Good Grief, Charlie Brown! at Somerset House review: A fantasyland for Peanuts fans October 26, 2018 Until March 2019 If you didn’t grow up reading Charles M Schulz’ cartoon strips, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Isn’t it just a cartoon strip about an anthropomorphised dog designed to sell pencil cases? But despite the Schulz estate’s willingness to cash in on the Snoopy IP, Peanuts is something entirely [...]
The Wild Duck at the Almeida: Ibsen’s classic play has been carved up for this deconstructivist test of endurance October 26, 2018 Until 1 December There have been a spate of productions recently that take a classic play, lift up the hood, and have a real rummage around with the nuts and bolts. There was othellomacbeth at the Lyric, which spliced together the titular plays, casting the female victims of the former as the witches in the [...]
Edward Burne-Jones at the Tate Britain review: A load of daft paintings but some first-class curation October 26, 2018 Until Feb 2019 It’s easy to be sniffy about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a bunch of bohemian Victorians obsessed with mythology and romanticism, who spent their days painting big, silly pictures of King Arthur and sleeping with each other’s wives. They claim their highly decorative works harked back to the days before art became formalist and [...]
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey review: Ubisoft’s vast Greek sandbox can’t live up to its spectacular setting October 25, 2018 Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series has been around since 2007, drawing in audiences with its finely tuned mix of stealth, parkour, and open-world adventure, and sending them on a murdery tour through history. Previous games in the series have explored time periods as diverse as the Italian Renaissance, Victorian London, and everyone’s favourite part of history: [...]
Measure For Measure: This buy-one-get-one-free Shakespeare is a sadly failed experiment October 23, 2018 Until 1 Dec It’s a strange coincidence that London last week saw the debut of two major Shakespeare productions in which two plays are staged back to back. In othellomacbeth at the Lyric Hammersmith, the Moor of Venice segued into the Scottish play, with the female victims of the first transformed into the preternaturally powerful [...]
The Inheritance at the Noel Coward Theatre: A virtuoso piece of theatre that ranks among the modern greats October 23, 2018 Until 19 Jan The Inheritance, set in New York’s gay community a generation on from the Aids epidemic, draws natural, inevitable comparisons to Angels in America. And while Matthew Lopez’s two-part, seven-hour epic is certainly worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as that superlative play, to think of it as merely a kind-of [...]
Fahrenheit 11/9 film review: Michael Moore’s latest documentary is a brash left-wing polemic but its passionate punches still land October 19, 2018 The same debate has been swirling around Michael Moore’s documentaries for 30 years. From his first film Roger & Me, about General Motors’ abandonment of his hometown Flint, Moore’s formula has remained largely unchanged: brash left-wing polemic, spiced with stunts and gags. To his fans, he’s a gifted ironist with a cause. To his critics, [...]
Wise Children at the Old Vic review: Emma Rice’s latest show is a celebration of all things theatre October 19, 2018 Emma Rice has named her new theatre company after its very first production, which is ballsy, a bit like getting your partner’s name tattooed across your chest, or calling your child Susan B Successful. Had her fever dream adaptation of Angela Carter’s last novel been a resounding flop, the name Wise Children would haunt Emma [...]
Picture this: Art-enriched offices make us more productive October 17, 2018 Some say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I like to think that art holds the key to unlocking a more productive economy. Recently, Frieze – which is one of the biggest events in the cultural calendar – saw the art world’s elite descend upon the capital. It’s a time of year when [...]
othellomacbeth at Lyric Hammersmith review: A fascinating but not entirely successful Shakespearian experiment October 12, 2018 Until 3 November Shakespeare’s major works are so familiar that theatremakers are almost expected to be bold and innovative. What audience would choose to sit through a traditional staging of Hamlet, when it could be performed in Farsi, on tricycles, in a shoe shop? In a world of flamboyant reinventions, the Lyric Hammersmith’s othellomacbeth is, [...]