb of Paris governed by the French Communist party.Named after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, it was once a showcase for the party, a modern, utopian, rent-subsidised setting for working-class supporters. But it mirrored the party’s decline and lapsed into disrepair – asbestos, rats, broken lifts, crime – and was, in reality, demolished in 2019.Directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If a standard-sized recital hall can be a lonely place for a solo violinist, playing an auditorium of Barbican dimensions must feel like crossing a desert under pitiless spotlight sun. Happily, Nicola Benedetti’s prowess as a communicator means that she made those trackless wastes shrink into a shared garden where she, and we, explored her instrument’s many kinds of bloom. Defiantly, a solitary figure in red on the enormous stage, she began her recital with Bach’s D minor partita – and the mighty, earth-moving Chaconne which completes it. Post-interval, she moved onwards through the history Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If a new ballet can be doomed by the weight of expectation, then Creature didn’t stand a chance. First scheduled to appear in the spring of 2020, then again last autumn, the publicity drive over the past weeks has had the air of marketing a used car that is taking up space in the showroom. As it turns out, Akram Khan’s latest big commission from English National Ballet was already doomed by the weight of its own bombast. What started out as an interesting idea, introducing elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, burst its bounds when climate change, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
An entertaining but undernourished industrial-domestic neo-noir set in South Wales,The Ballad of Billy McCrae depicts the power struggle between bent quarrying company boss Billy (David Hayman) and gullible failed businessman Chris Blythe (Ian Virgo), the story’s fall-guy protagonist.Directed by the enterprising Welsh filmmaker Chris Crow and dynamically scored by Mark Rutherford, the movie feels compressed – despite cinematographer Alex Metcalfe’s resplendent images of the hills and vales – and rushed. Getting an ambitious film made in Wales is admirable and Crow must have worked with a low Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in an agreeable drawing room with an author, Charles Condomine, who is looking forward to having a bit of fun with a local spiritualist, Madame Arcati, whom he has invited over for an evening séance. But once a conversation with his wife, Ruth, debating the relative attractiveness of his deceased first wife, Elvira, cracks like a shot from Chekhov’s gun, trouble is as sure to come as the spirits themselves.Richard Eyre’s revival of Noël Coward’s crowd-pleasing comedy fetches up at the Harold Pinter Theatre having haunted the Theatre Royal Bath and the Duke of York’s Theatre and Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
75 years after Sir Thomas Beecham founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s sobering to reflect that without this one person’s hubris and sheer cantankerousness, British musical life would be a whole lot worse off. Beecham, who fortuitously combined musical flair with force of personality and the inheritance of a pharmaceutical fortune, tended to start orchestras of his own after falling out with other ones. His chief creations, the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, today are still going strong – indeed, arguably stronger than ever. The latter notches up three- Read more ...