London
Graham Fuller
Woodfall was the independent film production company responsible more than any other for launching and realising the British New Wave of the early 1960s. The outfit was formed in 1958 by theatre and film director Tony Richardson, playwright John Osborne, and American producer Harry Saltzman to make the film version of Osborne’s Royal Court succès de scandale Look Back in Anger. Directed by Richardson in 1959, the movie – with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure – successfully opened up the play but trimmed its Suez Crisis polemic.Woodfall followed up in the next five years with Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It’s not as immersive as New York’s The Gates, 2005, nor as magnificent as Floating Piers, 2016, in Italy’s Lake Iseo – it has also, according to Hyde Park regular Kay, “scared away the ducks,” – but superstar artist Christo’s The London Mastaba looks quite absurdly unreal and is totally free for the public.Constructed with 7,506 brightly painted oil barrels, the 600 tonne sculpture – which is shaped as and named by the bench found outside ancient Mesopotamian houses – floats like a serene 3D gif between bridge, lido and island. The Serpentine Gallery's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seems appropriate that an onstage blender features amidst Tom Scutt's sleek, streamlined set for Julie given how many times Strindberg's 1888 play has been put through the artistic magimix. Rarely, however, have the results been less illuminating than in this National Theatre rewrite by Polly Stenham that replaces Strindberg's charged three-hander with a lazy recap of themes and situations Stenham has explored to far more rending effect elsewhere. Running shy of 90 minutes, Carrie Cracknell's production nonetheless feels as if it is struggling to fill time, due in no small measure to Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment. On a stage of packing boxes and boards, over the course of just over an hour, Paterson Joseph relays and plays the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, the first British man of African origin to vote.As befits any good piece of bombast set in the 18th century, The Author opens Act One. In actual fact, the author is Paterson Joseph himself, who, having written himself, performs himself – a fictionalised, larger-than-life, theatrical simulacrum. He explains, “Politics wasn’t Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship during the war combined with the traumatic human toll meant that lone helmets and ravaged trees came to stand easily for the dead, while wrecked landscapes and crumbling buildings questioned the senselessness of such utter destruction.In one photograph the cathedral crouches like an abject creature, low and painful behind a foreground strafed with Read more ...
Liz Thomson
2018 has become a year of farewells as a mighty handful of musicians who have, in their different ways, defined popular music bow out. Among them is Joan Baez, a star on the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene when she made her unannounced debut at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She was 18 and, it’s safe to say, never dreamed she’d be filling concert halls around the world 60 years later.Her latest album, Whistle Down the Wind, which brings her extraordinary career full circle, has enjoyed glowing reviews and demand has outstripped supply. So too has the clamour for tickets for her Fare Thee Read more ...
Chris Harvey
For the past decade, Victoria Park in east London has been host to the Field Day and Lovebox festivals, both homegrown and both still growing in size and influence. Last year’s headliners included rare appearances from Aphex Twin (Field Day) and Frank Ocean (Lovebox), bringing huge crowds to this vast and beautiful Victorian lung. This year, however, both were outbid and unceremoniously booted out to search for pastures new when the American organisers of Coachella decided to set up a new London festival.All Points East, a 10-day event, spread over two successive long weekends, boasts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the veteran combo roll around one more time, five years after they last performed in the UK, many a ticket-buyer for their No Filter tour has taken the view that, as the Stones once sang, this could be the last time. They didn’t play that one, perhaps not wishing to give fate the opportunity for a free hit, but they did take us on a trip through a decent chunk of their best-loved songs, and made room for a few surprises.While the likes of “Start Me Up” and “Satisfaction” sounded strangely messy and unfocused, some of the less obvious choices paid major dividends. For instance “Under My Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mary Chapin Carpenter lives these days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she sits at the kitchen table in her farmhouse and writes songs. “I have a couple of cats and dogs and I’m the hermit who lives down the road,” she explained to a capacity audience at the Barbican as she returned alone, just her and a guitar, for a final encore of “I Have a Need for Solitude”.Her songs – wonderful narratives, intimate, minutely observed – suggest a self-contained woman in touch with both her emotions and the world. Her voice – warm, low, a hint of vibrato, very distinctive – draws you in, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels have been admired for their prose style, scathing wit and pitiless depiction of a rotting aristocracy. Benedict Cumberbatch claims that Hamlet and Melrose were the two roles he was desperate to play, and now (via his own production company SunnyMarch) his portrayal of Melrose lands on Sky Atlantic.Each of the five-part series will dramatise one of St Aubyn’s books. This opener, Bad News (actually the second book in the series) found our drug-addled, psychologically shattered and disdainfully posh anti-hero taking a trip to New York to bring back the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’m not sure what exactly this event was – orchestral concert, electronic dance music gig or multimedia extravaganza – but however you define it, I loved every mad minute. Anna Meredith (b 1978) is one of the most successful contemporary classical composers of her generation but revels in crossing genre divides, and this event delighted in smashing boundaries with breathtaking confidence.Meredith, whose starry classical CV includes pieces in the 2008 Last Night of the Proms and the recently announced First Night of the 2018 Proms, has a taste for the unusual or technically challenging, not Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...