Reviews
Veronica Lee
As we enter the venue, Rose Matafeo is playing a game of mini table tennis with a member of the audience. Nothing that follows seems to relate to this “just a bit of fun to start the show” – but, trust me, it's one of the cleverest bits of misdirection you will ever see. The penny drops only at the end of Horndog, for which the New Zealander deservedly won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for best show at the Fringe at the weekend.It's a high-energy hour, as Matafeo gallops through heaps of gag-laden material in a show that she says more than once is just about having fun, but which Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by Bill Gates no less, it has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. It is a provocative, stimulating and original synthesis of, well, us and our many millennia on this earth, which of course is still only a moment in the planet’s history. Yes, we humans are a blip, and there were many suggestions as to why we are animals, yet so peculiarly and uniquely destructive in a way no animals ever were before us of Read more ...
David Nice
1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among Bernstein's works - more contestably – is MASS of 1971, surely his biggest and most resonant score, but hardly a candidate for comparable classicism. What John Wilson applied last night to make On the Town work as unremittingly well as the much shorter ballet, Fancy Free, was precisely that classical focus, high on energy and cutting no slack. Never Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In May 1981, Japan played two nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. For NME’s Paul Morley, the high-profile shows at the prestige venue were notable as “Japan can fill two nights at the Odeon and they're not yet a hit group.” Reviewing them, he said their frontman David Sylvian “advances, dances and freezes in motion so like Ferry it's debasing, it's like he is a surgically exalted version of the original Bryan. After ten minutes of Japan’s teenybop Simple Minds material – sumptuous in parts, dank most of the time – it was time to go. Not even a piece the liquid Sylvian wrote with the Great [ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time. The Munich Agreement was greeted as a triumph for the appeasers. The price Britain had to pay was a minor stain on its conscience: the decimation of Czechoslovakia. The country was only 20 years old, but the borders of Bohemia and Moravia had been defined many centuries earlier. The British people – and the French – were able to make this bargain with themselves because the question of the Sudetenland was, according to Chamberlain’s other famous phrase, “a quarrel in a far-away country Read more ...
Nick Hasted
What happens when you let racism sit and fester in the middle of your culture? That’s the question Spike Lee keeps asking while telling the mostly true story of black policeman Ron Stallworth’s bizarre spell in the Ku Klux Klan.Stallworth (John David Washington, pictured below right with Adam Driver) was “the Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs Police Force” in 1972, a lone black recruit who silently endured abuse to become an undercover detective. Absent-mindedly ringing a KKK information line one day, his enthusiastic racism over the phone impresses local Klan Wizard Walter (Ryan Eggold Read more ...
David Kettle
There were two immediate casualties at Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s high-energy account of Messiaen’s monumental Des canyons aux étoiles… with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival.First was one of the strings in the Usher Hall’s Steinway grand, which finally gave way during the piece’s eighth movement. Well, it had been given really quite a pounding by Aimard, and went on to emit a prepared piano-like buzzing rattle until the end of the piece. Second – less crucially – was the handle of the percussion section’s wind machine, cranked so furiously to conjure Read more ...
Owen Richards
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another biography on America’s first son, but a study on the persona, the myth and the brand that was created around him.Everyone has their own idea of who he was: the hip-swivelling rebel, the military hero, the irresistible leading man, the grotesque Vegas attraction. He was, in every complex and contradictory way, the living embodiment of the United States Read more ...
Lucie Wolfman
Watch Lucie Wolfman's vlog review of Carl Craig's Synthesiser Ensemble at the Barbican. Lucie Wolfman studies English at the University of Sussex, and covers arts for the National Student. She is a Barbican Young Reviewer, creating vlogs about productions. Through this, Lucie became part of Livity, a youth-led creative network which works as an agent for change. @LucieWolfman
Prom 55, Lisztes, Lendvai, Lendvay, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - unity and strength
Jessica Duchen
There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions. And though Fischer, talking to the audience from the podium, kindly explained that the Gypsy tradition is distinct from both Hungarian folk music and classical conservatoires, what emerged was a sense that they have far more in common than might be admitted.Nothing asserts “Hungarian Gypsy music” quite strongly as a cimbalom centre stage. In case you haven’ Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Grayson Perry is at it again. The Turner Prize winner, Reith lecturer, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, curator, writer, British Museum trustee, CBE, RA – plus Britain's and the art world’s favourite transvestite – is trying to find sense in things and events, or, as he has put it, invent meaning in a meaningless world.Channel 4 is devoting four hours to Perry’s investigations of rituals and ceremonies for our secular world, as well as those discovered from worlds rather less secular. We started with death at what might usually be taken as the end, after birth, coming of age and Read more ...
Hannah Greenstreet
Dear RashDash,I know you don’t like critics because Abbi read out a lot of reviews of famous Chekhov productions very fast, wearing a ruff and sequined hot pants. But I promise I won’t rate you out of five or patronise you with a gold star or give you a quotable soundbite to put on your posters. Even though I know you got four stars from The Times and the Guardian and the Stage because it says so on the back of the play text, which I bought because I had to take a piece of the show away with me.I’m not going to write what happens because nothing happens in Chekhov and by getting rid of the Read more ...