Reviews
aleks.sierz
You could call it the Corbynisation of new writing. In the past couple of years, a series of plays have plumbed the lower depths, looking at the subject of good people trapped in zero-hour contracts and terrible working conditions. Like Ken Loach’s dreary film, I, Daniel Blake, these plays have integrity, but very little dramatic content. Market leaders of this new fashion are two plays devised under the direction of Alexander Zeldin, Beyond Caring and Love. And the latest addition to this catalogue is Katherine Soper’s Wish List, winner of the 2015 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, co- Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.Of course, the CBSO has already embarked on a whole new adventure, and with an artist as exciting as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In the annals of ballet directors, always searching for the perfect balance between heritage programming and new work, there can rarely have been a double whammy so successful. In pairing a brand new Akram Khan Giselle with Mary Skeaping's near-perfect 1971 production in one season, English National Ballet may be setting an Orwellian future against a Romantic past, contemporary dance against the most classical ballet, but they have no jarring contrast on their hands. On the contrary, these two very fine pieces of work illuminate one another, and stand proud on their own.For the true ballet Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s the ghastly scenario of a grim morality play. A man called Simon comes into hospital for the removal of a tumour in his oesophagus and the construction of a new food pipe. But there are not enough berths in the intensive therapy unit to ensure he can have post-operative care. Why? Because elsewhere in the country Janice has ruptured her aorta in a car accident. She is on her way to the London hospital which specialises in such cases. If she dies in the ambulance on the way, Simon can have his op. If not, he has to go home (for the second time). How does that make Simon feel? "Guilty, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The aura of Ben Affleck burneth bright. It only seems about 10 minutes ago that he starred in The Accountant, and now here’s Live by Night, his fourth outing as director, and the second movie on which he’s been writer, director and star. He’ll be performing that multitasking feat again on the forthcoming solo-Batman flick The Batman, when he’s not putting in guest appearances in all the “DC extended universe” franchise spin-offs.If a gangster movie could ever be described as a “romp”, Live by Night would be that film, as it vaults across the Prohibition years of the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other themes too might have been hand-picked for classroom discussion: bullying, betrayal, bad parenting, family secrets. Its first-person narrative makes it feel real.The trouble with this stage adaptation newly arrived in the West End is that only a small portion of the audience is using it for exam revision. Those merely hoping for a theatre Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The timing of Gavin Turk’s retrospective couldn’t be better. Last November Joe Corre, son of punk icons Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, burned his collection of punk memorabilia in protest at the way the 40th anniversary of punk had become an excuse to institutionalise the movement and transform its anarchic spirit into a marketing opportunity. Having started life as deliberately offensive schmatters, the stuff he destroyed had attained a market value of £5 million. Two weeks later, a blue plaque was erected in Marylebone at 33 Daventry Street, the site of a squat where The Clash Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance. That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The main attraction of this new US sitcom for a UK audience is that two British actors - Stephen Fry and Susannah Fielding – appear in it. The basic premise is that Jack Gordon, a famed reporter, has led a thrilling outdoorsman life, writing about his adventures for the magazine Outdoor Limits. But then his editor, Roland (Fry), recalls him to the office in downtown Chicago and tells him the publication is going web-only, and that he will now be writing about the great outdoors from, well, the not-so-great indoors.Jack (Joel McHale, pictured below with Fry) is, in best sitcom fashion, a fish Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When a leading fringe theatre starts the year with a production whose gender ratio is 8:1 in favour of men, it had better have a good reason. When seven of those eight are wearing prosthetic penises, it had better have a very good reason. And a plan in place for a glut of women on its stage next season.Yet the sheer enjoyment to be had from Tony Harrison’s muscular rhyming verse is almost reason enough to revive The Trackers of Oxyrynchus after nearly 30 years. There’s also rarity value in its subject matter: the satyr play. Where a good handful of the many thousand tragedies that once played Read more ...
David Nice
What's not to like, or love, would have to be the sensible response to both the opening programme of Kings Place's year-long Cello Unwrapped festival at Kings Place and its life-enhancing execution. Symmetries abounded – between Alban Gerhardt's double-stopping summons with the "Canto Primo" of Britten's First Cello Suite at the start and his late-night farewell symphony, Kodály's towering Sonata for solo cello; also between two glistening suites for which the label "neo-Baroque" is too narrow, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Nicholas Collon and his Aurora players Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The American poet-critic Randall Jarrell once entitled a collection of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. He might have enjoyed Michel Houellebecq’s poem “Hypermarket - November”. Its forlorn narrator has “stumbled into freezer”, then “collapsed at the cheese counter” where “Two old ladies were carrying sardines./ The first turned to tell her neighbour,/ ‘It’s sad, all the same, for a boy that age’.” For well over than two decades, the veteran enfant terrible of French literature has been swooning in noisy revulsion at the decadence and emptiness of his godless consumer society. Should we Read more ...