London
David Nice
Behind this poignant, simple-seeming hour of music for soprano and lute(s) lay a spider-web of connections between outsiders in the City: rebels, prisoners, immigrants, Black Londoners. Elizabeth Kenny’s programme note wove it all together brilliantly; we could have heard even more of her talking during the concert. Most of us could have done with seeing more than 15 minutes of the wonderful Nardus Williams, too.On the way to the Tower I’d been reading the chapter in Antonio Pappano’s marvellous autobiography where he writes about coaching young artists and declares, “I am merciless that the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Unless you were around when The Beatles toured America in the mid-1960s, it’s doubtful you've heard anything like this. In 40 years of extensive gig-going, I have not. Taylor Swift has just performed “Champagne Problems” at the piano (pictured below), a song from Evermore, the second of her indie-folk flavoured COVID-era albums. There’s a rising feminine roar, Wembley Stadium on its feet, the noise grows and grows, an earthquake cacophony of women and girls screaming, so many that, combined with tens of thousands of hands clapping, it fills the head like cosmic hum. It surely cannot grow Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.Faith Omole, whose first and as yet unperformed play, Kaleidoscope, won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award last year, arrives with bang with My Father’s Fable. Since Omole is also an actor, and has appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, We Are Lady Parts, it’s no surprise that her debut is both a comedy and an acute look at the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
How can it be part of God’s plan to allow so much pain and suffering in the world, asks Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) of a young Oxford don, CS Lewis (Matthew Goode). His daughter Sophie died of the Spanish flu, his grandson, aged only five, of TB, he tells Lewis furiously. To those who believe in religion, his advice is: “Grow up.”“If pain is His megaphone, pleasure is His whisper,” says Lewis enigmatically. “Man’s suffering is the fault of man.” Freud takes another swig of whisky laced with morphine for the pain from his cancer of the jaw. In Nazism, he says, he recognised the face of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Powell and Pressburger’s least remembered Forties film is shrouded in Blitz darkness, deepening in the warped flat where alcoholic weapons expert Sammy (David Farrar) stares at a whisky bottle as if it’s a bomb. Following the vivid English fantasias of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), The Small Back Room turned to haunted psychological and social realism, veined with tension, humour and bleak beauty.Based on Nigel Balchin’s wartime bestseller, it is set during spring 1943’s mini-Blitz, as a new sort of booby-trapped bomb needs defusing. Sammy Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You have to tiptoe around the edge of the set just to take your seat in the Park’s studio space for Lidless Theatre’s Miss Julie. There’s a plain wooden table, a few utensils on it, wooden chairs and a small cabinet – not much, but, we’re smack inside this 19th century country house kitchen, uncomfortably close to discomfiting passions. It may be the longest day outside, but we're in a dark, claustrophobic space in more senses than one.The cook, Christine, hair tied back ferociously, is cooking up poison to effect an abortion for the house dog, but there are sounds of revelry in the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The concert offering at St-Martin-in-the-Fields has transformed in recent years, under Director of Music Andrew Earis. There is still a decent amount of “Four Season by Candlelight” but this tourist-bait now sits alongside some brilliant programming featuring choirs like Tenebrae, Ex Cathedra and the Monteverdi Choir.And a fairly recent innovation has been the creation of St Martin’s Voices, a chamber ensemble of young professional singers and who gave this hour-long recital of music about biblical beginnings. The ten-strong choir, under Earis’s avuncular guidance, sang beautifully in some Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Welcome to motherhood, bitch!” By the time a character delivers this reality check, there have been plenty of laughs, and some much more awkward moments, in Richard Molloy’s The Harmony Test, which premieres in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio space.As directed by the venue’s Associate Director Alice Hamilton, this promises to be an evening of taboo- as well as rib-tickling comedy, and certainly something a bit more serious: the play’s title comes from the DNA-based blood screening test for the most common chromosomal abnormalities, including Down’s syndrome.Set in the kitchen of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When does creativity become mannered? When it’s based on repetition, and repetition without development. About halfway through star director Katie Mitchell’s staging of Margaret Perry’s adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets – despite the casting of the always watchable Ben Whishaw – I had the horrible feeling that this 80-minute show was on repeat. Moody words, repeat, moody visuals, repeat, moody mood, repeat, repeat, repeat.Which is very sad because Bluets is the first offering from Royal Court’s new artistic director David Byrne, hyped up as, in his words, “the path of maximum adventure”. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Now You See Us could be the most important exhibition you’ll ever see. Spanning 400 hundred years, this overview of women artists in Britain destroys the myth that female talent is an exotic anomaly.We were led to believe there’d been no great women artists until, searching the archives, female art historians were able to reveal the genius of Artemisia Gentileschi whose Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638-1639 (pictured below right) kicks off this brilliant survey.How I wish I’d known of this powerful painting when I was a student at the Slade! It Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Kudos to the Wigmore Hall for continuing to make efforts to diversify its roster of performers and repertoire. Last year I reviewed the Kaleidoscope Collective, and noted how the different profile of their players attracted a younger and less universally white audience to the hall, and the same happened again last night when the American Sphinx Organization were given the stage. Make no mistake, the Wigmore Hall remains a bastion of Beethoven and a haven for Haydn, but an effort is being made and that should be noted and applauded.Sphinx is a Michigan-based, multi-faceted “social justice Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Like his baggy white suit, pitched somewhere between Liberace and Colonel Sanders, Pavel Kolesnikov’s playing was spotless at the Wigmore Hall last night. It comprised two very different halves, the first a miscellany of apparently unrelated pieces, the second devoted to a single set of pieces by a single composer. Both parts worked wonderfully, and made a very satisfying whole, the overlong Philip Glass encore the only misjudgement of the evening.The American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) assembled disparate everyday objects in a glass-fronted box in his work Celestial Navigation, which Read more ...