Reviews
Hanna Weibye
The premise of last night’s world première made so much sense that one almost wondered why nobody had done it before now. Commissioned by the Royal Opera House and in its downstairs Linbury space, Shobana Jeyasingh, a classically-trained Indian dancer and now director of her own contemporary dance company, would respond to the 19th-century ballet about an Indian temple dancer, La Bayadère, which has wonderful choreography but presents an entirely Western, Orientalist vision of the “exotic” east. Issues of cultural appropriation, objectification and identity would be tackled, dance would get Read more ...
fisun.guner
We think we know it when we see it. But how, pray, do we define beauty? The ancient Greeks thought they had the measure of it. In the 4th century BC, the “chief forms of beauty,” according to Aristotle, were “order, symmetry and clear delineation.” A century earlier, during the golden age of Athens, Polykleitos, one of the ancient world’s greatest sculptors, set out the precise ratios for the ideal male form in a treatise he called The Canon. And a century before him, Pythagoras instructed that it was numbers that revealed the hidden order of the world – a perfection revealed through an Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. For instance, before watching it I had no idea that the famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech given by the possible 2016 presidential candidate was “the beginning of the cry for women’s rights across the globe”; and it was certainly a surprise to discover that the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan was not merely in service of a “war against terror” but rather “a war against the barbaric treatment of women”.The format Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Joshua Harmon’s provocative 2012 piece is the Rocky of comedies. His evenly matched sparring partners, a pair of viscerally antagonistic cousins confined in close quarters after a familial loss, bruise, bludgeon and literally draw blood. The bonds of kinship have never felt so tangible, so knotty, so inescapable.Daphna (Jenna Augen) is aggressively committed to her Jewish heritage and lifestyle, while atheistic Liam (Ilan Goodman) all but disowns it, missing their grandfather Poppy’s funeral because he dropped his iPhone from a ski lift while in Aspen with gentile girlfriend Melody (Gina Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Johann Christian Bach’s Amadis de Gaule, which is receiving its first London run this week in a vivid and charming production at University College London Opera this week, suffered like many a talented work from the blinkered whims of musical fashion. History has generally focused on more pressing issues in late 18th-century Paris than the operatic rivalry between the schools of Gluck and Piccinni, but Bach’s failure to please either faction along with the minor disturbances of 1789 has, it’s believed, caused the subsequent neglect of this poignant and sensuous piece.It’s a curiously mixed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Six apocalyptic Argentine stories of revenge combine in this hugely enjoyable and extreme anthology. Producer Pedro Almodóvar must have been impressed by the perverse humour, and the lack of a handbrake as actions rocket out of control. Writer-director Damián Szifron is, though, the sole author of his characters’ nightmarish misfortunes.An aperitif involving the mysterious link between the passengers on a plane sets up a sequence of satisfying main courses, connected by characters who utterly lose it against their enemies. There’s the thuggish loan shark who stops by a roadside diner, and is Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The seasonal family reunion play is a hardy perennial. Like the Christmas tree that must take its place on the stage, it is usually spiky, dry and decorated with glittering ornaments – as in acidic jokes, acute embarrassments and ghastly revelations. Into every yuletide family a stranger must come, and all the most careful preparations must be ruined. Normally, everyone gets drunk, food gets thrown and truths get told. But if these are the rules of the genre, how does Sam Holcroft’s new drama bend them, and play with them?So, first things first, let’s do the introductions: mum is Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re looking for rare festival Handel, better a pasticcio – take that as shorthand for a cut-and-paste job mostly from previous hits – than one of those original operas in which the composer only goes through the motions (and I’ve heard a few). Call in a reasonably cutting-edge director, make sure you have a motivator of the calibre of Laurence Cummings in the pit – not difficult in this instance, since he’s the devoted force behind the London Handel Festival – and find the brightest and best of young singers.Which this sextet from the RCM International Opera School plus chorus certainly Read more ...
ellin.stein
If anyone thinks high fashion is an airy-fairy world populated by flibbertigibbets preoccupied with frills and furbelows, Frédéric Tcheng’s feature-length documentary Dior and I, a behind-the-scenes account of the race to prepare the 2012 Christian Dior couture collection in record time, should set the record straight. This is a serious business, with investors’ money and employees’ jobs riding on the quality and execution of one person’s artistic vision. In fact, in this aspect, and in the number of dedicated and highly skilled craftspeople it employs, launching a collection resembles Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, repeatedly unfunny Harvey isn’t just a study of madness, but a punishing example of it. Mary Chase’s dusty 1944 farce about a man hallucinating a 6ft 3in rabbit has slapstick trappings, but, in Lindsay Posner’s flat revival, the pace and energy of a straggling funeral procession.Chase’s placid, overlong paean to escapism – which somehow beat The Glass Menagerie to a Pulitzer – soothed her anxious wartime audience, but it’s thin pickings for a modern crowd; little has been done to instill contemporary Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the anatomy of treachery – its correlation with the uneasy relationship of the outsider to a dominant establishment – as it was an investigation of the intelligence world in which Blake played so notable a role.The final rankings of ignominy – who really was the Soviets’ “masterspy”? – may never be decided when it comes to rating which of the British Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Not unreasonably, anyone might imagine that a band might lose a bit of their usual vigour if they found themselves four albums into their career playing in a room not much bigger than a church hall, miles from home on a cold Monday evening. Not so the Subways. The Hertfordshire three-piece bounced onto the stage in the Temple room in Birmingham’s Institute and tore straight into the anthemic “We Don’t Need Money to Have a Good Time” and didn’t let up until they finally left the stage more than an hour later with sweat dripping down the walls in torrents.More impressively, they also had the Read more ...