Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Some critics complain that Westworld is too complicated for its own good, and you can see their point. Even on a basic level, it’s an exploration of the nature and potential of artificial intelligence, as it depicts the consequences of super-lifelike androids – or “synthetic humans”, if you will – acquiring higher knowledge and going on a terrifying killing rampage.You can dial down your apparatus criticus and just watch it as a lurid, menacing shoot-’em-up show, with spectacular scenery and scenes which (cunningly) would probably be too gruesome if they were about real people rather Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a superb location for a performance! The flats on the north-east corner of Islington Green back onto a crummy atrium from which a staircase leads down to a vaulted, concrete pit (pictured below). A cross between a car park and a bull ring, or a subterranean version of a de Chirico painting, this huge chamber reminded me of the stark designs of the Italian modernist, Aldo Rossi.Peering over the topmost balustrade, one sees silent figures entering the subterranean space through portals created with slender rods of light. Most are dressed in black; they are professional mourners flown in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Flo and Joan are sisters (Nicola and Rosie Dempsey: they have borrowed their stage names from their nan and her sister) and you may have recently seen them on television doing advertisements for Nationwide. Others may know them from social media, and their runaway hit “The 2016 Song” about music fans' annus horribilis with the deaths of David Bowie and Prince. If you like either iteration, you will love this hour-long show, called The Kindness of Stranglers.Nicola, always deadpan, is at the keyboard, while the chattier Rosie adds a bit of percussion on a shaker or triangle. The chat Read more ...
Owen Richards
Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him, death is nothing compared to the heavy conscience he would carry by doing nothing.The Deminer is an extraordinary insight into the life of Major Fakhir, compiled from around 50 hours of amateur footage. Armed with little more than a pair of wire cutters and a knife, Fakhir tackles a variety of bombs with worrying abandon: he hacks around landmines Read more ...
David Nice
Why would any conductor resist Mahler's last great symphonic adventure? By which I mean the vast finale of his Tenth Symphony, realised in full by Deryck Cooke, and not the first-movement Adagio, fully scored (unlike most of the rest) by the composer and puritanically regarded as the end of the line by supposed Mahlerians. Not Simon Rattle. Ever since his Bournemouth recording of 1980, he has kept faith with Cooke's noble venture to fill out an entire symphonic structure of unassailable conviction, and to judge from this visceral yet painstakingly articulated LSO performance, he feels it ever Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The BBC excels at a very particular kind of drama, namely one where production values overawe dramatic content. Its version of The Woman in White (BBC One) proves no exception. Our hero is Walter, a bemused sappy painter played by ex-Eastender Ben Hardy. Not much recommends his character except his ornately Italian friend Pesca who sets up an apparently cushy job for him in the rural retreat of Limmeridge (“When you make it to the top, remember you friend Pesca at the bottom!” he exclaims, only partly in jest). The role consists of restoring some ageing prints while tutoring the daughters of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Byrne is a worried parent. Thankfully his two young sons are hale and hearty, but he is concerned he may be bringing up a pair of pampered, Lord Fauntleroy youngsters, and in Spoiler Alert he ponders the differences between his experience of being parented as a child in the 1980s, and now being a dad himself.He wonders if his generation of parents may be giving a little too much to their offspring in material terms – “Social services send a drone to check you have a full-size trampoline in the back garden,” he says. And it’s not just ownership of a bunch of stuff that delineates the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Featuring two Russian composers, the two halves of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s programme could hardly have been more different. In the first, pianist Xiayin Wang (pictured below) joined the RSNO for Scriabin’s florid, rarely-heard Piano Concerto. The orchestral sound under Peter Oundjian – in what is his final season as Music Director – was lean yet strong, as the vast number of violins played as a single, powerful muscle.While this made for a captivating orchestral presence, Wang’s solo playing was for most of the first movement either overshadowed or downright drowned out. Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Playing Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom on 8 September 1974, the New York Dolls opened their first set of the evening with three cover versions. Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” was followed by The Shangri-Las’ “(Give Him a) Great Big Kiss” and Otis Redding’s “Don’t Mess With Cupid”. They were acknowledging that blues, girl group records and soul were integral to who they were. A pretty comprehensive sweep considering they were a prime influence on the purportedly reductive punk rock. Once the building blocks were revealed to the audience, Vancouver witnessed them lurching into their own " Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Brahms violin sonatas make a perfect spring evening recital. The Second and Third were inspired by a summer retreat, but all three are light, bright and with direct melodic appeal. Violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien conveyed that carefree spirit perfectly, the long melodic lines simply but elegantly shaped and the accompanying textures always carefully calibrated. They also made the most of the occasional dramatic outbursts, providing valuable contrast, while always maintaining the essential intimacy of expression.Brahms (pictured below) places much of the violin Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Conflict and comedy can be unpredictable bedfellows, and Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s 2014 play occasionally risks overstretching itself in its attempts to reconcile the two – although its immediate context, the world of office politics, has a rich history of showing humanity at its worst, and such ghastliness can be painfully funny. At the same time Johnson explores a much more profound strand of social unease, the echt-American issue that is racism, the depths and ramifications of which sometimes sit uneasily with some of the surrounding elements of Rasheeda Speaking.But if there Read more ...