Review: Dissonance
The Holywell Music Room had a very different atmosphere to usual for Hugo Max’s ‘Dissonance’. A film screen covered the organ, pieces of art were dotted around the space, paired balloons floated along the perimeter, people milled around. The air wasn’t as reserved as it usually is before a c
Review: The Golden Cockerel
A trumpet blares – tremolo builds, anticipation hovers. The mesh background drips starlight as the orchestra drifts downward in a minor key. A soldier glares at the audience, and I find myself in an enchanted world somewhat reminiscent of our own. An astrologer takes the stage. There is a deceptiv
Review: Entertaining Mr Sloane
As I take my ringside seat in the Burton Taylor Studio, I get the sense that I am about to witness a fight. The setting of chintzy sofas, ceramic lamps, and plated crumpets – the picture of dreary 1960s domesticity – seems an unlikely place for a brawl. But ‘My Generation’ by The Who crackle
Review: Cezanne at Tate Modern
It is said, perhaps to the point of cliché, that Paul Cezanne was the “father of modernism”. Amusingly, when Tate was first offered a painting by Cezanne in 1921 (The François Zola Dam, 1877-8), its then director rejected the loan, on the grounds that he was too modern. A century on, however,
On This Day: Paul Simon
Anybody who, like me, spent at least one fifth of their childhood dinner-times in the welcome company of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water cannot have helped forming an opinion on the relative artistic merits of Art Garfunkel. For better or worse, it seems to me that Garfun
REVIEW: RxJ
It begins with Mercutio, which is right. For an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet which claims to be a ‘radical new imagining of Shakespeare’s classic,’ it seems intuitive to open with Mercutio’s dying speech, the moment the play turns to tragedy, merging with the familiar prologue. Rory Fraser

