Reviews
Miriam Gillinson
Storage space units are not a nice place to hang out. Chilly and quiet, vaguely depressing and horribly lit, they bring on a desire to leave almost immediately. The same impulse is palpable in Dante or Die’s site-specific show, Handle With Care, which attempts to inject a little life into a storage unit in Old Street, but falls horribly short. The bizarre thing is that Dante or Die are – despite signs to the contrary – experts in site-specific theatre. In 2013 the company received great reviews for I Do, a roaming show which followed a wedding party around a fancy hotel in Islington. It Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The names may be unfamiliar, but Folque and Undertakers Circus are as good as better-known bands. Despite being musical bedfellows neither Norwegian band is as esteemed as, say, Trader Horne and Trees or Colloseum and Lighthouse. Folque issued their eponymous debut album in 1974. Despite line-up changes, the band was active until 1984. Undertakers Circus issued two albums, the first of which was 1973’s Ragnarock. The original band ran out of steam around 1976. Original pressings of Folque fetch between £40 and £80. Ragnarock is very rare and sells for around £70. The reissue of each album is Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Nothing galvanises an audience quite like physical risk. As soprano Sarah Tynan rose on a hoop into the darkness, intoning the final words of "Départ" from Britten's song cycle Les Illuminations, you could almost hear her heart race. Beneath, a troupe of circus performers held the rope – and her life – in their hands.In choreographer/director Struan Leslie’s vision, performers decked out as Rimbaud’s "sturdy rogues" brought sinew, grace and heart-stopping spectacle to a night illuminated by explosive, raw-fresh string music: it was all about the vertical.For Leslie, Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
David Nice
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more than twice that long, but it's worth every riveting or disconcerting minute thanks largely – but by no means exclusively – to the encyclopedic range of Isabelle Huppert."Star vehicle" may be a term at odds with this sort of total ensemble theatre, but that's in part what it is for Huppert (pictured below). This is a triptych like no Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At least half the audience for this live version of the short-form improv show, which was shown on Channel 4 between 1989 and 1998, couldn’t possibly have seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? when it was first broadcast, so one assumes they must have become fans via YouTube or rerun channels – testimony to the idea that good comedy is timeless and ageless.The West End version of Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson's creation is an appealing melding of old and new. The acerbic and quick-witted Clive Anderson is back as master of ceremonies, and producers maximise his presence by giving him a 15- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Infertility affects one in six couples, but it’s still something of a taboo subject. Gareth Farr’s new play throws welcome light on the challenges of conception, and is accompanied by a Fertility Fest that brings together artists and medical experts to address the issues raised. If Farr’s drama occasionally feels like a case study for that discussion, with a few awkward sitcom beats tossed in, it’s still a searingly honest and genuinely affecting piece of work.Jess (Michelle Bonnard) and Dylan (Oliver Lansley) have been married for five years and after trying, unsuccessfully, to start a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nimrod Borenstein: Suspended opus 69 das freie orchester Berlin/Laércio Diniz (Solaire Records)The splendidly monikered Nimrod Borenstein’s Suspended opus 69 deserves our attention for being the soundtrack to a juggling performance, namely Gandini Juggling’s 4x4 Ephemeral Architectures (“conceptualised as a piece of imaginary architecture and a fusion of the world of juggling and ballet”). Hmm. Fear not. Listen blind and what we hear sounds very much like a ballet score, its string writing looking back to Stravinsky’s Apollo. As well to the pastoral English tradition – parts of it recall Read more ...
David Nice
"Bad Star Trek episodes" is how one director describes a certain unfortunate look in would-be intergalactic opera productions. The late Nikolaus Lehnhoff came perilously close to it in his Glyndebourne Tristan und Isolde but offered a coherent vision. Daniel Kramer, now ENO's Artistic Director, has a few "bad Star Trek episodes" and many good ideas that don't always join up or else outstay their welcome. Unevennness abounds: hideous costumes and makeup clash with Anish Kapoor's eventually brilliant designs, singing and conducting are only patchily inspired.Let's celebrate the best first. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
New Blood began as it didn’t quite mean to go on. Somewhere in India five Brits on their travels mustered in a medical laboratory as volunteers to test-run a new drug. The tone was pregnant with portent, so it was no surprise when a knife was wielded and blood spattered. You settled in for a moody medical noir.Six years and one title sequence later, the tone made a 180-degree handbreak turn. Standing over the corpse lying at the foot of a block of flats in rainy London, Mark Addy’s old-school plod (pictured below) spouted sarky putdowns at a uniformed young upstart who fancied himself a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Wagner was never satisfied with Tannhäuser, and it’s not hard to see why. Essentially a study of the tension between sensual and spiritual love, it was composed at a time when, by his own later confession, he lacked the resources to deal properly (that is, improperly) with the sensual element, and even in any profundity – one might feel – with the spiritual. The piece went through numerous revisions, extensions, compressions, tinkerings of one sort or another. But what was left is a patchwork of early and late, conventional and inspired, and a sometimes painfully naïve morality which tends to Read more ...
bella.todd
Thought Terence Rattigan was a playwright of the drawing room? Think again. A day after his defining work The Deep Blue Sea opened in an acclaimed revival at the National, Chichester Festival Theatre takes a lavish risk on this epic later work, which swaps dingy post-war London for the beating heat of the Arabian desert, and restrained middle-class passions for bloody revolution.The vast Egyptian columns, scorched-earth stage and whirling Middle Eastern music insist on the "foreignness" of the external scene in Adrian Noble’s production. But internally, it turns out, we’re on familiar Read more ...
aleks.sierz
From being the Aunt Sally of contemporary British theatre, attacked by the angry young men in the 1950s and the new wave of social and political realists for three decades after that, playwright Terence Rattigan is now well and truly rehabilitated. For the past quarter of a century, both his major and his minor works have been regularly revived. Since Benedict Cumberbatch starred in a revival of Rattigan’s After the Dance at the National Theatre in 2010 it was only a matter of time until this flagship institution staged his best play, The Deep Blue Sea. And this revival stars Helen McCrory, Read more ...