Reviews
Mark Kidel
Intimacy is a mixed blessing: Richard Twyman’s close-up exploration of sex and violence in his production of Othello for Bristol’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory takes the audience on a gripping emotional journey, but one that is at times almost beyond close for comfort.This is theatre in the round with a vengeance: the low-ceilinged space, with the audience seated within feet of the stage, in a 360-degree embrace, leaves no room for escape. Twyman has accentuated the sense of claustrophobia – because yes, intimacy can feel stifling – with a mixture of one-directional vertical top Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
George Saunders has written a historical novel. Of course, this being Saunders, author of four volumes of dystopian short stories about contemporary America (the wonderful Tenth of December is the most recent), it’s unlike any other. This is a tale told by ghosts, three in particular, who inhabit the graveyard in Georgetown where Willie, Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, dead from typhoid, lies interred.The urbane voices of hans vollman, roger bevins iii and the reverend everly thomas (their names are lower-case throughout, perhaps because they are shadows of their former selves) recount the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By the time Buzzcocks recorded the 12 tracks heard on Time’s Up, they had played with Sex Pistols twice. They had also shared bills with The Clash, The Damned, Eater, Slaughter & The Dogs, Stinky Toys and The Vibrators. After singer Howard Devoto (then known as Howard Trafford) read about Sex Pistols in the 21 February 1976 NME he and his friend Pete Shelley (Peter McNeish) saw them on the 20th – the weekly paper was available in their home-town Manchester from Thursdays rather than the date of the issue – and the 21st in High Wycombe and Welwyn Garden City. They recorded the latter show Read more ...
Saskia Baron
From the opening shot of a distant train making its slow journey toward the camera across flat plains ringed by Montana’s mountains, the audience knows they’re in for one of those subtle, low-key American art films. Kelly Reichardt, who doesn’t just direct her movies but edits and writes them too, is the queen of the slow-burn 21st-century Western. Subtly feminist, she paints a portrait of women making their way in a male landscape, steeped in pioneer history and overshadowed by economic disappointment. Certain Women is adapted from three short stories by Marile Meloy, but it could have Read more ...
David Nice
It's official: if you want to be guaranteed an infallible musical adrenalin boost in London, you can always be sure to find it with Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo and his BBC Symphony Orchestra. And it's not just a question of splashy excitement: Oramo is a rigorous rehearser. Detlev Glanert's fiendish new tone poem Megaris would not have been half as vivid or pleasurable without extraordinary preparation. As for Nielsen and Sibelius, there is no conductor in the world I'd rather hear today in their music than Oramo.This was a concert of journeys, sea-girt in the first half, with plenty of Read more ...
Bill Knight
Lending its name to a major photography prize for the 12th year running, Deutsche Börse has joined the ranks of business organisations known to many for their involvement in the arts rather than what they actually do. Unlike Taylor Wessing or Man Booker, the clue is in the name: German Stock Exchange is reasonably self-explanatory, at least if you speak the language.The nominated projects from the shortlisted artists for 2017 occupy the gallery's upper floors. Entering the fourth floor you are confronted with Dana Lixenberg’s large black and white portraits from the Imperial Courts housing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Partition of India is vast and unexplored terrain in modern cinema. It triggered the migration of 14 million people: Muslims moved from an India reduced in size overnight to the new homeland of Pakistan, and non-Muslims made the opposite journey. It was what we’ve seen in Syria but multiplied by sheer volume of numbers, and squeezed into a much smaller timeframe. The border squiggled on the map was arbitrary and conjured up in haste. So a film about this seismic subcontinental shift is long overdue. It has fallen to Gurinder Chadha, a British filmmaker of Indian origin brought up in Kenya Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre increasingly uses digital delights to enhance audience enjoyment. And you can easily see why. Visual effects that mimic the experience of plunging into virtual reality inject a much-needed wow factor into otherwise quite mundane stories. And if there are plenty of British companies who use such effects, currently it’s American playwrights, such as Jennifer Haley, who are leading the way in the art of the eye-popping visual. The latest arrival - at the National Theatre - is Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, Ugly Lies the Bone, which was first staged in New York a couple of years ago and now Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata give relatively few old-fashioned concerts these days – I mean the sort that are done in purpose-built concert halls, with a conductor, soloist and conventional orchestra strength – because they’re busy crossing boundaries and attracting new audiences. But when they do return to the traditional path, they do it extremely well, and especially when music director Gábor Takács-Nagy is in charge.This time, at the Royal Northern College of Music, there was the additional distinction of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist in two Mozart piano concertos. He and they have recorded Nos Read more ...
David Nice
There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.None of this is the fault of the admirable Othello, Kurt Egyiawan. Noble and low-voiced in fine speech for the opening Venice act, he also makes us aware of a man on edge and alert to slights about his skin, which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The prequel is here to stay. In the end every popular TV drama flogs itself to death. The star wants out, or the writer dies, or the original source material runs dry, or the public falls asleep. And there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere, that is, apart from back in time. Hence the retro-fitted Endeavour and Gotham and Better Call Saul. In these risk-averse times, the execs enjoy the reassurance that the hard yards of establishing a character have already been gained. It (sort of) worked for Morse. How about the other great ITV cop of the last 30 years?Jane Tennison in the early 1990s was the Read more ...
William Green
Apocalyptica are a band that became famous for playing Metallica on cellos. And tonight they’re playing only Metallica covers because it's 20 years since they released Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, their debut album. The quartet formed at Finland’s Sibelius Academy in 1993 and the man responsible for bringing together classical cellists to play metal is Eicca Toppinen. Tonight, referring to their debut album, he admits that they were “expecting to sell 1,000 CDs”. Six million albums later and constantly on tour they return to their roots: without Metallica there would be no Apocalyptica. Read more ...