Reviews
Kieron Tyler
The Some Bizzare Album was released in January 1981. Compiled by DJ Stevo, it featured twelve unsigned acts he felt represented a fresh way of approaching pop – one enabled by the availability of synthesisers and rhythm machines. Stevo was playing the new music at the nights he hosted, putting the bands on and compiling the electronic chart for the weekly music paper Sounds. After being inundated with demo tapes, he chose the ones he liked best and issued the album.From today’s perspective, the Some Bizzare Album plays out as a prescient snapshot of what would enter the mainstream. The Fast Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Luke is a Silicon Valley billionaire, a high-tech wizard. And he’s just had a message from God. And what does God say? Well, He says, “Go where there’s violence.” So what does Luke do? He does what he’s been told, and devotes his considerable intellect and his even more considerable resources to solving the problem of violence in our society. Okay, it sounds wildly implausible, and if Luke wasn’t being played by Ben Whishaw in this new play by the ace American penman Christopher Shinn, at the Almeida Theatre, I might not have believed it either. But he is, and so I do.Against takes this Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary Oscar 10 years ago, the film’s success marked two significant events: a positive turning point in the campaign to avert environmental catastrophe; and the resurrection of the public career of Al Gore, after his presidential defeat at the hands of George W Bush. It also happened to be a very good documentary.That first film galvanised both debate and action related to climate change. The aim of the cutely titled second has a textbook campaigning duality: to trumpet the efforts and successes of the past decade, while reminding Gore’s growing Read more ...
David Kettle
Meet Me at Dawn ★★★★★ Edinburgh-based playwright Zinnie Harris is the subject of a particular focus at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, with three productions in collaborations with leading Scottish theatre companies. Her blazing adaptation of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros has been pulling crowds at the Lyceum Theatre, and her searing Aeschylus reboot This Restless House, created with Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland, opens next week.It’s another Greek myth – that of Orpheus and Eurydice – that simmers in the background of Meet Me at Dawn at the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
No cliché is left unturned in this odd-couple action comedy. Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson are the salt ‘n’ pepper rival bad-boys on the run. Cue shoot outs and high-speed vehicle chases through assorted European cities, interspersed with routine bouts of mutually insulting dialogue before bromance blossoms. Come back, Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte, Chris Rock/Anthony Hopkins, Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones, Mel Gibson/Danny Glover, all is forgiven.Ryan Reynolds plays Michael Bryce, a professional bodyguard who loses his élite status when a wealthy client is taken out by a mystery sniper on his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Every play is a Brexit play. This much we have learnt in the year since the referendum. But in Nancy Meckler’s hands the Globe’s new King Lear becomes the Brexit play – an unpicking of intergenerational responsibility and difference, of philosophies of power and governance, tackling above all that sticky question of what the old really owe the young.But the dramatic dice are loaded. The audience enters to a Globe covered in tarpaulins and chipboard, “KEEP OUT” scrawled across the boarded-up gallery. A cast of squatters surges onto the stage, all anoraks, unwashed hair and beanies, tearing Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Whether it’s the £400,000 that separates Mishal Husain from John Humphrys, or the 74 million miles between the metaphorical markers of Venus and Mars, there is a gulf between the genders. Despite legislation to enforce equality, the reality is that, right from the start, boys and girls are treated differently. Boys like trains, right? Girls like dolls… Before you know it, female students are massively under-represented in the sciences, and worrying numbers of young men think it’s OK to shout sexual threats to women on the street in the name of banter. Boys will be boys after all… but Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Gadsby ★★★★This is Hannah Gadsby's last show, she tells us. Not because she has stopped being funny (she most definitely hasn't, as the laugh count in this show attests), but because making comedy out of her life experience has become toxic for her.Over the years, Gadsby's shows have had increasingly personal content - about being a lesbian, her depression and growing up gay in a deeply homophobic society. And then last year, when the debate about gay marriage hit the headlines in her home state of Tasmania (it's still not legal), something shifted, and she realised how much anger she Read more ...
David Kettle
It was an intriguing, contrast-filled programme that Swiss-born pianist Andreas Haefliger brought to Edinburgh for his Queen’s Hall recital at the International Festival. Two masterpieces of musical picture painting – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the smaller but equally evocative St Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds by Liszt – alongside two far more abstract works: Berg’s compact but punchy Sonata Op. 1 and Beethoven’s Op. 101 Sonata.You might have expected two entirely different musical approaches, then – one all hot-headed, vivid musical storytelling, the other cool and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A new plague is sweeping British theatre: audience participation. Instead of just sitting back and enjoying the show, your visit to a venue is now likely to involve voting on the guilt or innocence of terror suspects (as in Terror or Blurred Justice) or, in Rob Drummond’s new solo show for the National Theatre, voting on a whole range of issues as this Scottish playwright and performer teases out a handful of ideas about democracy. The first step is technological: as we take our seats, we are issued with a small voting machine (you press one for yes and two for no) and given our instructions. Read more ...
David Kettle
Pike St ★★★★ London-based theatre company Paines Plough’s pop-up touring venue Roundabout has been a regular Edinburgh Fringe fixture for the past four years, nestled in nicely among the redeveloped veterinary buildings of Summerhall. And it’s been home to some of the Fringe’s most exciting new writing, too, both from Paines Plough itself and visiting companies. Pike St is a near-miraculous solo show featuring a tour-de-force performance by New Yorker Nilaja Sun, who also wrote its very funny and very moving text. Miraculous (or near miraculous at least) not only because of Sun’s uncanny, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Christopher Rainey, aka "Quest" – his hip-hop name – lives with his wife Christine’a and their young daughter PJ in north Philadelphia. Jonathan Olshefski’s restrained, absorbing documentary follows this African-American family over almost a decade during the Obama years, starting with the 2008 election and ending with Trump’s 2016 campaign, punctuated by Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown school shootings.Quest and Ma Quest, as she’s known, have plenty of back stories and grown children from other relationships, but "tired of the bullshit, the crap and people doing each other wrong" they’ Read more ...