Reviews
Florence Hallett
Khadija Saye was 24 when she died in the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the same year that her series of photographic self-portraits showed in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: she was the youngest artist in a roster of well-established figures such as Joy Gregory and Isaac Julien.Claiming prescience in art is tricky and probably ill-advised, but still it is true that in the aftermath of Grenfell, In This Space We Breathe directly addressed the outrage of that disaster, in which the right to live and breathe freely at home had been so flagrantly violated. Since then, the murder of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Missing the office? Or dreading the day you have to return? What’s your relationship to the people you work with and for, and how does it intersect with your personal life? Do your paymasters know you? Do they care about you? Are there days when the routine and the hierarchy of it all just feels like a spirit-crushing game?All of those notions, and many others, drifted through the imagination when you entered the unsettling world of the Institute. This hour-long film for the BBC was created and directed by Amit Lahav, founder of the much-admired physical theatre company Gecko, and adapted Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In each of its incarnations – books, television series and theatre shows – covering more than 80 titles, Horrible Histories, created by Terry Deary, has been a hit. Children love the stories' anarchic humour and gory details, while parents and teachers know that their charges are retaining some information while having fun. And now Horrible Histories' latest incarnation, Barmy Britain, presented by Birmingham Stage Company and written by Deary and Neal Foster, is touring drive-in venues around the country.Performed by Foster and Morgan Philpott, who play multiple roles with lots of on- Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After the success of BBC Radio 3’s live lunchtime broadcasts from the Wigmore Hall, live music is now kicking off again north of the border, with four concerts broadcast from City Halls, Glasgow, presented by Kate Molleson. Sadly, due to "unforeseen circumstances" the recitals were not filmed and streamed as originally planned – something which does take away from the overall audience experience – but it’s still thrilling to know that City Halls is once again ringing with music.Starting the series was a recital from the young Glasgow-born bass-baritone Michael Mofidian and pianist Julia Lynch Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and curator is also a bit obsessed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially as played by the maverick Canadian genius Glenn Gould. Well, Luis – snap. The last pre-lockdown Goldbergs I heard live fizzed into the Devon twilight a year ago during the Dartington Festival, in a blistering, furiously-paced performance by pianist Joanna MacGregor that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The gentleman pictured above is Martin Green. In 1995 he was a prime mover behind The Sound Gallery, a double-album compiling groovy British easy listening and library music from around 25 years earlier which until then had been (mostly) overlooked. It was as trailblazing a compilation as Lenny Kaye’s 1972 garage-psych set Nuggets.Now, Green is again looking back around 25 years, this time to the Nineties with Super Sonics – Martin Green Presents 40 Junkshop Britpop Greats. It’s also a double: a 40-track, 2-CD collection in a smartly designed double fold-out digi-pack.Both compilations spring Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Farms have played quite a large part in the history of rock, not just in terms of those wealthy stars who retire to one, tending sheep and making cheese. The festivals at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury all took place on farms but before everyone turned on, tuned in and dropped out in the mud and the sun, two farmers in a village on the Welsh borders had set up the world’s first residential recording studio.Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm, which premiered on BBC Four on Saturday evening, told the remarkable story of Britain’s own honky chateau, as Elton John named the album he Read more ...
Owen Richards
At a point in the early noughties, every third film was a teen comedy about a road trip to lose one's virginity. It’s a genre most were glad to see the back of. What a pleasant surprise Come As You Are is then, which brings much needed heart and relevancy to this tired trope.Based on a true story, we follow Scotty, Matt and Mo as they travel to Montreal to visit a brothel. But this isn’t some sleezy trip – each of the characters has a physical disability, and with their parents as their primary carers, having an active sex life has been nearly impossible. So, with the support of driver/nurse Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, this genre-defying Brazilian film suggests a peculiar amalgam of Angela Carter and Jean Genet, with dollops here and there of The Exorcist and even a brief nod towards Alien.The pregnant Ana (a sad-eyed Marjorie Estiano) finds herself falling for her baby’s serene-seeming nanny, Clara (a transfixing Isabél Zuaa). That the newborn turns out to be a werewolf sends Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It is 41 years since Peter Shaffer ripped off Mozart’s respectable façade to reveal a foul-mouthed verbally incontinent child-man with no more ability to control his behaviour than his genius. Inspired by a short story by Alexander Pushkin that put forward the theory that Salieri murdered Mozart, he fleshed out bare biographical bones with virtuoso obscenity as part of an extraordinary study of obsession, cut-throat professional rivalry and malignant jealousy.Michael Longhurst’s astonishing, exhilarating production for the National Theatre takes a stage-play that many felt was eclipsed by Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Presenting online concerts has been a Matterhorn-steep learning curve for the music sector. Now, after a few months in which imaginations have been tested to the limit, it’s becoming clear what works and what doesn’t. All the more power, then, to the Philharmonia’s many elbows: in yesterday’s webcast, the first of three for their Summer Sessions series, they showed exactly what is possible once one dives into the chilly water. In a programme slightly under one hour long, conducted by John Wilson (who has grown a lockdown beard), Sheku Kanneh-Mason, justifiably British music’s man-of-the- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...