Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
How do you make a venerable warhorse frisk like a coltish show-pony? Hire William Christie as the trainer. In a performance of scintillating drama and crystal-clear definition, the past master of Baroque revival and re-invention coaxed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its thoroughbred choir across all the tricky fences on Handel’s long and winding course. At the end of Israel in Egypt, with the Egyptians vanquished and the Israelites freed, the voice of Miriam the prophetess – one of the two soprano solo parts – exhorts her people to “Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Camp Bestival 2017 was defined by the weather and how everyone reacted to it. DJ-impresario Rob Da Bank’s family festival, which reached its tenth edition this year, took place, as ever, on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset. However, where the previous nine have cast the grassland surrounding the rebuilt 17th Century castle in balmy, blissful sunshine, the tenth most certainly did not. The weather, then, is where theartsdesk starts and ends its overview, sandwiching a multiplicity of juicy reviews and other festival stuff…THE WEATHER (Part One)Friday and Saturday were dominated by an assault of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Ghoul is an occult British thriller about depression, with a bleakly poetic view of London, and a seedy sadness at its core. This sensibility is greatly helped by its star Tom Meeten, who as police detective Chris is haggard and run-down, ready to flinch at the world. Called in by his friend Jim (Dan Renton Skinner, pictured below) to investigate a double-murder in which the victims kept walking despite being shot in the head, he tracks a suspect, Coulson (Rufus Jones), by going undercover as a clinically depressed patient of Coulson’s psychotherapist, Helen (Niamh Cusack). But reality Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The sobriquet “the greatest living Englishman” has been applied to such diverse individuals as Keith Richards, Winston Churchill and Alan Bennett, but the bookies would surely offer reasonable odds on Sir Frank Williams. Having founded his current motor racing team in 1977, Williams has provided rapid transit for an array of world champions, Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill among them. Since March 1986, when he suffered a catastrophic road accident in France, Williams has been a tetraplegic confined to a wheelchair, yet this only seems to have made him more obsessively committed to his team.But Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
As the lights dim the choir turn their backs on the audience. A spotlight picks out a single singer. With one hand aloft he leads the male voices through the “Pater Noster” and “Ave Maria” in a stern and stately plainchant. Then suddenly the full battalion of cornetts and sackbuts, theorbos and recorders burst into the joyful opening of Monteverdi’s Vespers, and we are up and running.The Vespers, like Bach’s B Minor Mass, was not heard complete in the composer’s lifetime, and may indeed not even have been conceived to have been heard in a single sitting. As Bach did later, Monteverdi seems to Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
As chat-up lines go, “I can’t do my fly up single-handed” is pretty full on – even if it is true. Thomas March (James McArdle) is speaking to James Berryman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who not only went to the same public school but has also just saved his life on the Italian front during World War Two. Furthermore, the come-on works. The wounded soldiers are soon sucking face.Man in an Orange Shirt is Patrick Gale’s first TV screenplay. He’s a master of middle-class misery whose novels read like Alan Hollinghurst for beginners. Think pink potboilers, albeit very well written ones, that explore Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Arriving on Thursday for the opening act Orchestra Baobab’s instantly recognisable mellifluous tones spreading out from the main stage over the Wiltshire countryside, it was clear that a high standard had been set for the rest of WOMAD. Whether it's in a small bar in Dakar, the Jazz Café in London, or playing to many thousands here, they are one of the great bands – fabulously musical without being flashy. Old-style Senegalese magic with hints of Latin and radiating immense warmth, they are practically critic-proof.While hundreds of global acts performed over the weekend, many of the Read more ...
David Nice
Like his smash-hit My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot's first and last plays have a role to play in the history of gay theatre, but do they work? Emphatically not in the case of Twilight Song (★★), completed – one is tempted to say, sketched – shortly before his death in 2014, though four out of five actors at the admirable Park Theatre give it their best shot. Coming Clean (★★★) is a different matter: a frank and well-structured essay in a crumbling relationship from the early 1980s, before AIDS truly came to the fore in the London scene.Unfortunately Coming Clean – the innuendo isn't pertinent Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Kendal Calling is a lovely festival. Charmingly misnamed – it’s set 30 miles from Kendal in Lowther Deer Park, a couple of miles from Penrith, in the northern Lakes – it takes place over four days in spectacularly beautiful Cumbrian countryside. It has clearly been lovingly nurtured, but Kendal Calling has many natural attributes going for it: leafy woodland mystery, rolling hills, lakes, all that caper, plus a cosy, walkable site and a main stage set in a tree-fringed bowl which gives the feel of a shallow amphitheatre.Naturally, by lunchtime on Thursday the entire place is already a mud Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Come awards time, it’s inevitable that Elisabeth Moss will be collecting a few for her portrayal of Offred, the endlessly-suffering lead character in The Handmaid’s Tale (her real name is June). But I reckon the real stars of the show are cinematographer Colin Watkinson plus the production design and art direction teams. What made Handmaid grip from the start was its photography and its balefully beautiful colour palette.There were those post-Puritan white and maroon outfits worn by Offred and her fellow-handmaids, often choreographed en masse in muted, wintry New England landscapes, and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For an act that hasn't visited the UK since 2009, the Indigo Girls might have been surprised at the audience's familiarity with their work. It’s now a given that artists have to tour to sell records, but judging by the vigour with which the audience in Islington joined in with the songs, sometimes in an informal call-and-response, the UK must provide a good flow of royalties. And no doubt absence makes the heart grow fonder.Sunday night closed out a UK tour, the highlight of which was the long-established Cambridge Folk Festival, now twinned with the even longer-established folk festival in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who'd have guessed that the London theatre scene at present would be so devoted to the numinous? Hard on the heels of Girl from the North Country, which locates moments of transcendence in hard-scrabble Depression-era lives, along comes John Tiffany's deeply tender revival of Jim Cartwright's vaunted 1986 play Road, which tempers its landscape of pain with an abundance of poetry.As it happens, one has to wait till after the interval to feel the gathering force of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child director Tiffany's approach here. But come the climactic scene in which a mismatched Lancashire Read more ...