Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Zum Roten Igel – the “Red Hedgehog Tavern” – was a concert venue with pub attached in 19th century Vienna, frequented by the like of Schubert and Brahms. It is also the name of an ensemble committed to exploring the connections between these “classical” composers and the Volkisch music that would have been heard in the next-door room. In this case it means re-scoring Schubert’s String Quintet and garlanding it with wild interstitial dance jams, recreating an imaginary historical mash-up.It is a Marmite project, with a full Purcell Room seeing several people leave during proceedings 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 ...
Robert Beale
You have to admire Samantha Fernando’s concept of the “To Do” list. Hers has one item: “Do Less”. That’s the subtitle of one section of the new work, Wintering, for which she wrote both words and music.It was heard for the first time in the North of England last night in a concert by four voices of the Marian Consort and a Manchester Collective string quartet (the premiere was at the Wigmore Hall last week).Oddly enough, there’s nothing about winter in the evocation of a guided meditation, with a soprano voice speaking the random thoughts actually going on in the head of a participant, which Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not easy witnessing your own death. But that's the situation in which we find the lyricist Lorenz Hart at the start of Blue Moon, Richard Linklater's startling film about a creative maverick who is well aware that his own shining star is on the wane. Boasting longtime Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke in his finest screen performance since this same director's Boyhood, the movie casts an unsparing glance at a great talent run amok even as it offers Hawke a renewed shot at the Oscar that has so far eluded him. (Hawke's last nomination, in fact, was for Boyhood 11 years ago.) Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
According to legend, Glasgow can be a tough place for a support band a crowd do not warm to. Therefore brotherly duo Faux Real were perhaps taking a risk when they elected to bound into the audience during the first number in their Wet Leg support slot. It was greeted with mostly puzzlement from early attendees, but when they repeated the trick 30 minutes later - finding space and sprinting towards each other before jumping into the air with high kicks - the reaction was much more enthusiastic. The pair had mixed up synth-heavy pop of varying quality with relentless, hard working 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 ...
Veronica Lee
It’s good to have the old gang back together in An Evening With The Fast Show, more than 30 years since The Fast Show debuted on the BBC. And if many in the audience attending with parents, or even grandparents, weren’t yet born during the sketch show’s run from 1994 to 1997, they are testament to its longevity – and how good catchphrases can live for ever.Catchphrases were the show’s stock in trade, along with memorable characters, fast edits and lots of sketches in each episode. Paul Whitehouse, co-creator of The Fast Show, explains self-deprecatingly the high sketch count was so that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the National Theatre has specialised in trilogies. End is the final play in both playwright David Eldridge’s outstanding trilogy and in this venue’s former director Rufus Norris’s Dorfman programme. Like Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England trilogy, Eldridge’s cycle – Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022) – says as much about the state of the nation as it does about the personal lives of its characters. Starring Saskia Reeves (familiar from Slow Horses) and Clive Owen, this two-hander explores the emotional landscape of a couple making plays for a final parting Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The ballet world will soon run out of titles signifying a renaissance. After ENB’s recent Re:evolution comes London City Ballet’s Rebirth, following its debut programme last year called Resurgence. In LCB’s case, the term is quite literal.The company resurfaced, after a nearly 30-year hiatus, under the directorship of Christopher Marney, whose formula for the new-look group is a winning one. Bring together fine dancers from all corners of the globe and send them out to perform in smaller venues, where they can explore rich, sometimes under-explored seams in the modern ballet repertoire. Add Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This week, UK electronica originals Cabaret Voltaire hit Birmingham on their penultimate tour before they finally put their synthesizers into storage and call it quits this time next year. For a band that have been going (on and off) since 1973, however, they were seriously on fire – with no suggestion that they should be considering permanent retirement any time soon.Richard H Kirk may have passed away in 2021, but Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, who had both left the fold more than 30 years ago, put on a fine show and paid tribute to their fallen comrade early in the proceedings. Read more ...
Claudia Bull
Strictly speaking, an epistolary novel tells more than one story. You could say, for example, that Dracula is “about” a collection of letters and diary entries and in the same vein, that Claire-Louise Bennett’s new book is “about” a woman’s writing. Really, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye follows the end of a single relationship, but the framing – a journal of sorts, containing various letters and emails – allows Bennett to chart a woman’s shifting, lifelong attitudes to intimacy.Bennett’s narrator begins by recalling her time with Xavier, a man whom she loved for many years. In fact, she still loves him, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tim Key, besuited and wearing a baseball cap, stands on stage as the audience files in, smiling sweetly as people take their seats. He’s on stage but, in keeping with many of the acting roles that non-comedy fans may know him from – Alan Partridge’s Side Kick Simon and the lazy office manager Ken in The Paper, to mention just two – he’s unobtrusive. Many don’t clock his presence at all.
But then – show time! – the baseball cap’s flung off, he’s stamping his foot and demanding our attention. We give it easily for the next 70 minutes of Loganberry, in which Key - more a storyteller than Read more ...