Reviews
David Nice
Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. It was intended for large-scale screenings of October in Berlin and Moscow, which never took place in the expected format. Bernd Thewes' reconstruction plays its essential part in a giddying, baroque experience of Eisenstein's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Given the rather uneven record of the National Theatre at the moment, there’s already a certain nostalgia for the days, which came to an end two years ago, when it was run by the two Nicks: Nick Hytner and Nick Starr. Together, they transformed this flagship theatre, offering the world some gloriously entertaining and mega-successful plays, from War Horse to One Man, Two Guvnors. Now at the helm of a brand-new theatre, the Bridge (located next to City Hall on the south side of Tower Bridge), the two Nicks are opening their 900-seat venture with a new comedy about a young German migrant, Read more ...
Rebecca Sykes
Born into an artistic Swedish-speaking household in Helsinki, Tove Jansson’s first, and most enduring, ambition was to be a painter. Although best known as the illustrator behind the creatures of Moominvalley, those plump white hippopotamus-like folk with an existential longing for adventure, Jansson came to regard her widely successful creations as a distraction from what she considered to be her “real work”.Jansson’s illustrations may have been exhibited in Britain before, but Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first to make explicit those connections between the artist’s graphic work and her Read more ...
David Nice
Singing students from the Guildhall School should have been issued with a three-line whip to fill the inexplicably half-empty Milton Court concert hall for last night's charmer. After all, every musician, and not just sopranos, should know that this is how it ought to be done. True, an effervescent personality like Lucy Crowe's can't be simulated. But every other respect of her stunningly sung and varied Mozart can be aspired to: the relaxed, natural stance (and in this instance, knowing how to play a recalcitrant shoe heel for comedy), knowing what to do with the hands, how to execute Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a challenge to review this film without resorting to adjectives like “plucky” and “well-meaning”, and its mainstream comfiness made it a strangely cautious choice for the opening night of the recent London Film Festival. Breathe is not only Andy Serkis’s debut as a director, but also a film based on the family experiences of its producer, Jonathan Cavendish. It tells the story of how, in the 1950s, the latter's father Robin met and married society beauty Diana Blacker but later contracted polio, which left him paralysed. The couple’s indomitable battle against his condition eventually Read more ...
Katie Colombus
With mentions of Theresa May, cricket jumpers and DMs, Trump slurs and a host of characters with Northern accents, The Old Vic's return version of Dr Seuss' The Lorax, proves itself to be poles apart from the recent, popular Universal Pictures movie.There are no zany Hollywood tricks here – no reliance on anything other than a strong cast, oodles of imagination and the artistic licence allowed by Dr Seuss that creates a cacophany of colours, sound and kooky characters. The entire script is spoken in rhyme; big song numbers burst out of the poetic verse, and dance steps lurk just Read more ...
Owen Richards
Who is the real Grace Jones? This is the central question that drives Sophie Fiennes’s documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. After 115 minutes, you might be less sure of the answer than when you go in. The title is Jamaican for a recording booth’s red light and bread, the substance of life. It’s appropriate for a film which juxtaposes the abstract visual feast of Jones’s live show with her modest upbringing in Jamaica. One minute we’re witnessing green lasers dance off her sparkled bowler hat, next she’s playing jacks in the small farmhouse next to where she grew up. The two Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Repetition can help clarity. It emphasises significance, and shines a light more directly onto something hidden. It can guide us gently into an area we might have otherwise circumvented, and urge us to stare at something for long enough to see beyond, and transcend previous, long-held opinions. It can also, of course, become very tired very fast and that was, sadly, the case with the third series of John Morton’s BBC mockumentary sitcom. It was, to be honest, struggling to find new things to say as early as series two.The joke, and there really has only ever been one, is the doublespeak and Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Sleaford Mods are not just those two sweary guys with a laptop from Nottingham. Their unique mix of acerbic, politically conscious lyrics and lo-fi earworm loops have rightfully earned them a growing and devoted following across the country. Indeed, the audience at Manchester Academy is packed with moody 20-somethings and middle-aged punks. Rather than appearing intimidating, however, the atmosphere is full of camaraderie and childish excitement, as everyone waits for these de facto voices of the disaffected to take to the stage.First up, though, is Nachthexen, an all-female four piece Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The streets around Grenfell Tower on the morning after it was consumed by fire heaved with people. A stream of donors brought food, clothes and toiletries, while news crews and journalists came in vans or on foot as if arriving in a war zone. Not half a mile from the smouldering sarcophagus, I cycled past a primary school with children playing as normal in the playground, and wondered if this was what the Blitz was like. An unfathomable disaster on the doorstep. The only certain difference was in the camera phones aimed ravenously at the flames still licking the flanks of the tower.Stories Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some site-specific theatre feels like a really good fit. You could say, in this case, that it seems like poetic justice. Agatha Christie’s 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, used to be a rep standard, and now gets a compelling new production in the echoing surrounds of the Council Chamber at London County Hall, which is situated on the South Bank, next to Westminster Bridge. The drama, which the Queen of Crime adapted from her own short story of the same name (originally published in 1933), centres on the trial of Leonard Vole for the murder of Emily French, a wealthy older woman who has Read more ...
Alison Cole
This is the latest in a line of beautifully curated, closely focused exhibitions that the Courtauld Gallery does so well. Its subject is the great Russian-French painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) who, remarkably, has not had a UK exhibition devoted to his work for 35 years. More specifically, the show draws together a series of Soutine’s portraits of modern workers, largely men and women working in the hospitality trades, many identified by their uniforms (such as bellboy reds or kitchen whites): hotel page boys, valets and room-attendants; cooks and pastry chefs; waiters and maids.For those Read more ...