A Four Star review from the Guardian for Steve Tilston‘s album ‘The Reckoning‘ This article titled “Steve Tilston: The Reckoning – review” was written by Robin Denselow, for The Guardian on Thursday 21st July 2011 21.31 UTCIn the Pennine hills in Yorkshire there lives a singer-songwriter and guitarist who has never achieved the public attention he deserves, but has always been praised by fellow musicians. Steve Tilston writes thoughtful, highly personal songs and is one of the finest instrumentalists on the folk scene, with a style that echoes the elaborate, rhythmic “folk baroque” guitar work of Bert Jansch and Davy Graham. He writes about anything that takes his interest, and the songs here range from unashamedly lyrical pieces about the countryside to others concerned with memory, nuclear waste, or a cheering story from the Spanish civil war, given a flamenco edge. There’s even a thoughtful meditation on the existence of God, Doubting Thomas, given a slinky, bluesy backing, and an update of the traditional Nottamun Town, now treated as a contemporary political nightmare. There’s occasional backing from accordion, harmonica and even a string section, but the album is dominated by Tilston’s exquisite guitar work, and features two spirited solo instrumental tracks, including a suitably virtuosic tribute to Graham.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSteve Tilston: The Reckoning – reviewRelated posts:The Unthanks: Last – reviewRadiohead: The King of Limbs – reviewGolden rower Tom James forces his way back into Olympic reckoning
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Steve Tilston: The Reckoning – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/22/steve-tilston-the-reckoning-%E2%80%93-review
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July 22 2011, 5:46am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/why-marx-was-right-by-terry-eagleton-%E2%80%93-review
Is Marx more diminished than enhanced by Terry Eagleton’s defence of him?This article titled “Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review” was written by Tristram Hunt, for The Observer on Sunday 29th May 2011 01.30 UTCAs the IMF dishes out its medicine in Lisbon, Dublin and Athens, and the limitations of neo-liberalism become more apparent, the moment is surely right for a compelling account of Karl Marx’s relevance to the modern world. And in campus conferences, continuing sales of Das Kapital, and even the words of Pope Benedict XVI (moved to praise Marx’s “great analytical skill”), there is a growing appreciation for Marx’s predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism, and the instability of international finance. As the Times put in the middle of the 2008 crash: “He’s back!”But Marx also remains the target of any number of lazy slurs. The easiest way to kill off debate about Marxism is to jump straight to the Stalin show-trials, Soviet gulags, and Khmer Rouge Year Zero. The philosophical beliefs of a mid-19th-century denizen of the British Museum are all too quickly elided with the most terrible atrocities of the 20th century as an all-purpose intellectual get-out card.So Terry Eagleton – literary critic, liberal-baiter, Marxist man of letters – has set himself the task of explaining why Marx was right. “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s works are mistaken?” he begins. His plan is to take on “10 of the most standard criticisms of Marx and try to refute them one by one”. He does so, he believes, at a time when capitalism is uniquely in crisis: “the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon it is”. Or as Friedrich Engels used to put it: “This time there’ll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before… all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.”But for any admirer of Eagleton or Marx, the book is a disappointment. There is none of the logical precision, winning prose or intellectual ambition displayed most recently in Eagleton’s Yale lectures on faith. Part of the problem is the structure. This is a work of intellectual rebuttal, as chapter by chapter Eagleton takes on a century of misreading Marx. All of which means he is fighting on an enemy territory of dreary objections. For example, there’s a long attempt to justify the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the Leninist aftermath, as well as the East German system of childcare – not something, I imagine, Marx and Engels themselves would have bothered with.The consequence of such deviations is that there is little sense of the anger, brio and bravado of Marx and Engels; none of the humour, irony and creativity so central to the Marxian heritage. Instead, this book reads like a rapidly crammed set of notes for an American midwest college course. There’s an array of lecture-hall style jokes and fairly worthless hyperbole. In no credible sense do one in three children in Britain today “live below the breadline”.Thankfully, amid the banalities, there lurk some wonderful passages. Eagleton is right to stress the centrality of democracy to Marxian communism, as well as explain so successfully the nature of free will within Marx and Engels’s account of history. This is all very much the humanist, Paris Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.Eagleton also stresses the modernity of Marx’s thinking and how, for example, he saw the nature of social class shifting with the progress of capitalism. “As long ago as the mid-19th century, he is to be found writing of the ‘constantly growing number of the middle-classes’ … men and women ‘situated midway between the workers on the one side and the capitalists on the other.’” This is a long way from the hackneyed dichotomy of proletarian and bourgeois.There is also a touch of the old Eagleton when he deploys Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to explore the interaction of culture and materialism. When it comes to Jude Fawley, we need to appreciate that “Oxford University is the ‘superstructure’ to Jericho’s ‘base’.”However, Eagleton’s touch is less sure when it comes to the human condition under communism. In trying to rebut claims of utopianism, he goes too far in suggesting that “Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection” and “envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist”. Engels, though, was clear that the ascent from socialism to communism entailed a metaphysical change. Under the leadership of the proletariat, humanity achieves true freedom liberated from its animal instincts: “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”Here was the quasi-theological endpoint of Marxism and it would have been more rewarding if Eagleton, such an intriguing catholic thinker, had expanded upon the Judaeo-Christian assumptions underpinning much of Marx’s heaven on earth. But perhaps that was too close to the bone.In the end, this is another worthy volume in the rarely scintillating Marx-Engels interpretative canon. Useful for undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame, but not for anyone else interested in the drama, insights, and majesty of Marxism. Marx might well have been right about an awful lot, but sadly Eagleton fails to make you care very much. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhy Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – reviewRelated posts:Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of powerThe Wizard of Oz – reviewThe latest word on globalisation
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May 29 2011, 11:40am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Cannes film festival review: Midnight in Paris
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/13/cannes-film-festival-review-midnight-in-paris
Cannes Film Festival opens with a Woody Allen love letter to Paris, the French capital, a shallow examination of nostalgia with endearing performances from Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard
This article titled “Cannes film festival review: Midnight in Paris” was written by Peter Bradshaw, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 11th May 2011 12.45 UTC From this movie’s opening postcard-view montage of Paris — familiar in a number of ways — it’s clear the French capital is to be added to the list of cities that Woody Allen adores, and idolises all out of proportion. His new movie was an amiable amuse-bouche to begin the Cannes festival feast: sporadically entertaining, light, shallow, self-plagiarising. It’s a romantic fantasy adventure to be compared with the vastly superior ideas of his comparative youth, such as the 1985 movie The Purple Rose Of Cairo, in which it was possible to step through the silver screen, or his 1977 short story The Kugelmass Episode, in which it was possible to enter the world of Madame Bovary. And it’s notable for a cameo from Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, playing a deadpan, tolerant museum guide: though it’s a measure of how muted Woody Allen movies are now that she is not obviously outclassed by everyone else. The camera adds 10 pounds, they say, but this rule does not apply to the fashionably thin Carla Bruni. I wonder how Carla’s sister Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi would have played the part. Once again, Allen finds himself in a luxury-tourist European destination, whose interiors he somehow manages to bathe in a soft golden-yellowy glow, like that which might suffuse the lobby of a five-star hotel. As so often, the film features a lead character who should really be played by the director as a younger man, though perhaps Allen intends his movie’s main theme — the fallacy of nostalgia — to be targeted at those critics who worry that his films aren’t any good any more. Owen Wilson is Gil, a wealthy Hollywood scriptwriting hack who still yearns to write a great literary novel; a visit to Paris with his testy fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her grouchy parents triggers a mid-career crisis. Irritated by the banality of contemporary culture, and electrified by his own idealised view of bygone bohemian Paris, Gil takes a midnight stroll, and gets picked up by mysterious revellers in a vintage automobile. He finds himself whisked back in time, hanging out with F Scott Fitzgerald (a nice performance from Britain’s Tom Hiddleston) not to mention Dalí, Hemingway, Picasso, Buñuel, TS Eliot and many, many more. These great figures from the past — Gil doesn’t meet any non-legends in his time-travel — cause him to fluster and squeak with excitement, though Wilson, fundamentally laid-back as ever, doesn’t give it the comedy-astonishment that Woody himself would undoubtedly have delivered. Gil’s ingenuous enthusiasm entrances Picasso’s beautiful mistress Adriana, played with conviction and finesse by Marion Cotillard: they fall in love, but it appears that Adriana is just as discontented with her time period as Gil is with his. It could be that Allen is satirising not just necrophiliac pining for the past but a kind of “history tourism” and “culture tourism” to go with the literal tourism described in the movie. Or it could just be that Allen is hopelessly in thrall to precisely this glib tourist view of Europe. Well, he’s brought back a negligible, pleasant piece of work from his city break. The view of Owen Wilson strolling, incidentally, shows a distinctive loping gait: like Robert Mitchum or John Wayne, he might have one of the most notable walks in Hollywood.
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Related posts:Arts venues band together to fund new festival of finest radical theatre South of Pigalle Paris Breaks Competition Why is Samaritaine in Paris still closed?
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May 13 2011, 3:35am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
TV review: Jamie’s Dream School
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/13/tv-review-jamies-dream-school-2
Some sort of review of the final episode of jamies dream school which aired tonight.
This article titled “TV review: Jamie’s Dream School” was written by Sam Wollaston, for The Guardian on Wednesday 13th April 2011 21.00 UTC Last week on Jamie’s Dream School, (Channel 4) Angelique said: “You’re a prick, mate” to Alastair Campbell. To be honest I was worried about Angelique at the start, so it’s nice to see her growing in confidence and getting the hang of things, as well as showing she’s a shrewd judge of character . . . Oh, you have got to be having a laugh – he’s only gone and banned her from the Downing Street trip. “I think calling a teacher a ‘fucking prick’ as you storm out of the class is not really an acceptable way to behave,” he says, sanctimoniously. Well, a couple of points there, Alastair. You’re not really a teacher – you’re a spin doctor. You’ve spent your life being rude to people, so maybe you should learn to take a bit too. Also, Angelique didn’t say “fucking prick”. You added the F-word, so go and wash your filthy mouth out. And one more thing: she did kind of have a point. But he’s not going to back down, because that would show weakness. It’s not all bad news, though, because Angelique’s going to get him. “Watch how I behave today in his lesson,” she says. “He thought last week was bad; he’s going to cry today.” Fight, fight, fight . . . Oh, the head intervenes, persuades Alastair to perform a spectacular U-turn and let Angelique go, but she does have to behave. So we don’t get to see her make Alastair Campbell cry. Boo! But then she is going to Downing street, so maybe she’ll make David Cameron cry. Or at least call him a prick. Yay! To be fair to Campbell (why are those words so hard?), he is one of Jamie’s better recruits. Not only are his classes good, but he also has a nice rapport with the kids, engages with them and clearly likes them too. Plus he realises that Jamie’s Dream School is much more dream than school and has little bearing on what does or can happen in a classroom. And that when it’s over it’ll be – to quote the great words of another member of the Dream School staffroom – back to life, back to reality. So off they all go to Downing Street and sit round the cabinet table. Oh, please let them run the country, just for one day – I like Henry’s idea of a skunk tax instead of the public sector cuts. He’s done the maths too – says it’ll bring in £1.6bn a year, and that’s just from him. In bounces the PM. “Hi, everyone, how you doing, hi Jourdelle, hi there,” he says. Not many people called Jourdelle at King Henry VI’s Dream School, his alma mater, I shouldn’t imagine. Jourdelle wants Cameron to guess how many GCSEs they’ve got between them. “I don’t know,” says Dave. “And I’m not going to guess, I don’t want to . . . er . . .” Oh, go on Dave, say something embarrassing, like “disrespect you”. But he saves himself just in time, gets Jourdelle to tell him. Damn. Harlem wants to ask something. “Harlem, take it away,” says Dave, relaxing into semi-youth-speak. Take it away, eurgh. But it’s just a bit cringey, rather than proper embarrassing. And they’re way too easy on him. Nothing about how can he possibly understand when he’s from where he is, or about whether he knows about skunk from back in the days with the Bullingham bredrin. Henry doesn’t even have a pop at Sam Cam (though to be fair to Henry, if she’d made an appearance he most probably would’ve done). The real disappointment is Angelique, who’s taking this good behaviour thing way too far. She doesn’t storm out, or make Dave cry, or even call him a prick. Angelique! What’s going on? You’ve let Jamie’s Dream School down, you’ve let your classmates down, you’ve definitely let yourself down, but most of all you’ve let the whole bloody country down. To be fair to Angelique (where’s all the magnanimity coming from today?) she does redeem herself outside No 10, showing that even if she’s not calling anyone a prick today, she can at least still recognise one. “Oh my God, it’s George Osborne,” she says. But then Henry goes and trumps her by getting the chancellor to unwittingly sign his legalise-skunk petition. Today – the last day – was Henry’s day; excellent work, well done.
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April 13 2011, 4:22pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Smash! – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/02/smash-%E2%80%93-review
A Theatre review of Smash! at the Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre, London
This article titled “Smash! – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 20.30 UTC “Is there anything that matters less than a musical?” a character irreverently asks in this revival of the late Jack Rosenthal’s 1981 play. It’s not a sentiment one ever expected to hear on the stage of the Menier. But it sums up perfectly the comic anguish at the heart of Rosenthal’s biliously funny piece: a backstage story based on his own nerve-wracking experience of seeing his TV play, Bar Mitzvah Boy, turned into a musical floperoo. The musical, as everyone tells you, is a collaborative form: what Rosenthal captures is the high emotional cost of bringing together so many competing creative egos. In this instance, there is an added cultural clash: a Broadway composer and director find themselves yoked to a British lyricist and librettist under the shaky supervision of an American-Austrian producer. Things look bad from the initial New York encounter, when the veteran composer dismisses the book and its “cardboard, asshole characters”. Matters get even worse in the course of London rehearsals and a Manchester try-out after which the director demands new sets, costumes and rewrites of the rewrites. Yet, in the strange way of showbiz, everyone still believes miracles can be achieved by the time of the West End opening. I wish Rosenthal had defined more clearly the show on which they’re working: we learn its title, Whatever Happened to Tomorrow, and not much else. And, although Rosenthal forgiveably changed the book-writer’s gender to avoid a Twelve Angry Men feeling, it slightly weakens the enterprise’s testosterone-fuelled absurdity. But what he captures perfectly are the shifting loyalties of the team, the oscillations between insane optimism and despair, and the notion that a musical is like some giant, uncontrollable machine with which everyone feels obliged to tinker. As the director claims, in the play’s best single line: “In a musical nothing’s all right until it’s too late to be changed.” Tamara Harvey’s production creates exactly the right sense that everyone, while working for the good of the show, is protecting their own territory. Richard Schiff, of The West Wing fame, makes the composer a figure of wondrously acerbic vanity who prefaces every remark by reminding everyone of his 28 Broadway scores. Cameron Blakely’s director is all elegantly attired bombast masking profound insecurity. And Natalie Walter plausibly makes the writer, clearly representing Rosenthal himself, the still, small voice of sanity in this creative madhouse. But the funniest performance comes from Tom Conti as the producer who seeks to exude avuncular reassurance while secretly aware that the show is under-capitalised. What Rosenthal’s delightful play really proves, however, is that musicals operate in a special way: in conjuring up a world of fantasy, they leave their creators trapped in their own private bubble of preposterous self-delusion.
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April 2 2011, 11:37am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-little-voice-%E2%80%93-review
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – a theatre review
This article titled “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice – review” was written by Alfred Hickling, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 20.45 UTC Jim Cartwright’s 1992 comedy has matured into an enjoyable period piece – just how much so becomes apparent in the first scene when Mari, a noisy northern housewife, is beside herself with excitement over the acquisition of a new phone. It takes two engineers to install it and plug it into the wall. It’s a minor miracle that the play has had any kind of continued production history at all, having specifically been tailored to expose Jane Horrocks’s uncanny ability to impersonate the great popular divas from Gracie Fields to Judy Garland. Yet it was successfully revived in the West End with X-Factor contestant Diana Vickers; and here it is the remarkable Rebecca Hutchinson who proves capable of switching from Bassey to Piaf and back again in a single breath. Cartwright’s drama has an archetypal quality – it’s essentially the Tale of the Ugly Duckling in reverse – and might be said to have invented its own genre of glittery northern realism. Director Amy Leach points out that it’s hard to conceive of Shameless or The Royle Family without it; though Cartwright’s language remains one of a kind. When Eithne Browne’s Mari rhapsodises over a “real pronto lip-lapping snog”, it’s hard not to picture exactly what she means. The downside of such loquacity is that it leaves little room for subtext. It’s a good job Hutchinson’s Little Voice and Sue McCormick’s amiable, roly-poly Sadie are practically mute or else the play would go on all night. Leach’s production is long enough, but the young, Bolton-born director has had an impressive run at the Dukes, suggesting that hers is another significant little voice on the rise.
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April 1 2011, 5:48pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The weekend’s TV: The Killing
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/the-weekends-tv-the-killing
No spoilers, just a pice to say that The Killing on BBC 4 has been the best thing on TV for ages.
This article titled “The weekend’s TV: The Killing” was written by Sam Wollaston, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 23.15 UTC Non-spoiler alert: there are no spoilers in what follows. If you’ve yet to see the end of The Killing, or any of it and you plan to, it’s still fine to read on. Honest. I need to explain something about the mechanics of this column. Unless there’s some massive live TV event on Saturday I file copy for Monday’s edition, the weekend’s television, on a Friday. The early deadlines are to allow people who work on the print edition, the newspaper, to have some kind of a weekend. I don’t know whether they deserve one, but that’s another matter. The point is, I’m not going to discuss who it was whodunnit in The Killing (BBC4, Saturday), the conclusion of which was obviously the Big Thing this weekend. It wouldn’t be fair on my editors and subeditors. For those of them (loads, this is prime Guardian territory) who have been watching, it would totally spoil their weekend. For the others, it would spoil the box set which I will be urging them to get hold of as soon as it comes out. If you do want to discuss how Pernille could possibly have slaughtered her own daughter (oops . . . only kidding, hahaha), then you need to go to Vicky Frost’s excellent series blog. Which you almost certainly have done already – more than 1,200 posts after the last one. And there are half a million viewers of the show – not bad for an obscure foreign-language drama on BBC4 that requires serious commitment. And after all that hype, who’s talking about Boardwalk Empire? I will say, however, that the end of The Killing has left a frightening gaping void in my life. What is there to think about now, to lie awake worrying about at night? (I had a nice little theory about Nordic neo-Nazism, Mayor Bremer, and the bid for the 1984 Winter Olympics on the go). In my house, The Killing – or Forbrydelsen, as we’ve come to call it, pretentiously – has crept up and engulfed us like the gloom of an unlit Copenhagen cellar in November. Not only has it been pretty much the only topic of conversation for the past 10 weeks, but we’ve also begun speaking in Danish. Pass the salt, tak; shall we get a hund? We’ll call out “Troels!” in the voice of Rie Skovgaard for no reason at all, often in our sleep. And then think of excuses to say it again. Who are ugly and live under bridges? “Troels!” How does the fisherman catch mackerel behind his boat? “Troels!” What does a bobby on the beat do? He pa-”Troels!” Shut up! I’ve also asked my girlfriend to dress up in a loose-knit white Scando sweater and walk about in the dark with a torch, saying nothing, stony faced, giving nothing away . . . anyway, sorry, perhaps you don’t need to know about that. The reason for the obsession is simple: The Killing is brilliant, the best thing on television for yonks. It started with the brutal murder of a teenager, then dragged us along for 20 hours, mainly in the dark (sometimes with a torch, sometimes without), up side paths and cul-de-sacs, doubling back on itself until it eventually reached its conclusion, leaving us exhausted. And emotionally drained too, because The Killing isn’t just a thrilling whodunnit, it’s a very human story that never lets you forget there’s a tragic death at its heart. It has some of the most interesting and real characters on television, who develop and react to the drama as it unfolds. I’m talking about Pernille and Theis Birk Larsen, Hartmann (“Troels!”), Bremer, Meyer. And Sarah Lund, of course, possibly the most single-minded detective in TV history, but also seriously fallible and therefore believable, and now officially the coolest woman in the world. A mesmerising performance by Sofie Gråbøl, by all of them. The Killing is also beautifully written and directed, deeply atmospheric and fantastic to look at once you get used to the dark. Eat plenty of carrots if you’ve yet to get involved. Which you must do. I do still have a few questions – mainly about Danish police procedure, but also about some of the political stuff and who knew what when. So conversation isn’t totally dead yet. Or maybe I’ll go back and revisit earlier episodes. I really think you could, already, and get more out of it; there’s not a lot of television you can say that about. The final body count is six, or seven if you count the earlier one. My final score is clearer, and higher. Ten. Out of 10.
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March 26 2011, 7:05pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/23/the-umbrellas-of-cherbourg-review
Theatre breaks review of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” by The Guardian’s Michael Billington
This article titled “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 23rd March 2011 00.24 UTC “Charmingly attenuated” was how the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael described the original 1964 Jacques Demy movie. Suspiciously thin would be my verdict on this stage version adapted and directed by Emma Rice for Kneehigh. The Michel Legrand score still offers its fitful pleasures, and the bittersweet ending is retained; but it seems an oddly gratuitous translation of a highly successful film into theatrical terms. Rice is faithful to the story: Genevieve, a naive teenager, falling for Guy, a Cherbourg garagiste; and then, when he is drafted into the Algerian war, being ardently wooed by a rich jeweller. But, one has to ask, what exactly is gained by the stage transfer? Rice heightens aspects such as the jealous pangs felt by Genevieve’s mum, who has her own eyes on the jeweller’s assets. Lest we miss the fact this is an essentially French story, Rice has also imported a roguish compere in the shape of a cabaret diva called Meow Meow, and adds a chorus of matelots in striped vests. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky she stopped short of an itinerant onion seller. What is lost are the very things that made the film so original. One is the way in which the fluid camera movement matched the seamless recitative of the Legrand score: take that away, and you are left with a show that, with the exception of I Will Wait for You, seems strangely lacking in musical or dramatic highlights. The other missing ingredient is the candy-coloured artifice of the film, in which even the wallpaper matched the characters’ costumes. Watching the stage version is like seeing a Technicolor film rendered in black and white: Lez Brotherston’s set, with its partitioned steel structures, seems determined to evoke the reality of Cherbourg, whereas the point of the story is that it is a romantic fairytale. The performances themselves are fine. Carly Bawden conveys Genevieve’s innocence, Andrew Durand shows Guy plausibly embittered by both the war and his lover’s desertion, and Joanna Riding as Genevieve’s mum has the right flighty desperation. Nigel Lilley’s musical direction is tireless. And there are one or two striking images, such as that of a lovelorn Guy marooned in the midst of the Algerian conflict. But when you recall how ingeniously Kneehigh interwove film and live action in Brief Encounter, this seems a strangely prosaic attempt to capture the elusive poetry of the Demy original.
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March 23 2011, 3:04pm | Comments »
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The Unthanks: Last – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/10/the-unthanks-last-review
Review of the Unthanks folk music album.
This article titled “The Unthanks: Last – review” was written by Robin Denselow, for The Guardian on Thursday 10th March 2011 23.07 UTC The Unthanks experiment continues, with an album of gentle melancholia that matches their most elaborate instrumental arrangements to date with a reworking of a startling variety of songs. As ever, their music centres around the delicate, haunting vocals of the Unthank sisters, Rachel and Becky, but Rachel’s husband Adrian McNally is playing an increasingly important role as producer, pianist, co-arranger and composer of the gently epic title track. Based around a sturdy, drifting piano theme, it’s a thoughtful, sad and lyrical meditation on “why the future doesn’t look so great”. Elsewhere, there’s more epic gloom with an unlikely revival of King Crimson’s Starless, now based around trumpet and strings, while other cover versions include a breathy treatment of Tom Waits’s No One Knows I’m Gone, and Jon Redfern’s slow, sad reflection on the Iraq war, Give Away Your Heart. The traditional songs do little to change the mood, but include some fine harmony singing and violin work on Canny Hobbie Elliot, a quietly eerie Gan to the Kye, and impressive piano work on The Galloway Lad. There’s not the emotional range of the last Unthanks album, Here’s the Tender Coming, but it’s a bold and highly original set.
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March 10 2011, 5:14pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
PJ Harvey – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/04/pj-harvey-%E2%80%93-review
After The Radiohead King of Limbs release, Polly Jean Harvey’s is the most talked about. Excellent reviews.
This article titled “PJ Harvey – review” was written by Dorian Lynskey, for The Guardian on Monday 28th February 2011 21.30 UTC Polly Harvey has been denying for years that she’s an autobiographical songwriter. Her war-themed new album Let England Shake should finally rest her case. Even a listener hellbent on blurring singer and song would have to admit that she didn’t actually fight in Gallipoli. In this new stage of her career, which began with 2007′s White Chalk, Harvey celebrates craft not catharsis; the action on stage belongs as much to the world of theatre or visual art as it does to rock’n'roll. She strides out enrobed in black with a feathered headdress, like a sorceror in a Terry Gilliam film, clutching her autoharp as if a widow’s memento. Her three-man band form a semi-circle several feet away from her, playing antiquated equipment. Given Harvey’s commitment to her theme, they’re lucky she didn’t make them dress as Anzacs. The Let England Shake material is experimental in conception, but simple in execution, with emotionally direct melodies and deliberately rudimentary playing. Disembodied samples of voices from 20s Iraq and 70s Jamaica rise up like ghosts. To call the songs anti-war, just because of the bloodshed they describe, would be to ignore the macabre relish with which Harvey sings some of the most brutal lines. In performance, as on record, these songs are an unsettling puzzle, not congratulations for being on the right side. Events in Libya add a fresh twist to the bitter black humour of the Eddie Cochran-quoting refrain of Words That Maketh Murder: “What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” Older songs enter the main set only when they are sympathetic to the mood: the phantom wail of The Devil or the eerie sensuality of The River. Every move is precisely controlled and contained. During several songs, Harvey stands stock still; at the end of England she cocks her head in the spotlight to catch the dying notes of a long-gone Kurdish folk singer. She doesn’t say a word to the audience until the encore, which is the first time tonight seems at all like a conventional, communal rock show. She introduces the band in soft, polite Dorset tones and cranks up the distortion for a liberating blast through Meet Ze Monsta. You might try and find in this sudden loosening up the “real” PJ Harvey, but she would no doubt tell you to stop looking. The truth of this extraordinary performer lies in the stories she tells.
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March 4 2011, 9:47am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Million Dollar Quartet – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/03/million-dollar-quartet-theatre-revie
Review for The Million Dollar Quartet a rock musical based on an impromptu jam session at Sun Records studio on 4th December 1956 between Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.
This article titled “Million Dollar Quartet – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Monday 28th February 2011 22.15 UTC 1956 was a momentous year: the Suez crisis, the Hungarian revolution, Khruschev’s denuniciation of Stalin. But it was also a time of cultural upheaval, and this exuberantly nostalgic show recreates the occasion on 4 December when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins all converged on the Sun Records studio in Memphis for some impromptu music-making. Sam Phillips, who turned an old radiatior shop into the pioneering Sun studio and who hosts the get-together, is described by one of the group as “the father of rock’n'roll”; and Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux’s story records the poignant moment at which the sons abandon the father. Elvis has already been sold to RCA and become a Hollywood star, and the others now accept that it is time to move on. But, though the show pinpoints the eclipse of the Sun and the tensions within the group, such as Perkins’s resentment of Presley’s refashioning of Blue Suede Shoes, what we see on stage is a celebration; and, if you’re of a certain generation, it’s a joy to hear once again numbers such as Hound Dog, Great Balls of Fire and I Walk the Line. Obviously, the cast have to compete with our memories of the real thing, but Ben Goddard does a particularly good job of conveying the anarchic wildness of Jerry Lee Lewis. But Michael Malarkey as Elvis, Derek Hagen as Johnny Cash and Robert Britton Lyons, the one authentic American, as Carl Perkins offer substance as well as shadows. Bill Ward as the pathfinding Phillips and Francesca Jackson as Elvis’s squeeze, who offers a notably sultry, microphone-caressing version of Fever, add to the gaiety of a show that taps into all our yesterdays.
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Read more: http://theatrebreaks.co/wiki/Million_Dollar_Quartet#ixzz1FYmxVDDa Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMillion Dollar Quartet – review
Related posts:The Wizard of Oz – review Drowning on Dry Land – review The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – review
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March 3 2011, 11:54am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Wizard of Oz – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/02/the-wizard-of-oz-review
The Guardian amongst others has published a review of The Wizard of Oz with Danielle Hope at the London Palladium. If you like The Wizard of Oz on film you will undoubtedly enjoy the stage version too. Red Shoes Blues sung by Hannah Waddingham as the Wicked Witch of the West is one of the highlights, and a new song with lyrics by Tim Rice: “She’s pretty, she’s clueless and I want her shoeless”.
This article titled “The Wizard of Oz – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 2nd March 2011 00.53 UTC The Victorian theatre of spectacle is alive and well, and residing at the London Palladium. But although this adaptation of the Frank Baum book and the 1939 movie, with additional songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, is quite an eyeful, it’s somewhat lacking in humanity. I came out feeling blitzkrieged rather than charmed. The star of the show is undoubtedly the set and costume designer, Robert Jones. The Kansas cyclone that whisks Dorothy into a dreamworld is evoked through vorticist projections (the work of Jon Driscoll) that betoken chaos in the cosmos. The Yellow Brick Road is on a tilted revolve from inside which poppyfields and labyrinthine forest emerge. The Emerald City is full of steeply inclined walls suggesting a drunkard’s vision of the Chrysler Building lobby. And the Wicked Witch of the West inhabits a rotating dungeon that might be a Piranesi nightmare. Not since 19th century Drury Lane melodramas can London have seen anything quite like it; one has to admire the director and co-adaptor, Jeremy Sams, for marshalling the effects. But the story and the people get swamped. Danielle Hope shows a natural, easy presence as Dorothy, but can’t hope to compete with the scenery. Even Michael Crawford, playing both Professor Marvel and The Wizard, seems slightly subdued, and misses a trick by not highlighting the latter’s resemblance to PT Barnum whom he once played. Only two of the cast transcend the spectacle. Hannah Waddingham makes the Wicked Witch a pointy-chinned ogre who at one point flies over the audience’s heads with an elan that Spider Man might envy. David Ganly notches up a first by making the Cowardly Lion explicitly gay and announcing “I’m proud to be a friend of Dorothy.” Of course, there are the songs; it’s good to be reminded of such classics as Over The Rainbow, We’re Off To See The Wizard, and Follow The Yellow Brick Road. The additions by Lloyd Webber and Rice are also perfectly acceptable. Dorothy is given a good plaintive opening number, and Red Shoes Blues, sung by the Wicked Witch, has a pounding intensity. But, as a film scholar remarked to me, the movie was a story with songs rather than a full-blown musical. That delicate balance has been changed, and an essentially simple fable about the importance of individual worth seems overblown. I suspect in the end the show will be critic-proof and people will go to see both the winner of the TV talent contest and to luxuriate in the sumptuous visuals. But the paradox of the evening is that it suffers the same dilemma as the Tin Man: it might have been so much more if it only had a heart.
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March 2 2011, 2:14pm | Comments »
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Drowning on Dry Land – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/27/drowning-on-dry-land-review
Theatre review of Alan Ayckbourn’s Drowning on Dry Land at the at the Jermyn Street theatre.
This article titled “Drowning on Dry Land – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Sunday 27th February 2011 17.58 UTC Long before it became trendy to attack celebrity culture, Alan Ayckbourn satirised it brilliantly in his 1988 Man of the Moment. He returned to the theme in this play, which had its Scarborough premiere in 2004: the year that The X Factor made its debut. And, even if the fame game is now madder than even Ayckbourn foresaw, it’s salutary to be reminded that comedy, at its best, can have a moral purpose. Ayckbourn’s hero, Charlie Conrad, is a TV celebrity who has charm but no talent: he has risen to the top by his persistent failure, first as a middle-distance athlete and then as a hopeless quiz contestant. But Charlie’s world unravels when he is caught in a compromising position with a female clown at his son’s birthday party. Even if Ayckbourn takes time establishing Charlie’s epic incompetence, he is very good at showing what happens when the bubble bursts. While Charlie’s wife, agent and the sexually impetuous clown all benefit from his humiliating downfall, he himself retreats into a shrunken private life. Although Ayckbourn ends with a faint gesture of hope, the play burns with indignation at the way fame is now divorced from hard work and achievement. Christopher Coghill makes Charlie a little too blandly apologetic. Otherwise, Guy Retallack’s production nails all the key points. Mark Farrelly is buoyantly funny as a vain celebrity lawyer who helicopters in to destroy the charges brought by the litigious clown, played by Helen Mortimer with a touching solemnity. Emma Swain as Charlie’s resentful wife and Les Dennis, who knows a thing or two about the whirligig of fame, as his agent also lend weight to a play that may not be major Ayckbourn but is one that effectively harpoons our society’s elevation of the untalented.
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February 27 2011, 12:18pm | Comments »
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West Is West – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/26/west-is-west-%E2%80%93-review
East is East was a stage play which I saw at the Theatre Royal Stratford some time in the 90s. So here’s a review not of the theatre but of a new film West is West.
This article titled “West Is West – review” was written by Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 22.15 UTC In 1999, East Is East was a smash-hit 70s-set British-Asian film and a key commercial cinema success of the New Labour era; it was a comedy about Pakistan, Britain and Islam that was of its pre-9/11 time, just as Chris Morris’s Four Lions is very much of our time. But this sequel shows that its scenario and characters have an awful lot of life and relevance left in them. Young Sajid (Ajib Khan) is now a tricky teenager, unhappy at school, bullied by racists and patronised by a teacher who presents him with a copy of Kipling’s Kim. So his formidable dad George (Om Puri) takes Sajid for a restorative trip to Pakistan, where he has been sending money to his first wife and family. His second, British wife Ella (Linda Bassett) pursues him out there, and effectively forces him to choose between identities. Perhaps it doesn’t have the novelty of the first film, but it’s refreshingly un-parochial, with charm and fun, and Bassett and Puri are reliably excellent.
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February 26 2011, 5:10am | Comments »
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The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/23/spelling-bee-theatrebreaks
A new addition to the range of musicals on offer for London theatre breaks The Donmar Warehouse has announced full casting for its British premiere production of The 25th Annual County Spelling Bee, beginning performances February 11th 2011, with an official opening on February 21st, for a run through until April 2nd 2011. “If you win the Spelling Bee, one’s life improves from A to Z.” Music & Lyrics by William Finn. Book by Rachel Sheinkin 11 February – 2 April 2011 Only those blessed with an extraordinary ability and love of language qualify for the Putnam County Spelling Bee. But there can only be one winner and with a place in the national final at stake, emotions run high, hopes are quashed and dreams are broken. Dust off your dictionary and prepare yourselves for the spelling challenge of a lifetime in William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s hilarious Tony Award-winning musical. This riotous musical comedy is guaranteed to have you cachinnating (use it in a sentence, request a definition?). The Spelling Bee cast will feature Chris Carswell (as Leaf Coneybear/Carl Dad), David Flynn (William Barfee), Hayley Gallivan (Olive Ostrovksy), Harry Hepple (Chip Tolentino/Jesus), Katherine Kingsley (Rona Lisa Perretti/Olive’s Mum), Maria Lawson (Marcy Park), Ako Mitchell (Mitch Mahoney/Dan Dad/Olive’s Dad), Steve Pemberton (Vice Principal Douglas Panch) and Iris Roberts (Logainne Schwatzandgrubenniere), under the direction of Jamie Lloyd. Read more: http://theatrebreaks.co/wiki/The_25th_Annual_Putnam_County_Spelling_Bee
“Like Grease and Legally Blonde, it has a vaguely academic context.”
This article titled “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Tuesday 22nd February 2011 02.09 UTC Given the Donmar’s exemplary musical track record, it is a bit of a shock to find them importing this flimsy, vacuous diversion. Like Grease and Legally Blonde, it has a vaguely academic context. But William Finn’s music and lyrics and Rachel Sheinkin’s book have little of the brio of those shows and seem unsure whether they are satirising or celebrating a peculiarly American institution. The pretence is that we are in a high school gym watching a competitive spelling bee. To add verisimilitude we are asked to stand and recite the pledge of allegiance and four audience members are invited to join the contest. It says much for the bravery of my colleague, the Evening Standard’s Henry Hitchings, that he agreed to participate and he acquitted himself with dignity and style. But much of the spontaneity and fun goes out of the proceedings when the four volunteers are eliminated and all we are left with is a remorseless whittling away of the survivors: it’s a bit like The Weakest Link without the laughs. I presume the intention is to show that spelling bees are a way for American kids to shed their hangups by exhibiting their verbal prowess. So we have the unloved fat boy, the disconsolate over-achiever, the poor kid pining for her mum on a spiritual trek to India and the guy with uncontrollable lusts who at one point sings “my unfortunate protuberance seems to have its own exuberance”. But the highly forgettable songs seem to be imposed on the action rather than arising organically from it and many of the jokes are just as arbitrary. In a heavily American show, that assumes we know the difference between the Red Sox and the Yankees, it seems implausible for a high school kid to tell us that “Nick Clegg is after the alternative vote – but what about the straights?” The best one can say is that the cast in Jamie Lloyd’s production works with unremitting energy. Katherine Kingsley, who made a big impression in Aspects of Love, lends the contest’s co-host a honey blonde vivacity and Steve Pemberton as her colleague has the fake omniscience of the smug quizmaster. And, among the contestants, David Fynn as the bumptious know-all, Hayley Gallivan as a lovelorn loser and Harry Hepple as the guy with the erectile issues make their mark. But it’s hard to warm to a show that, for all its would-be scholasticism, embodies the progressive infantilising of the American musical. And, when Christ appears in a vision to one of the struggling contestants and declares “this isn’t the kind of thing I care about”, he speaks for a good many of us.
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February 23 2011, 5:24am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Radiohead: The King of Limbs – reviews
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/20/radiohead-thekingoflimbs-reviews
The release strategy and format of Radiohead’s albums have been talked about endessly but what do the reviews of the music have to day about it? independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/radiohead-the-king-of-limbs telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/cdreviews/8334723/Radiohead-The-King-Of-Limbs-review
Here’s my review: I like it. This article titled “Radiohead: The King of Limbs – review” was written by Kitty Empire, for The Observer on Sunday 20th February 2011 00.06 UTC In the end, it arrived early. Announced on Valentine’s Day – and, perhaps not uncoincidentally, the eve of the Brits – the eighth Radiohead album was eventually sprung on the world a day before anyone was expecting it. That was an act of mischievous digital benevolence so typical of Radiohead, a band rewriting the rules of pop engagement on the fly. Judging from their most recent black-and-white portrait, in which the band slope awkwardly at the bottom of an ancient tree, The King Of Limbs could, by rights, have been their acid folk album – one informed by the writing of Roger Deakin, perhaps. Indeed, seven tracks in, Give Up the Ghost – a mellow and mantric song strung on acoustic guitars and announced by birdsong – gives a hint of what might have been. By contrast, anyone following Thom Yorke’s recent Office Chart blog posts might have been expecting a record in thrall to dubstep, or even more obscure electronic micro-genres. Fulfilling that brief is Feral, a sinuous bass shakedown at the heart of this typically contrary, intermittently stunning, album. Yorke’s deep affinity with musical outriders such as LA’s Flying Lotus – upon whose album Cosmogramma he guested last year – is manifest. Bloom, the album’s opening track, is underscored by wild jazz polyrhythms. Well, this is a 21st-century Radiohead album; it was never going to be easy listening. In truth, The King of Limbs sounds a little predictable, certainly at first. It is very much the heir to 2007′s In Rainbows, imbued with some of the spirit of Yorke’s solo outing, 2006′s The Eraser. Which is to say, it sounds another death knell for fans of The Bends and OK Computer still hoping for a late recantation and a return to anthemic guitar rock. Guitars are very thin on the ground in Radiohead’s dark wood. The most traditional sounds here occur on the splendid Codex, in which a stately, distant piano bongs mournfully. Restless rhythms abound. But they never quite resolve into dance beats – despite Yorke’s brave moves in the video that accompanies Lotus Flower. It should have stopped traffic in Tokyo last Friday at rush hour, but because of crowd concerns, the screening on Hachiko Square’s giant video screens was pulled. Radiohead’s works reward close and long listening; this dense and knotted eight-track album is no exception. But one of its most instant delights was the sense of giddy communion last Friday, as fans and observers awaited, then savoured, the record in real time.
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February 20 2011, 6:07am | Comments »
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