Canada
Tom Birchenough
French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan leaves the time and place of It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) deliberately unclear: “Somewhere, a while ago already” is the only clue offered by its opening titles. An adaptation of the 1990 play by the French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, its unspoken subject is AIDS (from which Lagarce himself died in 1995), with its story of a lead character, Louis, returning to his family after a long absence to reveal that he is dying. It’s not only the absence of mobile phones or email that reveals we’re in the past: clearly, it’s a time when Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams, let's face it, was the reason many of us came to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Their performances and recordings as dedicatees of his labyrinthine First String Quartet and Absolute Jest, in which the four players function as soloist with orchestra, led to high hopes for the UK premiere of a second quartet. As it turned out, the yield was smaller beer than expected. What really hit home, for those of us who don't spend as much time as we should with the first and most varied quartet canon in the literature, was an early Haydn masterpiece.Not the curtainraiser, Op. 20 No. 1 Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cities, the fastest growing habitats in the history of the world, provided the subject for the sixth and final programme in Planet Earth II, the series that came a decade after the original Planet Earth programmes set new standards for television coverage of wildlife and nature.The follow-up confirmed that they are still being set, even though we have become accustomed to intrepid cameramen getting close to subjects never seen before, and tight narrative editing that gives us both visible and verbal comprehensible sequences, all anchored by the comforting familiarity of David Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The indefatigable Victorian spinster Marianne North (1830-1890) is the most interesting artist you've never heard of. The upper-middle-class Ms North thought marriage a terrible experiment, and with her single state allowing her control of her fortune, she took to cultural and physical independence. Her rich landowner father, Frederick, MP for Hastings, knew everyone who was everyone, including Sir William Hooker, director of Kew. It was a visit to the gardens that turned his daughter’s eyes to the world of plants. She was 25 and had found her vocation. Marianne deserted the drawing room Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lead singer and frontman Ed Robertson launches into a BNL-in-London rap, extolling the Roundhouse, “where they used to turn trains”, as well as the glories of Camden Market’s liquid-nitrogen ice-cream bar. The crowd, with its distinctly Cold Feet demographic, goes wild for the Ladies – if you’re not familiar with them, there are no women in this Canadian band – and their new album, Silverball, named in honour of Robertson’s pinball obsession, has been hailed as a buoyant return to form.The BNLs, who've been going for 27 years, are known for their melodic tunes and quirky, caustic lyrics, Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Montréal International Jazz Festival's 37th edition presented its accustomed surfeit of gigs, covering the complete range from concert hall spectaculars to small club sessions. A large part of this, the globe's biggest jazzfest, is the massive-scale freebie shows on various outdoor stages. The festival completely takes over Montréal's downtown centre, which just happens to be this French-speaking city’s cultural area. These streets and plazas are already full of venues, from theatres to clubs, with a wide range of audience capacities to suit both the mainstream and the maverick.As if the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Music is so often about context, some music more than others. Such is the case with the latest album – the third – from Canadian electronic bolshies MSTRKRFT. It’s wilfully obnoxious, caustic stuff, a battering techno-based assault that cares not a jot for the classy deep house smoothness Disclosure et al have brought to dance music, nor, for that matter, the energized Ritalin frolicking of EDM. It’s closer in tone to The Prodigy’s battering last album, although on OPERATOR MSTRKRFT care even less about pop, polish and funk. So, in terms of context, at 3am, out-of-your-skull at a festival, it Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Canada has been Uncle Sam’s body-double in countless drama productions. Shooting on location is easier and cheaper north of the border. One twinkly city skyline looks very much like another. 19-2 is set in and around car number two as it patrols the clean streets of the 19th district of Montreal. And yes, from the very first moments – “Maybe we should call for back-up?” – it feels like we’ve been here before.The speaker, poor guy, is soon lying on the floor with blood pooling round his head. Nick Barron (Adrian Holmes channelling Idris Elba) takes exception to his new partner Ben Chartier ( Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.But it started from a very specific and personal experience. In Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. In the song’s pay off, Kom’s protagonist declares “when the going gets tough, I give up.”Canada’s Burning Hell don’t Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cape is not an everyday item of clothing. Worn by magicians, it brings an air of the extraordinary. It billows in the path of superheroes. The cloak of invisibility confirms the cape’s singularity. Basia Bulat was first seen in a sparkly gold cape on the sleeve of her recent Good Advice album and last night it was integral to the renewed vigour of her music and stage persona. Moved to say how hard it was play guitar with its folds fluttering, she nonetheless did not take the easy path and discard it.None of this is to say that Bulat would lack anything without the cape, but it is Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Poor Alice. She’s alone all day, with a six-month baby boy, while her husband Ben – a doctor – is out at work. Working all hours. She sleeps at odd times of the day, and at first seems to have just suffered some kind of catastrophic loss. Ben seems to be working too much, so the couple never see each other. I say “seems” because it is very soon apparent that things are really not what they seem in Québecoise actress and playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s brilliant 2008 play about one woman’s sense of self, and her conflicting emotions about motherhood. Oh, poor Alice.After a brief Read more ...