Reviews
Veronica Lee
Five nominations for the Edinburgh Comedy Award are surely a recommendation for James Acaster – and with his intelligent, offbeat humour and a wry delivery, he has rightly built up an impressive following at the Fringe (where I saw this show), having improved his craft year on year. Now he embarks on his biggest tour yet and is certain to add to his rapidly growing fanbase.His latest show, Reset, is a gem, a beautifully crafted and performed essay about having one's time again. In Acaster's very individual take on the subject, it could mean him going into the witness protection programme, or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1985, John Foxx released In Mysterious Ways: his fourth solo album since leaving Ultravox in 1979. In 1980, he had charted with “Underpass”, his first solo single. Subsequently, he charted a path where frosty, anomie-filled electropop gave way to the warmth of “Europe After the Rain” and the Beatles-inspired psychedelia of “Endlessly”. The 1983 album The Golden Section was his most straightforwardly poppy to date. Then, the patchy In Mysterious Ways and musical silence.In 1997, he re-emerged with two albums, Cathedral Oceans and Shifting City (made with Louis Gordon). From this point, Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s just a short trip down the A1 from Edinburgh. But East Lothian – with its big skies, wide-open spaces, empty beaches and seemingly inexhaustable supply of quaint, historic villages – feels like a long, long way from the Scottish capital. Especially from the heaving, hectic Edinburgh of the August festivals season – which East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival follows by just a couple of weeks, managing to maintain the momentum of artistic endeavour, but also providing a far more reflective, considered antidote.The East Lothian festival takes its name from the surprisingly wild Lammermuir Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A single guitar note rang out over smouldering synth-chords. It was bent up a tone and then wavered in the air before gracefully falling. And so began the final residency of the Rattle That Lock tour. No hype. No support act. Just David Gilmour and his all-star band looking back on his long and prestigious career. At least that's how the programme described it. For everyone else this was Pink Floyd resurrected.Not the Nineties "stadium version", mind. This was more like early Floyd - a time when the band members were still totally immersed in the possibilities of making Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Gorgeous, sumptuous, thrilling: here comes Abstract Expressionism riding into town, the first major overview in London since its own contemporary heyday in the 1950s. A clunky, unappealing label for such fabulously appealing stuff, it's best just to relax and enjoy this total immersion, for colour and gesture can never have been combined to such memorable effect. Nurtured by the melting pot of New York, this was the first homegrown group of American artists, its activities destined to put New York on the international culture map, wresting the crown of art capital from Paris.The diversity of Read more ...
David Nice
What's in a name? Imogen has a softer music to it than Cymbeline, the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the title character is marginal, and the daughter certainly dominates in a way that her regal father doesn't. So Cymbeline Renamed, as half the subheading of Matthew Dunster's bold production puts it, is fine.Reclaimed, though, from what? There's no need to shift any of Shakespeare's centres of gravity, and Dunster doesn't. True, this "heavenly Imogen" is more earth than air, and Maddy Hill compels from the start – a good but tough girl in a harsh environment, in a new riff on the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At its best, theatre is great at putting resonant metaphors on stage. And, as Elinor Cook’s new play abundantly proves, the activity of mountain climbing seems very promising as a metaphor for masculine endeavor. All that effort, all that heaving, all that straining. Blood and sweat and sometimes tears. And then the question: why do men want to stand on top of the world? And is it just men who have this urgent need for power and dominion? Although Pilgrims is a rather short and small play, it is provocative not only in the questions it asks, but also in some of the answers that it suggests. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Vladimir Jurowski began his latest season as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic with a typically bold and adventurous programme. At its core were the two Szymanowski violin concertos performed by Nicola Benedetti, and these were framed by Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin Suite. The two concertos are stylistically distinct, the First impressionistic, the Second folk-influenced, so the pairings were apt. As ever, Jurowski delivered supple, well-crafted performances, and Benedetti shone, but the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Copland: Orchestral Works Volume 2 Jonathan Scott (organ),BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/John Wilson (Chandos)This disc is a welcome reminder that Aaron Copland’s populist, diatonic ballet scores only tell half the story; the early and late stages in his career contain music which is far less ingratiating. Pieces like the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, first performed in 1925 and the source of a much-repeated quote from conductor Walter Damrosch that if Copland could write a piece like this aged 23, “within five years he will be ready to commit murder!” It isn’t an organ concerto, the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They keep on coming, these crime dramas, from every direction. The Viking invasion continues, the co-productions with France, the ongoing American global takeover. Meanwhile back in Blighty, Red Productions have been a reliable source of quality drama since the 1990s. Their most recent forays into crime have both involved Sally Wainwright: Happy Valley was theirs, and so was Scott & Bailey. Their latest, modishly, is an international collaboration: Paranoid, a new eight-parter set somewhere quiet and northern, was made in conjunction with Studio Canal and is destined for Netflix.In one Read more ...
Alison Cole
Of all the mesmerising images in William Kentridge’s major Whitechapel show, the one that lingers most, perhaps, is that of the artist himself, now turned 60, hunched and thoughtful, wandering through the studio in Johannesburg where he lives and works. He paces, meditates over a "magical" cup of coffee, imagines, draws, tears paper, works, adjusts, observes, directs – all in the gentle manner of a Buster Keaton-style silent film star. Time in this metaphoric space is thick with possibilities, under-stated humour and conundrums. It is also a Utopian universe, where mistakes can be undone, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and addiction on the New York publishing scene. It has already played in translation in Mexico and in France, where it won Molière awards for direction and design. Its director, the prolific screen and stage actor John Malkovich, now brings it to London for the first time – and obligingly lends his famously dark-chocolate tones to the reminder to turn off mobile phones.This is also one of those plays with a plot Read more ...