Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017: The same old show with the same old problems June 8, 2017 Each year the Royal Academy selects many hundreds of works of art, both amateur and professional, and piles them high and wide for its Summer Exhibition. And each year many thousands of words are written questioning whether this is Any Way to View Art. The correct answer is “No, this is No Way to View [...]
Barber Shop Chronicles review: Inua Ellams’ razor sharp play draws profound connections between disparate men June 8, 2017 Set in half a dozen barber shops across two continents, Inua Ellam’s energetic, funny, banter-driven play seeks to join the dots between the experiences and opinions of black men in geographically disparate locations. And there are are plenty of dots to join in a play that ricochets between barber’s chairs as far apart as Johannesburg [...]
887 at the Barbican review: an unmissable evening for fans of Lepage’s brilliant brand of stagecraft June 2, 2017 French-Canadian auteur Robert Lepage returns to the Barbican with a solo show suffused from first second to last with his inimitable brand of heartwarming and absurd stagecraft. It's ostensibly a memoir about Lepage growing up in a working class tenement block in Quebec, with the building brought spectacularly to life by an incredible scale model, [...]
Zero Point at the Barbican review: a visually stunning but eventually tiresome mash-up of ballet and Japanese butoh June 2, 2017 For a while, Darren Johnston’s Zero Point is mesmerising: the bodies of a dozen or so Japanese dancers twist and warp as they contort through beams of light. Projections turn them into living blocks of static. At times they dance alone in the dark, your eyes only making out vague outlines of limbs. The audience, [...]
Into the Unknown at the Barbican: an anarchic journey through the world of science fiction June 2, 2017 Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction is a brilliantly anarchic history of the genre, succeeding both as a surface-level crowd-pleaser and a rigorous collection that will give fresh perspective to even the most ardent of nerds. The curation takes inspiration from the blockbuster exhibitions hosted by the V&A – from the moment you [...]
The Treatment review: A darkly satirical take on the movie business and its players May 5, 2017 The Treatment is a work of lofty, detached genius, reminiscent of the jostling intellectualism of Martin Amis – it's dense, complex, and utterly assured of its own brilliance. On face value, it’s about how the media – in this case, the film industry – edits and rewrites “truth” until it’s at best a distant cousin [...]
Sleepless review: A buzzing cast can’t rescue this low-rent Die Hard-alike May 5, 2017 Universally recognised as the greatest film about clambering around inside air vents ever made, Die Hard has inspired a long list of distinguished imitators, each of them about crawling around inside different kinds of building. Among them was 2011 French action film Nuit Blanche, about a bent cop who gets tangled up in a [...]
Personal Shopper review: Anyone expecting a straightforward horror film will come out with buyer’s remorse March 16, 2017 Personal Shopper puts so much effort into not being your typical supernatural horror film that it almost forgets it’s a supernatural horror film. It opens with a familiar scene, a young attractive woman (Kristen Stewart in this case) wanders around a scary old house, following the sound of dripping taps and creaky door handles. But [...]
My Country: a work in progress at the National Theatre review: a play that tries to make sense of Brexit March 16, 2017 It has been said that our membership of the EU was too complicated a subject for a referendum, and this play – born out of a nationwide listening project – also makes the theatre feel inadequate when it comes to deciphering what the hell happened on 23 June. Each actor is assigned a region – [...]
Seventeen review: An exploration of the quirks of pissed up post-exam youngsters March 16, 2017 Premiered in Australia and reproduced for the Lyric Hammersmith, Matthew Whittet's tale of smalltown British teens getting sozzled after finishing their A-levels is a gentle love-letter to the clumsiness of adolescence, as portrayed by a cast of middle-aged actors. The characters should be immediately familiar, from coming-of-age fiction if not firsthand experience – a prancing [...]