Reviews
Laura de Lisle
“I don’t think I have the right to influence her,” says an older character of her daughter in For Services Rendered, W Somerset Maugham’s 1932 anti-war drama. If only all elder statesmen and women felt the same about the youth. Tom Littler’s revival at the Jermyn Street Theatre makes great use of an intimate space, but the first half is a slog and only a few of the large cast make their mark. The setting is appropriately idyllic: a garden in rural Kent (the village’s name is Ramblestone, naturally), late summer 1932, the gentle thwocks of a game of tennis drifting over the fence. Eden Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Where does music come from? That’s the vital question posed to Sergei Rachmaninoff in Dave Malloy’s extraordinary 2015 chamber work, as the great late-Romantic Russian composer – stuck in his third year of harrowing writer’s block – tries to relocate his gift. It comes from others and from himself; from past and present; from everything and nothing. It is ephemeral, and yet it is at the core of his very being.Rach (Keith Ramsay, pictured below with Tom Noyes), traumatised by the failure of his first symphony in 1897 – mangled by a drunken conductor and finished off by a sharp-tongued Read more ...
Heather Neill
Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking heroine, her story reimagined by prolific playwright Tanika Gupta? Ibsen's understanding of the fears and frustrations of women in the Nineteenth Century stood out among writers and thinkers of his time and modern women writers are likely to warm to him. Stef Smith's version of A Doll's House, offering three manifestations of Nora and bringing her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, and Channel 5 marked the occasion with this sobering documentary. Focusing on male suicide – incredibly, now the UK’s biggest killer of men under 45 – it studied six patients at the Riverside Mental Health Centre in Hillingdon, west London. The results were both harrowing and heartbreaking.Director Rachel Harvie stood back and let her interviewees tell their stories, which served as both therapy and confessional. Charlie, a sad, mild-mannered boy of 18 covered in self-inflicted scars, has been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, social anxiety and “ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Memory is a funny thing: it can get you through exams; it can comfort you or distress you; it can last a lifetime or go in an instant. In Sofie Hagen's case, her idiosyncratic one has provided material for her new show Bumswing, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe and is now at Soho Theatre.Bumswing, she tells us at the top of the hour with a deceptively sweet smile, is a departure from her previous few shows, which were about anxiety, abuse and self-harm (one of which, Bubblewrap, won her the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer in 2015). Her therapist told her to perhaps cut back Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Semyon Bychkov was a surprising choice to take over the Czech Philharmonic last year, a conductor with few obvious connections to Czech music. But on the strength of this visit to the Proms, they make a good team. Bychkov communicates fluently with the players, conveying power and passion, and detail too, but without any overt theatrics at the podium.The Czech Philharmonic has a burnished tone, well projected and filling the Albert Hall, but more with colour than with weight. There is an elegant and lyrical flow to everything the strings play, which Bychkov is able to harness and shape. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre fronts this seven-part history of those fearful days, and the first instalment of Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History (BBC Four) took us from the first stirrings of Catholic versus Protestant conflict in the mid-Sixties to the full-blown horrors of murders, bombings, mass internment and the British Army’s increasingly bloody involvement.It Read more ...
Owen Richards
According to Metronomy maestro Joseph Mount, his first attempt of album number six was a much snappier affair. But it wasn’t until he broke from his self-imposed immediacy that it started connecting with him. In its final form, Metronomy Forever clocks in at 17 tracks of singles, instrumentals and soundscapes, and though it skirts close to double-album indulgence, you’re never more than one song away from a winner.The title Metronomy Forever refers to the never-ending nature of radio, and this airwave-skipping mindset has given Mount a toy box of genres and forms to play with. The preceding Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Thanks for being in here with us tonight,” Wayne Coyne begins, “when you could be outside with the universe shining down on us.” Having clearly experienced a pre-gig epiphany from the unexceptional South London sky, The Flaming Lips singer seems primed to take us all higher. And so this 20th-anniversary celebration of their breakthrough LP The Soft Bulletin begins with an explosion of joy. Giant balloons rain down and stay rogue, bouncing through the childishly engaged crowd for the next two hours. Confetti cannons fire at will, dry ice pumps. And as the yearning anthem of quixotic human Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Known as "Heldenmommy" to her fans on Twitter, Christine Goerke is a Wagner soprano of and for our time. You won’t find her recordings on the major-label behemoths but her reputation is built on two decades of producing the goods night after night at opera houses across the US, notably the Metropolitan in New York. On the other side of the Atlantic, her Brünnhilde has filled the Usher Hall through the course of a four-year Ring cycle at the Edinburgh Festival.Having seen the world end north of the border 10 days ago, Goerke reprised the Immolation Scene to bring a Wagner Night at the Proms to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the kind of thing that the Proms does well – indeed, where else would it get an outing? A "big event" piece of massive scale in terms of size and duration, in many ways a modern Spem in Alium, but where Tallis’s 1570 piece demands 40 singers, In the Name of the Earth ups the ante to 700-plus voices, led by eight conductors and arrayed around the Royal Albert Hall. Both the title, with its nod towards the Christian sign of the cross, and the scheduling for Sunday morning, made this feel like a secular meditation with the natural environment substituting for a traditional God. As the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
London’s latest theatre opening brings a stirring revival of Harvey Fierstein’s vital gay drama, which premiered as Torch Song Trilogy in New York at the beginning of the 1980s, the playwright himself unforgettable in the lead, before it opened in London in 1985 with Antony Sher. Fierstein revised the piece two years ago for a new production that itself returned to Broadway – to the same theatre, in fact, where it had played for three years on its first appearance, garnering Fierstein Tony Awards in 1983 for Best New Play and Best Actor – retuning the title and taking it down from a Read more ...