Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“A rich and occasionally irritatingly gimmicky album…less perfectly realised than Autobahn, though there are some quite pretty tunes. People often charge electronic music with being ‘mechanical,’ confusing machines like clocks and other wind-up toys with devices which operate in ways more analogous to the human brain, which create quite different musical problems from, say, musical-boxes. What is wrong with Kraftwerk, however, is that their music is in fact mechanical, creating a contradiction between form and content which eventually destroys its artistic credibility and any hint of a soul Read more ...
David Nice
It all adds up to a cleverly interconnected triple bill and the perfect experience for five singers from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Artists Programme. There are three losses, two of them deaths, only one mourned for, a baritone in all three operas and three other singers in two of them, plus dazzling, finely honed work from various small forces of the Britten Sinfonia under conductor Peggy Wu (also on the JPAP). The weak link has nothing to do with any of the performances, nor Talia Stern's surefooted direction, so let's get that out of the way first. I'd be surprised if Elizabeth Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Puppini Sisters brought their signature blend of close harmony singing to Islington’s Union Chapel on Friday, the opening night of a three-week UK tour marking their 20th birthday and the release of their seventh studio album, titled – naturally enough – The Birthday Party. There was nothing Pinteresque about the evening, just unalloyed joy onstage and off. “The Andrews Sisters on acid”, “The Spice Girls of jazz” and “Swing Punks” – this effervescent trio, whose fans include King Charles and Michael Bublé, are all those and more. With their retro-glamour aesthetic (reflected by a few Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Patriarchy is a trap for both men and women. This we know. But it’s not often that its takedown is as amazingly theatrical as this fabulous entertainment, Tender, by American playwright Dave Harris, now getting its wonderfully noisy premiere at the Soho Theatre. It’s a wildly immersive show, partly orgiastic, partly touching the bits other entertainments cannot reach, and brought to us by director Matthew Xia, who previously teamed up with the playwright to create the hit Tambo & Bones. Set in a dilapidated old theatre, this show explores the world of three male strippers, called the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The aftermath of school massacres for those left behind, and the pros and cons of restorative justice have become two strong themes for drama in recent years. Writer Fran Kranz combines the two, in an intense, claustrophobic piece that attacks both the brain and the heart. Mass has had an unusual journey: Kranz originally conceived it as a play, before turning instead to film (of the same name, in 2022), but then reworking it for his intended medium, which has its world premier at the Donmar. I haven’t seen the movie, so can’t compare; but it is perfectly at home on stage, and especially Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There has been a trend in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in recent years to portray Athens as a sexually repressive regime in which Queen Hippolyta is resentfully shackled to Theseus after he has conquered her in battle. The Bridge Theatre’s – ultimately gloriously escapist – Dream, portrayed Theseus as a tyrant from The Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, the beautifully austere Dream which played at The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last Christmas, showed him as a psychotic misogynist.This is a completely valid reading of the text – I personally have never recovered from the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The USA was still months short of Pearl Harbour’s shove into World War II when Bertholt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. It was many years into a Cold War by the time it was first staged in 1958. It will need a historian of the future to draft the next sentence, the one that heralds its revival at the RSC in 2026. But we were all thinking, and worrying about what exactly it would say – as Brecht intended.After a prologue and some banners (the more intrusive Brechtian stylings mercifully largely left behind after that) we’re introduced to the fat cats of the Chicago cauliflower Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The writer of the edgy TV drama The Responder, Tony Schumacher, is back with an equally edgy but surprisingly warm-hearted story of people down on their luck in Liverpool. On paper, The Cage sounds like another run-through of the clichés of casino dramas, but it regularly confounds expectations.The setup is simple: two casino employees are, separately, skimming the takings, one to save her family from potential homelessness, the other to pay off loan-shark debts. Then it gets complicated. Their paths inevitably are on a collision course, both with each other and with the police and the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It is almost without fail that Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival is guaranteed to be one of my annual musical highlights – and despite it still only being April, I suspect that it will be the same again this year. As is usually the case, the line-up of this celebration of the weird and distinctly wonderful was one where only the most musically literate would be aware of more than a handful of the performers. However, it was again a set-up where most would have gone home having discovered a new favourite band. This time, mine would most certainly be the raw and visceral Prostitute. That said, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scott Bennett is a busy guy at the moment, touring as he is with not one, but two shows; Blood Sugar Baby, a personal piece of storytelling about a family medical ordeal, and Stuff, which is presented more in his usual strand of Everyman comedy. In truth, I thought I was going to review the former at the Leicester Square Theatre, but I ended up going to the latter – and I’m glad I did.Bennett is an accomplished observational comic with a keen eye for everyday absurdities, other people’s as well as his own, and over an energetic 90 minutes during which he barely pauses for breath he reflects Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
David Pearson’s debut play, Firewing, part of Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE project for emerging writers, is a heartfelt two-hander about the importance of passing stuff on.“Stuff” is a key word in the dialogue, the portmanteau word with which a young man called Marcus (Charlie Beck, pictured below right) pads out his sentences, a sign of his unfinished education. He has now found a mentor, Tim (Gerard Horan, pictured below left), an older man who is steadily filling in some of the gaps. Marcus, we learn, is a son devoted to a mother who loves to paint but seems to have been felled by Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the delirious and exhilarating Sephardic dance that finished their concert devoted to the Jewish, Muslim and Christian music of Jerusalem, one of the Apollo’s Fire fiddlers seemed to be playing – so my companion spotted – some Led Zeppelin riffs. In which case, the Chicago- and Cleveland-based Baroque orchestra had achieved a sort of cross-genre full house, or music classifier’s utter nightmare. File under: ClassicalFolkWorldJazz... Rock. The night before, however, the Bach Double Violin Concerto had skipped and flown through St Martin-in-the-Fields with bravura elegance as much Read more ...