Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Already a couple of Golden Globes to the good after debuting in the States last year, The Affair effortlessly hit its stride as it landed in Blighty. This opening double episode began generating a subtle miasma of intrigue and vague menace from the off, as teacher and aspiring novelist Noah Solloway (Dominic West) gathered his untidy family together for a summer holiday trip to the in-laws in Montauk, in the Hamptons.A holiday romance might take many forms, but with any luck will turn out to be just a fleeting by-product of too much sun and alcohol. However, the one getting ready to crash up Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
After the disappointment of Wayne McGregor’s latest piece for the Royal Ballet, which opened on Monday, I thought last night’s trip to Sadler’s Wells for a new Rambert programme might cheer me up about the state of contemporary dance and composition. Two new pieces were on offer, by rising choreographer Alexander Whitley and Rambert director Mark Baldwin with original scores by Icelander Daniel Bjarnason and Brit Gavin Higgins respectively, alongside a revival of Lucinda Childs’s Four Elements, and there was no sign of the fawning hype that preceded the McGregor opening. Were we in for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In The Tribe, his feature debut, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy has created something totally unexpected, and viscerally powerful to boot. This dark tale of life among inmates of a Kyiv institution for the deaf avoids spoken language completely, leaving viewers to assemble the narrative for themselves: communication is only in sign language, heralded consciously in an opening screen-title as presented without translation, subtitles or voiceover.Clearly Slaboshpytskiy’s predominantly teenage, non-professional cast know what they’re getting up to, but we’re left guessing until Read more ...
Marianka Swain
André is losing time. It’s not just his perennially mislaid watch, but whole hours, weeks, years. Is he still living in his Paris flat, or did he move in with his daughter Anne? Is she married, divorced, leaving the country with a new boyfriend? And why does that nurse she’s forced on him – the third one, or is it the first? – remind him so strongly of his other daughter, whose unexplained absence is just one of the memories slipping through his fingers like sand?The stark, inescapable power of Florian Zeller’s Molière Award-winning play, meticulously translated by Christopher Hampton, is Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
On my way to the Woolf Works opening last night, I made the mistake of reading The Waves, Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel. It was a mistake because even the briefest immersion in Woolf’s prose was a thousand times more exhilarating than the 90 minutes of treacly sludge served up by Wayne McGregor and Max Richter in this, the choreographer’s much-hyped first full-length work for the Royal Ballet. It’s not really full-length, though: it’s three self-contained short pieces, each inspired by a novel – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, in that order – with the portentous in- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
"I sometimes wish we were more normal," sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the froth and the substance of this early play, written in a blaze of youthful elan over three days in 1924. What has kept it a theatrical staple for 90 years and counting is not just its writer’s talent to amuse, nor its near-perfect structure: it is also the stain of truth that seeps through its merry mayhem, drawing on Coward’s own experience as a hapless weekend houseguest, and his sharp-eyed observations Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It seems almost redundant to critique a show that so ably – if unconsciously – critiques itself. “The power of Bollywood is it’s unique!” cries one character, before squandering that uniqueness in tired East/West fusion; "Dance should have feeling!” proclaims another as he launches into a propulsive routine as far removed from the emotional narrative as London is from Mumbai. In trying to rescue Bollywood from cliché, the show’s creators have instead cursorily employed a hodgepodge of dance drama recyclables, from star-crossed lovers embodying different styles and art informed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s a shock to see the Corn Exchange’s hundreds of seats sold out for a jazz piano trio. When I first heard GoGo Penguin two winters ago, it was in an East London basement, where new recruit Nick Blacka’s thunderous double-bass was inspiring a few intrepid dancers to their skittering beats, among a crowd of dozens. Since then, there’s been a Mercury nomination, and a recent three-album deal with America’s gold-standard jazz label, Blue Note, a remarkable achievement for a British band.It’s when they break from their own successful formula that GoGo Penguin are most interestingListening to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival has all manner of talks during its three week run, audiences with everyone from octogenarian French avant-garde filmmaker Agnès Varda to ceramicist Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes. theartsdesk will be covering the de Waal evening, as well as a Q&A with novelist Margaret Atwood and her partner Graeme Gibson, later in the month. This past weekend, however, I dipped into a couple of other talky events, both of which were thoroughly engaging but might have benefited from a 21st Century technological upgrade.On Saturday night, Nicolette Jones, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Modigliani’s short life was a template for countless aspiring artists who, in the period after his death in 1920, were only too willing to believe that a garret in Montmartre and a liking for absinthe held the secret to creative brilliance. While Modigliani certainly compounded poor health with a ruinous drink and drug addiction, this exhibition plays down his reputation as a hellraiser, suggesting instead an altogether quieter, although no less romantic character. Even relatively unembellished, the artist’s life has been so comprehensively mythologised that it feels as contrived as a film Read more ...
David Nice
When ENO announced its return to Gilbert and Sullivan, rapture at the news that Mike Leigh, genius Topsy-Turvy director, would be the master of wonderland ceremonies was modified by its choice, The Pirates of Penzance. Last staged at the Coliseum – and unmemorably – as recently as 2004, the fifth Savoy opera seemed less in need of revisiting than several larger-scale successors. By the end of last night, though, it was clear not only that Leigh and his musical team had been the best possible choice to tackle this work of classical perfection, but also that if operatic schedules could be Read more ...