Reviews
Tim Cumming
The Union Chapel is packed – upstairs and down, and the two of them emerge through a backstage curtain, step up to the mics and sing The Everly Brother’s "Wake Up Little Suzie", which should hit the spot just right, with the sweet-n-sour harmonizing of their voices, Shawn Colvin’s picking technique against Steve Earle’s rhythmic sense behind a guitar, but here and on a few songs through the set, it doesn’t quite get there.At times their guitar playing doesn’t fuse, at times it falters, as if they have quite settled yet, their voices pull against each other rather than together. I notice that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stillness. Contemplation. Surreal spirituality. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films share qualities hugely distant from Hollywood, closer to his other career as a visual artist, and rooted in his responses to his Thai homeland. It’s been six years since his last feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, bringing his work as close to mainstream notice as its quiet otherness permits. One shorter film, Mekong Hotel (2012), and much visual art, filled the gap till this contemplative return (which itself won Un Certain Regard at Cannes).In what isn’t a story Read more ...
Ed Owen
British filmmaking does gritty suburban dramas better than anywhere. Stories stripped of superficial action, from Ken Loach’s early work through to more recent stand-out films like Tyrannosaur. The Violators offers a new voice producing a superb feature set in a bleak Merseyside suburb. Debut director Helen Walsh is better known as a novelist, creating tales thick with human drama, sometimes in grim settings, and The Violators adheres to this template.Three siblings live together under the care of their constantly smoking, constantly angry older brother Andy (Derek Barr), terrified that their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The guitar, the "little orchestra" beloved of Andrés Segovia, is an instrument for all seasons, and for venues from salons to stadiums. It isn't exactly the same instrument in all cases, of course. Comparing the traditional acoustic Spanish guitar to the electronic weapons systems used by Radiohead or U2 is like parking an Austin 7 next to a Tesla Model X.It's one of the loopholes in Guitar Star (★★★) that it seeks, somehow, to throw all known types of guitar and every playing style into a pot, whence (at the end of nine episodes) a winner will be plucked. Logically, it's an impossible Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-affirming music made in the jaws of hell – the starving ghetto, the Nazi work camp – has been amply covered on page and screen. And one’s first thought during the opening 10 minutes of this production is, slightly guiltily: do I really have to look this horror in the face yet again? But at a time when the storm clouds of extreme nationalism are Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay. Jacob Dorrell, director of the University of Birmingham’s summer production of Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Barber Institute, explains: “I wanted to bring to the Barber stage a community of people one would never expect to appear in an opera: today’s working-class community.” Dorrell is a young director, early in his career, so let’s leave aside the fact that his vision of “today’s working-class community” – a world of jeggings, leopard print, trackie bottoms and midriff-baring maternity wear – seems to come out of Coronation Read more ...
David Kettle
It just goes to demonstrate the breadth and ambition of the Hebrides Ensemble’s work. For its 25th anniversary, the Scottish new music group (although its output delves a bit further back in time than that description might suggest) had commissioned a brand new chamber opera from Inverness-born Alasdair Nicolson, unveiled at Glasgow’s Cottier Chamber Project festival, with subsequent performances at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and Orkney’s St Magnus International Festival, where Nicolson is artistic director.To be honest, though, The Iris Murder was a pretty mystifying experience, as Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Found Festival 2016 got a couple of things right. The choice of music-makers was solid and the broad cross-section of friendly people who attended was admirable. But, unfortunately, everything else went wrong. Worst of all was the behaviour of the security team who, by the end of the day, had become hi-viz-jacketed herds of power-dizzy bullies, marauding around the site.The idea of the festival, born of a south London club night and in its fourth year, was to fill Brockwell Park, from 11am until 9pm, with five marquee tents of underground techno, disco and house, plus a sixth outdoor stage Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Is The Cunning Little Vixen a jolly children’s pantomime, or is it a searching study of issues of life and death, Man and Nature? The answer, naturally, is that it’s both. Children dress up as animals, and sing and prance about. But at the same time grown-ups (both animal and human) dream and fantasize, couple and procreate, hunt and kill. Remarkably, it’s a tragedy that leaves no bitter taste. The heroine dies, but Nature goes on. The hardest thing to understand about hunters is that they identify with and even love their prey. But this is precisely the crux of Melly Still’s brilliant Read more ...
David Kettle
"A funny wee film about music and death" goes the strapline. That’s a pretty accurate summary of Paul Fegan’s touching documentary Where You’re Meant To Be, which follows singer Aidan Moffat – formerly of 1990s indie rockers Arab Strap – as he tours his bawdy urban updates of traditional songs around Scotland.There’s plenty of humour – sarcastic or absurd for the most part – and at a mere 75 minutes it’s certainly wee. Music’s a constant presence, with footage of gigs in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, the Western Isles, Skye and elsewhere, to varying reactions from the locals. And death – well, that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Boy meets girl; girl and boy fall in love; boy loses girl. In true bohemian fashion, La bohème can lay its operatic head anywhere from Paris to Peshawar, in any era from 90s punk to the Belle Epoque, and still make sense. What matters are the emotions; do we believe in the relationship between Rodolfo and Mimi, the camaraderie between Rodolfo and his friends? Stephen Barlow’s new production for Opera Holland Park may relocate the action rather unexpectedly, but what emerges both fresh and familiar is a love story between two people who couldn’t care less what city or what age they find Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Laura Mvula talks almost as much as she sings. Between songs she confesses to rambling, but her musings – on heartbreak, on “toilet analogies” for the recording process, on meeting the Duke of Edinburgh and then falling over – are never less than disarmingly engaging. At times it verges on stand-up comedy. Mostly, she simply reveals aspects of herself: charismatic, sassy, down-to-earth, a girl from Birmingham with an incredible gift. The show begins with “Who I Am” and all but ends with “Phenomenal Woman”. It’s pretty easy to see the middle of the gig as an equals sign.There’s a kind of Read more ...