London
Gary Naylor
You can add to “Would The Taming of the Shrew still be staged, were it not written by William Shakespeare?” the question, “Would My Fair Lady still be staged were it not for those timeless songs?” Such conjectures are but sophistry, but they do present a dilemma to a director, and it’s always interesting to see how each new production deals with the issues the book throws up.It’s 1912 and the Suffragettes are demanding the vote, the mores and fashions of a still new century are asserting themselves and the carnage of Flanders is not yet visible on the horizon. A phonetics professor, Henry Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Whoever thought of creating an exhibition comparing the brilliance of JMW Turner with that of John Constable deserves a medal – maybe Tate Britain’s senior curator, Amy Concannon? Even if you are familiar with the work, seeing their paintings hung side by side reveals surprising similarities as well as differences.The rivalry between them has not been cooked up as a marketing ploy; it was real. On show is a snippet from Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner. It’s varnishing day for the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition of 1832. Turner saunters in with a brush load of crimson paint and dabs it onto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having given us Peter Jackson’s monster documentary series The Beatles: Get Back four years ago, Disney have returned to the Moptop well to deliver this spruced-up reissue of the Beatles Anthology. This epic history of the Fab Four originally aired in six-episode form in the US and the UK in 1995, but that was expanded to eight instalments for VHS and LaserDisc releases in 1996.The USP of this latest version is a supposedly new ninth episode, a sort of post-match roundup assembled from mid-1990s interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison with interpolations from producer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re old enough to remember LPs and the lost art of reading sleeve notes (let alone writing them), this one’s for you. The titular session man is the fabled keyboard player Nicky Hopkins, whose teeming creativity and dancing digits left their indelible mark across an extraordinary swathe of records from the golden age of rock’n’roll.Among Hopkins’ most recognisable feats are his Jerry Lee Lewis-style romp through the Beatles’ "Revolution", contributions to several tracks on John Lennon’s Imagine including "Jealous Guy", rollicking ivory-tickling on George Harrison’s "Give Me Love", his Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Out of the hundreds of gigs, surprises and collaborations that make up the EFG London Jazz Festival (LJF), this review focuses on four concerts fusing jazz with world music. They are the Korean extravaganza of Dionysus Robot (pictured) at the Queen Elizabeth Hall; British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed’s melding of jazz, Middle Eastern elements and Bahraini history at Ronnie Scott’s; a late-career turn from Ethio-jazz giant Mulatu Astatke at the subterranean Here at Outernet; and the festival’s closing weekend ‘takeover’ by the Aga Khan Master Musicians at the Royal Festival Hall.Won Il, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Obsession makes for good drama. Looking back over 30 years of in-yer-face theatre in general and female monologues in particular – anything from Fleabag to Superhoe – I’m struck by the power of the individual voice to take us on journeys into the underworlds of extreme feelings. Dark places; dark thoughts; darkness visible. So Tanya-Loretta Dee’s debut play, Loop, which she performs herself, starts with a very promising premise. Described as a “surreal one-woman fever dream”, it plunges us into the mind of a young woman whose infatuation with a man rapidly becomes obsessive and self- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
To St James’s Piccadilly to hear the young pianist Misha Kaploukhii give an impressive performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, accompanied by the Greenwich Chamber Orchestra. Kaploukhii is a rising star, a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music where he recently won the Concerto Competition, and I enjoyed his reading of a favourite concerto of mine.And although he isn’t yet the finished article – as I’m sure he himself would admit – he is certainly a pianist I will be keeping my eye on. The Fourth Concerto starts with a Beethovenian novelty, the piano alone playing a chordal Read more ...
Gilbert & George, 21st Century Pictures, Hayward Gallery review - brash, bright and not so beautiful
Sarah Kent
There was a time when Gilbert & George made provocative pictures that probed the body politic for sore points that others preferred to ignore. Trawling the streets of East London, where they’ve lived since the 1960s, the artist duo chronicled the poverty and squalor of their neighbourhood in large photographic panels that feature the angry, the debased and the destitute.
Scrawled on decaying walls, the racist, sexist and homophobic slogans they recorded on their wanderings, create an atmosphere of dread – of impending and actual violence. The streets were mean and, especially as gay men Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This follow-up to 2022’s Man vs Bee finds Rowan Atkinson reprising the role of Trevor Bingley, a bumbling no-hoper who is somehow still at large in the community. He’s now separated from wife Jess (Claudie Blakley), with whom his daughter Maddy (Alanah Bloor) has been living, and dwells alone rather forlornly in a remote house in the countryside.Quite why Atkinson (in collaboration with co-writer Will Davies) seems so invested in this hapless and rather pathetic character remains a mystery, since it eschews entirely what used to be Atkinson’s main strengths (eg sardonic delivery, deadpan but Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There is, of course, a long tradition in this country of Christmas Messiah performances – but it’s not one I’ve ever previously participated in. This was the first time I’ve ever heard Messiah live, despite being quite long in the tooth – and it was terrific. I can see what I’ve been missing out on all these years. Handel really knew what he was doing – as do the Philharmonia Chorus, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and four excellent soloists, all under the leadership of Eamonn Dougan.I am no expert on the scholarship behind performance practice of Messiah, although the piece is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As reports come in of theatre audiences behaving badly, slumped drunkenly in the aisles, gorging on noisy food and wrestling with their latest smartphones, it’s refreshing to see that kind of behaviour safely onstage, and played for big laughs. Surprisingly, perhaps, this mayhem comes courtesy of Noel Coward.The redoutable Menier has found another gem to polish after Nancy Carroll’s superb revival of Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister and its exuberant The Producers: a 100th birthday edition of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. Roundly denounced for its vulgarity and loose morals at its debut, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hail the spirit of the dance. And of acting. And of driving and flying. At a time when new writing is clearly in decline, and the most successful shows are adaptations or revivals of the classics, the National Theatre returns to one of its big hits from a year ago, thrillingly recast. Unsurprisingly, it’s an adaptation of a popular book of yesteryear: Kendall Feaver’s version of Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 coming-of-age novel about three adopted sisters who go to drama school. Set in a fossil-filled crumbling house in Cromwell Road, the plot is about the absent-minded Read more ...