Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
In 2007 Maxim Vengerov had to withdraw completely from violin playing, and stayed away for four years. He had suffered the after effects of a weight-lifting injury to his shoulder, and needed surgery. But he also described at the time that he felt he needed to re-learn the instrument. If people – like the writer of last night's programme introduction – now refer casually to his “effortless virtuosity”, it is clearly something which has been acquired with an intense effort and sense of purpose. At the age of 41, the violinist has indeed now reached a delightful ease and naturalness of Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
Secret in Their Eyes is not a mystery-thriller that leaves us pondering for long “whodunit”. The focus is on how two investigators and a Deputy District Attorney can relinquish obsessions that have glued them to a murder case for 13 years. This is a story of longings, obsession, and the inability to move on from events unaccounted for by justice. Written and directed by Billy Ray (who was Oscar-nominated for his Captain Phillips script), Secret in Their Eyes is based on Juan Jose Campanella’s 2009 El Secreto De Sus Ojos, which won the 2010 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Ray’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Although everyone agrees that Sarah Kane was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 1990s, revivals of her work have been few and far between. Now, at last, some 17 years after her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, our flagship National Theatre has finally decided to stage one of her best works (artistic director Rufus Norris, thank you). But although she became infamous for the media-fuelled scandal and atrocity-fest aspects of her work, subsequent reconsideration suggests that her main theme was nothing less than romantic love. Now revived by star director Katie Mitchell ( Read more ...
David Kettle
The set-up behind Spanish film-maker Álvaro Longoria’s intelligent documentary on North Korea is almost as bizarre and unlikely as the regime he’s attempting to probe.Having felt compelled for several years to make a film about the country, he’s finally allowed to travel there thanks to intermediary and fellow Spaniard Alejandro Cao de Benós (pictured below), the North Korean government’s sole foreign employee (we’re told), and a passionate, unquestioning supporter of the regime. Permitted to film whatever he wants to (as long he’s accompanied by government guides, and as long as it’s what Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Given that Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it’s an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in Russell Bolam’s production of Glyn Maxwell’s adaptation. It ought not to be so. With its all-female cast and stripped-down staging, it ought to feel radical and fresh, stimulating new lines of enquiry into the nature of role-play and what constitutes maleness and male heroism, shedding new light on a familiar text.The story of Cyrano de Bergerac, the soldier-poet who selflessly uses his literary gift to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who’s the Boss? occupies a square-eyed quadrant somewhere between Gogglebox and The Apprentice. If you like those, you’ll probably like this jaunty workplace experiment in which it’s not the boss who hires applicants for a new job, but the workforce. In Ancient Rome they called it Saturnalia, when for one day of the year the hierarchy was reversed. Nowadays you’d call it Siliconalia because like more or less everything these days the idea originated in Silicon Valley.It's quite a long way from California to a family fruit and veg distribution business in Hertfordshire. Reynolds needed a new Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Hell, the souls of the damned endure cruelly imaginative punishments for all eternity. Corrupt churchmen are buried headfirst in the ground with their feet set on fire, and soothsayers, who in life presumed to be able to see into the future, have their heads turned 180 degrees and are forced to walk around looking backwards. Drawn in metalpoint strengthened here and there with ink, Botticelli’s lines are as fine as spider’s silk. Sometimes barely there at all, their extraordinary refinement lends a strange, jarring intensity to the violence and terror they depict. By contrast, their Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Isy Suttie, an ever-smiling and engaging stand-up, may come across as a real-life version of Dobby, the perpetually nice character she played in Peep Show, but that's somewhat to deceive. While she is an immensely warm comic she used to have, she told us at Winchester Discovery Centre, some very strict rules about choosing a boyfriend; he must be grammatically aware of the difference between your and you're (I have no problem with that, obviously) and, most strikingly, he mustn't like the sea – “It's just water that moves a bit”.The Actual Book Tour is a live accompaniment to her new book, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
John le Carré's 1993 novel The Night Manager was his first post-Cold War effort, and the fortuitous setting of its early scenes in a hotel in Cairo has allowed TV dramatiser David Farr to move the action forward from the post-Thatcher fallout to the 2011 "Arab Spring". Here we encountered the fastidiously tailored Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of the Nefertiti hotel, a man who keeps his head while all around him is panic, gunfire and explosions.Pine's journey is going to be the mainspring of this six-part series, and judging by the opener, the casting of Tom Hiddleston is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The third of Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays, La Mère coupable, is a very different affair from the other two, in that it records actual adultery and its disastrous consequences (including Cherubino’s death in battle), as opposed to the largely comic innuendos and mistaken identities of The Barber and The Marriage. David Pountney’s libretto for Elena Langer’s new opera for WNO, Figaro Gets a Divorce, fuses this idea with elements from Horváth’s play of that name, which has the Almaviva entourage exiled by revolution, the Countess dying in poverty and the Count imprisoned for crooked business Read more ...
peter.quinn
With Peter Andre butchering Frank Sinatra on the one hand ("Reality TV swing", as Ray Gelato aptly put it) and Annie Lennox massacring Billie Holiday on the other, it was heart-warming to hear two artists performing standards and originals with such care, insight and sensitivity.After they'd opened with an arresting snippet of Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce”, a massively swinging take on Peggy Lee’s “I Love Being Here with You” saw Martin slipping in some deft lyrical changes (“I’d love to kiss George Clooney’s nose”), while the first of several towering scats lit up “Comes Love” like a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before Canadian comedian and British TV panel show regular Stewart Francis arrives on stage his audience are entertained with his one-panel cartoons. These, Sharpie-penned in black, are projected as a slideshow (sample: in a fishbowl, one fish says to the other, “It’s all kicked off again in the Middle East” – title “Topical Fish”). It’s unfortunate that whoever set this up couldn’t be bothered to centre the image, since a good quota of the jokes' key lines were rendered non-existent, chopped off at the top. Happily, a half-hour support slot by UK-based fellow Canadian Dana Alexander went Read more ...