Reviews
Hanna Weibye
There are different ways of celebrating a great artist’s legacy, and I suppose they have to coexist. One approach is raptly to admire his or her acknowledged masterpieces, the equivalent of making straight for Guernica or the Mona Lisa. The other approach is to delve in the archives and pull out the fragments and sketches, the early cartoons and the late pastels, and scrutinise them for evidence of the genius at work. The decision to try and recover a lost MacMillan ballet, Le Baiser de la Fée, for this Royal Opera House season marking the 25th anniversary of the choreographer’s death smacks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey’s new album, Wake Up Now, is one of the year’s finest. However, there’s a moment on the single “Myela”, a heartfelt Afro-Latin stomper protesting the plight of refugees, which can grate. The song suddenly stops and female backing singers begin a nursery rhyme chant of “I am your neighbour, you are my neighbour”. On record it seems trite; however, in concert at this eye-pleasing, airy Bexhill-on-Sea venue, it’s transformative. Mulvey and his five-piece band use the sequence as a launch pad for a cosmic jam, before settling into a brief snippet of Gary Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kerry Godliman is such an affable and down-to-earth onstage presence that when she talks about whether she should move now that her area has upped and come – you can tell by the local baker making sourdough loaves – you think how much her neighbours would miss her.Moving – whether geographically or along the social scale – is the central theme of Stick or Twist (which I saw at Soho Theatre), but Godliman neatly swerves into lots of other territory including bad parenting, female friendship and the invasion of hipsters in her previously gritty London abode. If she and her husband sold up, she Read more ...
The Lady from the Sea, Donmar Warehouse review - Nikki Amuka-Bird luminous in a sympathetic ensemble
David Nice
What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
On paper this was a fairly austere piece of programming. No variety in composer, genre or style, just four Bach Partitas in a row, works of similar approach, length and technique. And yet in performance, in the hands of Angela Hewitt, there was sufficient variety, not to mention poetry, humanity and wit, to make for a completely satisfying recital.It is extraordinary that of over a thousand pieces written by J S Bach only about a dozen were published in his lifetime. The pieces he chose as his opus 1 – although published in 1731 when he was in his 40s and already a hugely experienced composer Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander – a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree – two strangers, Janet and Dermot, meet for a casual hook-up arranged over the internet. The glitch, or at least surprise: she appears dressed as a mouse. That opening gambit won't surprise those who saw Ireland's earlier Royal Court entry Cyprus Avenue, in which protagonist Eric is so convinced his granddaughter is Gerry Adams that he scrawls a beard on her face to prove himself right. And in this considerably more modest entry, Ireland's penchant for Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A hit on Broadway, David Ives’s steamy two-hander now boasts Natalie Dormer and David Oakes, well-known for their screen work, in its West End cast, with Patrick Marber on directing duties. That plus the tabloid panting over Dormer’s skimpy S&M attire should certainly sell tickets, but Ives’s piece has also gained spikiness from recent interrogation of the casting couch and the murky intertwining of sex and power.Actress Vanda (Natalie Dormer) arrives late to audition for a new play by writer/director Thomas Novachek (Oakes) based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s kinky 1870 novel Venus in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Kabakovs' exhibition made me thank my lucky stars I was not born in the Soviet Union. A recurring theme of their work is the desire to escape – from the hunger and poverty caused by incompetence and poor planning, and the doublethink required to survive under a regime that became ever more repressive the greater and more obvious its failings.I first came across the Kabakovs' work in 1992 at Documenta art fair in Germany. A concrete bunker with two entrances labelled “Male” and “Female” contained two rooms lined with latrines. Someone had filled these dismal spaces with furniture that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Prolific writer Mike Bartlett is the most impressive penman to have emerged in British theatre in the past decade. The trouble is that his work is so uneven. Although he wrote the amazingly imaginative play, Earthquakes in London, and the Shakespearean West End hit, King Charles III, he has also been responsible for the preposterous improbabilities of the second series of the BBC’s Doctor Foster. Is his new play, a three-hour state-of-the-nation epic billed by the Almeida Theatre as the story of one woman searching “for seeds of hope”, a triumph or another trawl through improbability?Albion Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chris Packham, who devises and presents programmes about nature and animals, has described himself as "a little bit weird". This autobiographical documentary about himself explained what being on the autistic spectrum meant to him in particular in daily life and beyond.Autism is more and more discussed: more is known about its effects than its causes, and many high achievers have come out or are thought to be on the spectrum. The public hardly ever sees those who are so autistic that anything approaching a normal life is impossible, although a few brave families have made programmes about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In a rather clever wheeze, Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe – who therefore knows a thing or two about historically accurate stagings – has established Classic Spring, a new company dedicated to celebrating work by “proscenium playwrights” and staging their plays in the theatres they were written for. Its first year-long season is devoted to Oscar Wilde and opens with a star-stuffed A Woman of No Importance, directed by Dromgoole.Wilde's play, written in 1893 and staged in a CJ Phipps beauty that opened in 1870, deals with the hypocrisy (sadly not confined to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might expect a posthumous 90-minute documentary – and that’s before you insert the ad breaks – about one of the biggest stars in British pop music over the last 30 years to shed some light on how said artist became so huge, but also how his career slowed to a crawl and his life came to such a depressing end. Freedom gives you some of the former but absolutely none of the latter. There’s a brief introduction to camera by Kate Moss (all pout and cheekbones) which mentions George’s death last Christmas and says that the film is “his final work”, but other than that Michael’s death might Read more ...