Reviews
Gavin Dixon
Nature, nationalism, folk culture: the broad themes of Norway’s visual arts map easily onto its music. That has given Leif Ove Andsnes and his colleagues plenty of leeway in planning their musical tributes to the painter Nikolai Astrup. For this, their second programme at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which is hosting the first ever exhibition of Astrup’s work outside Norway, and the first major one worldwide) the three musicians presented a range of surprising facets of the nation’s musical psyche. We heard the folk themes, of course, but classical and even Baroque elements were also explored Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
In case anyone hasn’t guessed from the flauntingly obvious title, Fifty Shades of Black is a parody of 2012’s favourite piece of trash lit: EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which was adapted for film by director Sam Taylor-Johnson in time to underwhelm audiences on Valentine’s Day 2015. Created by some of the team behind the A Haunted House series, including writers Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez, and director Mike Tiddes, Fifty Shades of Black sets out to spoof the already ridiculed piece of fiction, itself based on Stephenie Meyer’s popular but poorly acclaimed novel-cum-film series, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Birdwatching is not the most thrilling subject for a drama. In fact, next to watching paint dry, it is probably the poorer option. So there is something wonderfully clever and theatrically brilliant about Robert Holman’s 1977 play, which takes place at a popular birdwatching spot overlooking the mouth of the Tees, a location around which several lives meet and connect. You can see why this 90-minute play won Holman the prestigious George Devine Award, and it’s great that it has finally been revived in an absorbing touring production by Alice Hamilton for Up in Arms theatre company.Holman is Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare that a sponsor does more than stump up the money for culture and sometimes request a mention in a review (usually ignored). Last night's godparent, though, the Savings Bank Foundation DNB, is a true self-styled "collaborator", responsible not only for the first major exhibition bringing the remarkable Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup to the world and public-spirited owner of the greatest collection of his paintings and woodcuts, many on display here, but also through its subsidiary Dextra Musica providing the "Kreisler Bergonzi" violin and the Guadagnini violin on loan to the two Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the camera lingered lovingly over landscaped gardens and ravishing English countryside with a stately home parked squarely in the back of the frame, one could hardly avoid slipping into a Downtonesque reverie. Even more so when the assembled posh personages arrayed prettily on the greensward began to discuss marriage and inheritance, triggering echoes of the fabled Downton "entail".Clearly, screenwriter Julian Fellowes is not minded to relinquish his grip on ITV's plum 9pm Sunday slot, and his motto may be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it any more than you have to". If he couldn't bring us Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An innocently-intended Friday night out turns into something fearsome indeed in I See You, a Royal Court co-production with the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, that puts the tensions of post-apartheid South Africa under a sorrowful microscope.At the same time, the interval-free, 80-minute staging marks the directorial debut of the Olivier Award-winning actress Noma Dumezweni, here suggesting that the soon-to-be Hermione of this summer's Harry Potter plays possesses yet further strings to her considerable bow. (The performer made headlines at this address late last year when she stepped with Read more ...
David Nice
Gluck's two operas about the daughter of Agamemnon saved from sacrifice only to serve as priestess-butcher herself have found their level on the contemporary operatic stage. Not that the handful of UK productions or their casts in recent years have quite matched the pared-away beauty of his peculiar classicism: neither Iphigénie en Aulide at Glyndebourne nor the Royal Opera's Iphigénie en Tauride have stuck in the memory, and I doubt if ETO's brave shot at the second opera will either.Iphigenia's tortuous path to reunion with brother Orestes finally calms the chain of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
A gallery chock-full of Botticellian lips and tits is no place to start disputing the central premise of this show, that the Florentine artist’s paintings are woven into the fabric of our collective visual consciousness. From tuppenny ha’penny statuettes to a Dolce & Gabbana trouser suit printed with fragments of the Birth of Venus, Botticelli’s most famous paintings, whether in spirit, pastiche or frank reproduction, are everywhere. And if Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in Dr No is the most effortless of knowing references to Botticelli’s great painting, French performance artist Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service saw their stock Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What a load of balls. No, seriously. Globes, orbs, moons, suns, juggling balls, beach balls, er balls balls: if it’s spherical and pregnant with symbolism then you’re bound to find it somewhere on the props table for English National Opera’s Akhnaten. At the centre of Phelim McDermott’s new production of Philip Glass’s opera is a troupe of jugglers. If that idea appals you it’s worth suppressing your doubts, because it turns out that the greatest trick on display in this mesmerising show isn’t ball skills at all, it’s conjuring – dramatic sleight of hand of the most sophisticated, bewitching Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Celebrating the four ages of man, eight huge, semi-abstract paintings create a carnival atmosphere in the Serpentine’s central gallery. The freshness of Childhood is characterised by flowers, petals and stamens floating on a blue ground. The passions of Youth warrant a ground of hot orange crammed with circles and spirals jostling for space like amoeba in a petrie dish. Adulthood is dominated by a large, yellow gourd-like shape on a lavender ground; dancing in attendance are looping letters and clover-leaf swirls. Old Age is no less euphoric, but the colours are subtler and the loops and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The weekly magazine Country Life was founded in 1897, and is now perhaps improbably owned by Time Inc UK. Its popular image among people who do not necessarily ever look at it is defined by the famous (or infamous) girls in pearls: those portraits of well-groomed fiancées, a kind of weekly visual equivalent of – say – Desert Island Discs for prosperous young aristos, which introduce the articles of each issue. There have been 6,000 such young belles since 1897, interspersed with an occasional Prince Harry or William – not wearing pearls.This time round it was a Yorkshire lass, Ella Charlotte Read more ...