1940s
Albert Herring, Opera North review - immersive and intimate funSaturday, 13 January 2024
Reviving Giles Havergal’s 2013 production from its “Festival of Britten” of that year, Opera North have an Albert Herring that’s both immersive and intimate, to quote their own publicity.Immersive because it was designed specifically for the... Read more... |
The Boy and the Heron review - elegiac swan song by the Japanese anime masterFriday, 22 December 2023
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes... Read more... |
A Forgotten Man review - Switzerland's WW2 record haunts monochrome dramaFriday, 10 November 2023
Switzerland isn’t exactly famous for parading its history during WWII. Remaining neutral from the conflict like its neighbour Liechtenstein, the Swiss benefitted from financial and armament deals with Nazi Germany, turned away Jewish refugees... Read more... |
Peter Grimes, English National Opera review - not quite the pity or the truthFriday, 22 September 2023
Britten’s biggest cornucopia of invention seems unsinkable, and no-one seeing his breakthrough 1945 opera for the first time in this revival will fail to register its forceful genius. David Alden’s expressionist nightmare of a production, though,... Read more... |
The White Factory, Marylebone Theatre review - what price dignity in hell?Thursday, 21 September 2023
This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic... Read more... |
A Haunting in Venice review - a case of Poirot by numbersMonday, 18 September 2023
You can imagine the thought processes that brought Kenneth Branagh’s latest adventure as Poirot, his third, to the big screen.“Memo to self: Find an Agatha Christie/Poirot story that hasn’t been done to death already, in fact isn’t well known at all... Read more... |
World on Fire, Series 2, BBC One - return of Peter Bowker's panoramic view of World War TwoTuesday, 18 July 2023
Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this... Read more... |
Osborne, BBC Philharmonic, Glassberg, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - energy and virtuosityMonday, 19 June 2023
The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.There was orchestral virtuosity in the form of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, pianistic virtuosity in the shape... Read more... |
A different angle on the Anne Frank story in 'A Small Light'Wednesday, 03 May 2023
The Diary of Anne Frank became a Broadway play and has formed the basis of a lengthy catalogue of films and TV series, but the name of Miep Gies is rather less well-known. Yet without Gies the Anne Frank story might never have reached the wider... Read more... |
The Good Person of Szechwan, Lyric Hammersmith review - wild ride in hyperreality slides byMonday, 24 April 2023
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London... Read more... |
Betty Blue Eyes, Union Theatre review - musical revival pigs out on nostalgiaFriday, 07 April 2023
People can’t find the food they want in the shops. Nobody has enough money. Public services are under pressure. And there’s a big Royal occasion to take our minds off things.England 2023? Nah, England 1947, as rationing applies to meat and fruit... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Queen of SpadesTuesday, 14 February 2023
If post-war baroque cinema had been a school or movement rather than a style, its male icon would have been Anton Walbrook. Before Max Ophüls cast the suavely menacing Austrian actor as the master of ceremonies in La Ronde (1950) and as King Ludwig... Read more... |
