Reviews
Veronica Lee
Home From Home, written by newcomers Chris Fewtrell and Simon Crowther, first saw life as a pilot in the BBC’s Landmark Sitcom Season in 2016, the channel's search for new and original content for its schedules. Well, new it may be, but original it ain’t – yet don’t let that put you off. It’s a decent enough run-through of several sitcom tropes, with Johnny Vegas as its everyman hero.The set-up is that underachiever but hard-working northerner Neil Hackett (Vegas), the manager of a newsagent at a motorway services (“northbound and southbound”), has scrimped and saved with wife Fiona (Niky Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2018 – Saturday April 21 – is upon us. It should really be Record Shop Day 2018 as this is the UK but let’s not quibble. Instead, put aside cynicism about major labels cashing in, wander down to the nearest record shop – and, happily, new record shops are starting to pop up a lot lately – then rifle through the racks. Below are the releases that reached theartsdesk on Vinyl, quite a few of them rare as hens’ teeth. Dig in, see what takes your fancy, then go out and find them, out there on the high streets and back streets...theartsdesk on Vinyl's FAVOURITE RELEASE FOR RECORD Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a serious film to be made about the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is not that film. The absolute gobful of a title more than hints at artery-furring whimsy. Its provenance is explained in the opening sequence when, after dark on the island in 1941, a tipsy, bucolic crew of Guernsey residents are apprehended for breaking the Wehrmacht's curfew. They explain that they have convened to discuss literature in a book club for which they instantly extemporise a name. In truth, they’ve been gleefully glugging home-brewed gin while Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Back by feverishly popular demand, Jim Steinman’s mega-musical is no longer in danger of alarming unsuspecting opera-goers. A year on from its Coliseum debut, this indisputably bonkers show moves to the West End venue it was surely always destined for – that lingeringly inhabited by its rock operatic forebear. The Queen is dead; long live the Loaf.Unlike most jukebox musicals, this one originated as a theatrical concept back in the Seventies, then became an unlikely hit album instead. Unfortunately, that hasn’t blessed it with, say, a decent script, coherent plotting or satisfying Read more ...
Owen Richards
As if the real world wasn’t scary enough... Ghost stories are en vogue at the moment, and after the BBC’s hit-and-miss Requiem, Channel 4 brings True Horror to the small screen – a collection of "real" ghost stories, told by witness interviews and dramatised with a decent budget. And just like Requiem, our first tale took us to the rolling hills of Wales.Wales, according to the wide-eyed Pastor Matt Tricker, is a land of old gods and occultists – a description which doesn’t match my Cardiff suburban upbringing, but who knows what happened behind closed doors? The Rich family certainly could Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On Wednesday night, the music world took a small step closer to the realms of science fiction. Roy Orbison, 30 years dead, stood in front of a packed Hammersmith Apollo. It wasn't a resurrection, of course, but a hologram, and a damn fine one. Virtual Roy wiggled, turned around and occasionally thanked the audience. At one point he even looked like he was going to pick his nose (it turned out to be just a wipe). The audience responded with plentiful applause and open-mouthed wonder.The evening started in a very human way. The organisers had had the good sense to find a support act which Read more ...
David Nice
Kudos, as ever, to Vladimir Jurowski for making epic connections. Not only did he bookend a rich LPO concert with two very different symphonies from the late 1930s by Stravinsky and Shostakovich; he also masterminded and attended the early evening special event, another variegated shell in the cornucopia of the Changing Faces: Stravinsky's Journey festival.Featuring the young players of the orchestra's Foyle Future Firsts programme and their mentors, it started with a lovable performance of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto - exactly contemporary with the Symphony in C heard later - Read more ...
Veronica Lee
One of the joys of writing about comedy over the past few years is the decreasing frequency with which I am asked to comment on “women in comedy”, “female comics” or, most egregiously, “are women funny?” I think we can all agree that you're either funny or you're not, no matter which gonads you carry around. So it's interesting to see Funny Cow taking us back to a time – the 1970s – when female comics would be booed off stage.Maxine Peake is Funny Cow, a Northern working-class woman whose life is aimlessly drifting along until she sees the washed-up comic Lenny (Alun Armstrong) performing in Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Eight months have passed since the Russians invaded Norway in the first season of Jo Nesbo’s neo-Cold War thriller. Real-life events have only made Occupied seem more relevant. Like Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes, it dramatises the clash between two world views: lily-livered liberalism versus ruthless realpolitik or, if you prefer, truth and lies. No wonder, on viewing it in Moscow, the Kremlin saw red.The theory is embodied with sweaty physicality. Season two opens with Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad) and Anita Rygh (Janne Heltberg) bonking with typical Scandinavian abandon. (This naked Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always nice to come away from a show having learned something and Angela Barnes, history buff and a woman with an obsession some may consider weird (more of which later), certainly fills in a lot of historical detail in Fortitude. Some of it touches on the Cold War and, as she drily points out, she never thought that section of the show, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, would be so up to date again.Barnes starts by talking about how she has recently entered her forties, but thankfully this is not a cue for pedestrian material about the perils of middle age. Rather, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When doctors told Doreen Lawrence her son had died she thought, "That’s not true." Spending time with his body in the hospital, aside from a cut on his cheek, it seemed to her he was sleeping. The death of a child will always be strange, and in the aftermath Neville, his father and her husband, even wondered if he might have been struck by the Biblical curse of the loss of his first-born.Quarter of a century after Stephen Lawrence was killed in an unprovoked racist attack on Well Hall Road in Eltham, a pall of unreality still hangs over his murder. Doreen and Neville’s pain remains raw and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is, perhaps, a tale that suffers from overfamiliarity. Tina Turner’s rags-to-riches story – from humble beginnings as little Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, to her discovery, reinvention and sickening abuse by husband and manager Ike Turner, and finally her rebirth as a solo rock'n'roll star – is the stuff of showbiz legend. This new glossy but pedestrian West End musical adds little to the established narrative.The structure doesn’t help. Starting at the very beginning and racing through the years, there’s only time for broad-brushstrokes storytelling and one-note supporting Read more ...