Reviews
Marina Vaizey
To suggest an absence is to imply a presence. Philosophers, novelists, dictators, politicians – as well as almost every “ism” you can think of – take the stage in this absorbing, precisely and elegantly written study of various kinds of atheism. All assumptions are up for grabs, everything brought out into the light and questioned.It is a dizzying read, reminding us, among many other things, how the Enlightenment invented racism and provided justifications for colonial empires; that the deaths of ordinary people in the French Revolution were estimated in the hundreds of thousands; and how Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In terms of chart statistics, Julian Cope’s period with Island Records looks pretty good. He issued four albums with the label and all of them charted. Saint Julian (issued in March 1987) peaked at 11, My Nation Underground (October 1988) stalled at 42 but Peggy Suicide (March 1991) and Jehovakill (October 1992) climbed to 23 and 20 respectively. Not bad.Yet Jehovakill became his last album for Island and, in 1994, he signed with the Chrysalis Records subsidiary Echo for whom Autogeddon climbed to a 16 position. The chart statistics tell part of the story.With Island, the release schedule was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry put it, “there’s a certain amount of fuck you-ness in everything Jeff does.” Perhaps it’s this which has allowed Jeff Beck to achieve the rare feat of surviving into his seventies as what you might describe as a guitar legend without portfolio. He does what he wants when he wants to, is revered by the great and good of the electric guitar universe, and has avoided being trapped into playing The Yardbirds’ greatest hits until the end of time.He isn’t known as an eager interviewee, but the Beck on show here seemed relaxed and vaguely amused to be taking a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two fast-rising actors, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, lend genuine flair to a thriller that needs its mesmerising star turns to rise above the murk. Densely plotted, if sometimes suffocatingly so, TV director Michael Pearce's feature film debut keeps you guessing on matters of culpability right through to the closing exchange. But one can't help but feel in places that less would be more, however pleased one is to clock the continued career ascent of its leading players. The near-ubiquitous Buckley plays the novelistically-named Moll, who has a job as a tour guide that she loathes and Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It’s 25 years since Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin last came to the Scottish Opera stage, and this brand new production, directed by Oliver Mears, DIrector of Opera at The Royal Opera, gives the stirring score a stately yet elusive grandeur. Based on Alexander Pushkin’s verse-novel of the same name, this tale of unrequited love set against the trappings of class and duty is rooted well within the literary and musical traditions of 19th century Russia, yet easy to immerse oneself in today.The story is told within the context of female lead Tatyana’s memories from days gone by. Dancer, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In the 27 years since he first conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Sir Simon Rattle has steadily integrated its moodswings and high contrasts into a reading of a piece which now feels more than ever like the work of a man engaged in a form of symphonic stock-taking – before, in the Tenth, setting out on bold new paths. Previous hits are revisited, too: in the second movement, Mahler returns one more time to the well of his beloved Scherzo form, back to its appearance in the First Symphony, and further back still to Berliozian implications of symphonic autobiography.A masterful display of tempo Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of South African director John Trengove’s powerful first feature works in more ways than one. In its literal sense, it alludes to the ritual circumcision, or ukwaluka, that accompanies the traditional rite of passage for young Xhosa men, and the process of healing that follows. It’s a process that sees teenage “initiates” symbolically inducted into adulthood by older men, or “care-givers”, who have themselves previously been through the experience that they now oversee.Traditionally shrouded in secrecy, descriptions of ukwaluka are rare, the best-known that in Nelson Mandela’s Read more ...
David Nice
Depression, with or without psychotic episodes, is a rare subject for drama or music theatre - and with good reason: the sheer unrelenting monotony of anguish and self-absorption is hard to reproduce within a concentrated time-span. So we still stand in awe of Sarah Kane for the way she managed, months before her suicide, to wring from the depths and write in blood such a kaleidoscopic range of despair and black vision in 4.48 Psychosis; in awe, too, of composer Philip Venables, for finding an equal variety, and an even greater eclecticism, in the musical voices to tell a drama of pain that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness”. Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play. Produced by the Orange Tree Theatre in 1988, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The Fates did not want theartsdesk to review English Touring Opera’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro. The Beast from the East intervened to prevent a colleague from covering it at the Hackney Empire at the start of its tour in February: now, eight weeks and eight venues further on, altogether more mundane problems (for Midlands based readers, ‘M42’ will be sufficient explanation) meant that by the time I took my seat at the Cheltenham Everyman, we were already well into Act 1 and Ross Ramgobin’s Figaro was breaking out some martial arts moves to the closing bars of "Se vuol ballare". Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that talked explicitly about sex and sexuality. I remember watching his searing and provocative plays, such as Penetrator (1993), The Censor (1997) and Stitching (2002), with my heart in my mouth, and my legs crossed. The content was explicit, emotionally grounded and rarely heard in public. Since then, the playwright has diversified his output, but his new Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A much tinkered-with show needs to go back to the drawing board, if this latest iteration of Strictly Ballroom: The Musical is any gauge. Having travelled across Sydney, Leeds, and Toronto on its extensively revised way to the West End, director-choreographer Drew McOnie's musical adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's enjoyably whacked-out film emerges as an overextended and bloated cartoon.Sure, the dancing grabs the attention now and again, as one might expect, and Zizi Strallen steps up to the plate as a genuinely charming female lead. But the forced grins on the cast's faces are likely to be met Read more ...