Reviews
Marianka Swain
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.Rylance the writer has given Rylance the actor a typically Rylance part: charmingly guileless and gormless Ron, the loquacious and gently dotty companion of serious fisherman Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), whose suffering of this irksome presence Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Born in Rome and taught by her artist father, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) led a colourfully energetic life. As an adolescent she was raped by her father’s assistant – an episode which unusually, then as now, actually came to public trial – but she nevertheless became a confident, resolute woman, and a successful artist. She was vitally ambitious, portraying herself as La Pittura in her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, c.1638-9, an image at the heart of this exhibition.Here Artemisia is almost hurling herself at her canvas, brush in one hand, palette in the other. Wearing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sketch format goes in and out of favour. It was huge in the 1970s, crawled under a rock when alternative comedians found other means of expression, and was reinvigorated 20 years ago by genuinely inventive shows like Big Train and The Fast Show. Since then, easily the biggest kid on the block has been Little Britain, which married mainstream appeal with a flair for subversion.After cashing in with a live tour, its stars didn’t really have anywhere to go with the format. They had a crack at ribbing the docusoap genre in the underrated Come Fly With Me, and then went their separate ways. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar Remastered (Somm)Elgar’s compositional career took a bit of a nosedive in his final decades but his sharpness as a practical musician never left him, as is witnessed by the superb series of acoustic and early electrical recordings he conducted in the 1920s and early '30s. There’s a magnificent Warner box collecting the discs he made for HMV, which should be in every home. Elgar’s swift tempi and reluctance to linger are frequently thrilling, dispelling any suggestion that this is crusty music for tweed-clad buffers. This Somm set is also mandatory listening: sound engineer Lani Spahr Read more ...
joe.muggs
At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in black bomber jackets, black jeans, black trainers and black baseball caps. These were London's electronica fanboys out in force for Autechre, the duo who, second only to The Aphex Twin, epitomised the moment the rave generation went weird and disjointed, and since the mid-Nineties have explored all the sonic abstractions that technology has to offer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Damned peak early tonight. They never really top a tribalistic crowd sing-along to the song “Ignite” about two-thirds of the way through the evening. Dressed, as ever, like a cool rockabilly undertaker, in aviators with a black glove clutching the Shire Classic-style microphone, frontman Dave Vanian, his face painted cabaret zombie skeletal, prowls the stage, watching the crowd with a wry smile. Unreadable, his contained energy and rich bass voice is jointly at the heart of The Damned’s live appeal.Beside him is the band’s boundless energiser, Captain Sensible, who couldn’t look more Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade, one new theme in particular has emerged in contemporary British new writing: generational conflict. In several bright new offerings – such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster (2010) and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2012) – the baby boomers are condemned for having a cushy lifestyle while their kids, the millennials, are having a hard time (indebted, homeless and underemployed). Play after play asks: will the new generation ever enjoy the same living standards as their parents? Lucy Kirkwood’s latest, a follow up to her big 2013 hit Chimerica, is the newest, rather Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Back in the 1980s Jim Jarmusch was a breath of fresh air. He made quiet, quirky films about young urban Americans that dispensed with the prevailing neon-bright high school romances, jocks and suburbia. He was about as far removed from the John Hughes/John Landis/Porky hit machines as you could get. Jarmusch was saturated in obscure B-movies, modern poetry and played in a band. His breakout feature, Stranger than Paradise, starred the then unknown John Lurie, who over the course of the film drifted from a cold New York to a frozen Cleveland and emerged blinking in the stale sunshine of Read more ...
james.woodall
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their being set in a prison. With the long-planned trilogy now rounded off with The Tempest, which has premiered in the Donmar’s purpose-built 420-seater just north of King’s Cross, the device has attained lock-stock-and-barrel totality.The acting space is a square, with steeply raked seating on each side. Behind the last row runs prison caging, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through the holiday period, scheduling that assumes audiences can't get enough of Tchaikovsky-and-tutus at Christmas. And I'm sure they can't, when the purveyors of said delights are the Royal Ballet.It helps that Wright's Nutcracker is a classic of the genre, almost perfect in every way. I say almost, because I began to feel, on last night's viewing, that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad). Stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard will guarantee some ticket-shifting action, but the apparent intention of director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight to recreate Hollywood's vintage wartime melodramas never quite comes off.Still, it's quite fun to see them trying. The opening scene is a shot of sun-scorched desert sands Read more ...
David Nice
Has there ever been a more pertinent time to revive the poetic mythologies of Brecht and Weill? The writer said that the good-life-for-dollars city of Mahagonny was not exclusively an American state of mind and should be set in any country where it's performed. But the inverted morality tale of The Seven Deadly Sins explicitly references seven American cities. And with lines like (in the Auden/Kallman translation) "If you show your offence at injustice, Mr Big will show he's offended", it's very much of the moment. Add a performer of colossal magnetism like Storm Large, the slickest Weillian Read more ...