Rock on

Vices - The Wind I Walk Into


Vices’ first album is a rock and roll blockbuster. Beautifully produced by Jason Saltzman, song after song combines Californian bliss with driving rock beats. The three guitars weave artfully together over a backing bass and drums, each taking turns in the manner of a seasoned jazz ensemble. At times, the delicate guitar work is reminiscent of ‘Scar Tissue’-era Red Hot Chili Peppers – as on ‘Giving Cigarettes to Kids’. At other times, instruments combine in a sensual assault that disguises the thought and complexity which underlies the song – as on ‘Junk’.

Lead singer Lea, so extrovert on stage, here demotes himself to another instrumentalist, his voice adding another layer of complexity to the guitar work. The abstract lyrics are almost-comprehensible riffs on an enigma, which add to an air of affected privacy; one gets the feeling that these songs might have arrived fully formed in practice sessions, and that the band would be just as happy performing for one another as for the wider world.

The stand out track comes halfway through the album. ‘Jerusalem’ builds slowly to an ecstatic explosion of vocals and guitar. But in truth, the bitter appeals of ‘Younger’ or poppy, 70s-influenced ‘Dust Ghost’ vie for that title, and there are few weak links here.

The Wind I Walk Into is available on iTunes.

Hidden London 2: Coffee, Cake and Kink

Amid plush red sofas and art covered walls, customers sip from a remarkable range of fairly traded coffee, and nibble on genuinely heavenly cakes. CCK does exactly what its name suggests – it is a classy café with a kinky theme, and it is a marvellous place for the open minded to meet the like minded.

Admittedly, the prices are less than student friendly, but the experience is certainly worth it. This is a warm, friendly space in which no topic is off limits, and clothing and music tastes are not barriers to conversation. The art is beautifully done by some of the country’s best, and if you really fall in love with a piece, it’s all for sale.

One acquaintance worried that he would discover a flickering light bulb and a Nescafe at the back of a seedy sex shop; he could hardly have been further from the truth. Sure, it is a sex shop of sorts – all sorts of handmade kinky equipment and kinky books of photography are for sale – but this is not a place filled with sheepish looking men in anoraks. The crowd is, by and large, young, intelligent and welcoming.

Even when the café is empty, there is still fun to be had, because the staff mix easily with the customers, putting first time visitors at their ease and chatting away to old friends. For those that want a little more life and activity, there are regular events in the evenings.

CCK is precisely everything Starbucks, Pret and the rest are not – it is a café with soul, a place to hang out and chat, rather than simply top up your caffeine level. It is a little known corner of London, but one which should be better known.

CCK can be found at 61 Endell Street, just north of Covent Garden, or at http://www.whatsyours.com/

Hidden London 1: Brixton Jamm

Brixton Jamm is a small club and music venue in, predictably enough, Brixton. An unprepossessing building from the outside, inside it is a tastefully decorated haven for music lovers. The bar is well staffed (though not the cheapest), there are plenty of sofas for those early evening drinks, and at one end, a busy dancefloor is entertained by DJs playing a balance of the cutting edge and the classics. Perhaps most remarkable of all, the toilets are clean – a never before seen phenomenon at a gig venue.

Go through the door on the left, though, and you will discover what really makes the venue tick. At one end is the stage, and in a 200-odd capacity room – with another bar down the side – up and coming bands and DJs rock out. The sound system is excellent for a venue this small, and the bands generally are too. Nights are tightly themed, so you are sure to hear what you like (providing you’ve checked ahead), and only bands with real potential are invited to play. Regular nights feature 3 or 4 acts, although there are plenty of all-day or all-night specials, with as many as eight or ten different bands. There are also occasional well-known names playing there: Carl Barat of Dirty Pretty Things put on a marathon four hour DJ set a couple of weeks ago, to the delight of the crowd.

You’d probably never remark on it if you walked past, but Brixton Jamm is one of the best nights out in London. For relatively cheap entry (around £5-£7), you can party until 4am and jump (stumble) straight onto the buses opposite.

Brixton Jamm can be found at 261 Brixton Road, or http://www.brixtonjamm.org

Another old review

Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd has director Tim Burton in full Gothic Horror mode, complete with fog, monsters and fountains of blood. As ever with Burton, the picture looks magnificent; the scarlet of Todd’s victims leaps out amid a Victorian landscape in shades of grey. Again, though, as ever with Burton, the plot seems subsidiary to the look of the thing; there is a sense of searching for motivations, having already decided that Todd will kill people, and the sickly sweet love affair between Anthony and Joanna is an odd adjunct to a film which delights in its darkness.

The film is so over the top, though, that these quibbles hardly detract from the fun. The music, and the urgent, spoken singing style carry the audience along at a pace, and the fact that the exchanges approach dialogue excuses the lack of memorable tunes – with the notable exception of ‘Try the priest’, which is filled with delightful wordplay and a memorable chorus.

Helena Bonham Carter is magnificent, giving a simultaneously tender and cavorting performance as Mrs Lovett, the lonely pie shop owner who becomes Todd’s accomplice in the hope of getting her to love him. Depp also gives a solid performance in the lead role, although he has yet to rid himself of all of Captain Jack’s mannerisms, whilst Rickman enjoys playing a sinister Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall is convincingly brutal and simpering as Beadle Bamford. None of them are fantastic vocalists, but all are perfectly competent for the style.

‘Sweeney Todd’ is pure melodrama, and those unable to submerge themselves in the current of imagery and emotion will call this a silly and insubstantial film. It certainly is silly - but it is good fun.

A very old review, dug up

Linkin Park at O2, 28/01/08

The rejuvenated Dome certainly is impressive, with its cinema, restaurants and 17,000 capacity arena, and though negotiating security takes a while, it is a while worth waiting. Entering into a huge bowl which puts Earls Court and Wembley to shame, the excited buzz of fans surrounds the standing area.

It has been a couple of years since Linkin Park were the hottest band around, but they certainly had no trouble dominating this venue; bounding around with exuberant energy, their stage presence is impressive, and lead singer Bennington has the arrogance of a true frontman.

This energy was their saving grace in a set which included almost the entire new album. ‘Minutes to Midnight’ is passable enough rock, but hardly compares to the raw innovation of ‘Hybrid Theory’ – yet tracks like ‘Given Up’ and ‘What I’ve Done’ were carried off with aggressive, immaculately rehearsed skill, corny lyrics and all.

It was the old anthems which stuck out though. There was scarcely a drop in volume as Bennington allowed the audience to do the work for him on ‘Numb’, and a couple of years off the radio has certainly refreshed ‘In The End’, their standout track of the evening.

A misjudged drum solo (what drum solos are not?), and a cover of Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’, in which Shinoda showcased his dubious skill as a pianist – and then forgot the words – are perhaps best forgotten, but this was an extremely professional performance, with slick changeovers, impressive lightshows and album-exact songs delivered by a mature band at the peak of their live performing skills. Wipe out the ‘Minutes’ material and it tips the balance into a great performance.

Support came from Biffy Clyro, who enhanced their reputation as an excellent live act. The new album has more crowd-pleasers, but they have managed to maintain the aggression and excitement which has seen them play T in the Park more times than any other band.

Painfully accurate

Pains of Youth, The Cottesloe, National Theatre, 6/1/2010

Katie Mitchell's production of Martin Crimp's translation of Ferdinand Bruckner's play makes for electric viewing.

The premise has the mechanics of a farce: the self-involved characters are all sleeping with one another, as a rotating cast of lovers drift from one bed to another. In truth, there are few laughs. Instead, we get a parable on human relations which seems to have at its source Forster's "only connect."

The characters talk past one another, so wrapped up in their own concerns that they are utterly unable to listen. Desperate to avoid bourgeois moderation, they retreat into carefully constructed boxes. This is brilliantly evoked by Crimp's declamatory, disjointed writing, in which no statement seems quite to follow another. The speeches are not realistic; they are the epitome of theatricality.

Mitchell is never a passive director, and here she makes herself felt most clearly in the scene changes. Props are clinically bagged by anonymous, besuited investigators, harshly lit. This is set to uneasy, discordant music composed by Paul Clark. The two together provide a moral commentary on the actions onstage.

All the actors put in strong performances. Geoffrey Streatfield is perhaps the most outstanding, adding depth to manipulative, vicious Freder. Leo Bill's timid Petrell is a little lacking in definition, though it steers well away from cliche. Sian Clifford's besotted, naive Lucy is a remarkable creature.

This play is the result of brilliance in collaboration; the labours of Crimp, Mitchell, Clark and all the cast combine to create a memorable work.

Trying hard

Scouts in Bondage, The King's Head, 23/12/2009

This is a lightweight lark which seeks to lampoon Scouting and the Empire through filth and innuendo. The results are mixed.

Four scouts - one camp, one posh, one keen and one German - are flying to a jamboree in India. When their plane crashes in Afghanistan, they get into scrapes, and must outwit dastardly Afghans, dastardly Russians and dastardly Brits. Along the way, they learn about the true meaning of Scouting, and accidentally bend over in front of one another, in very tight shorts.

A miniscule audience - the same size as the cast - immediately puts the players at a disadvantage. From then on, they battle manfully along, little helped by an average script, without ever commanding outright hilarity. There is enthusiasm and energy from all the cast, but only Mark Farrelly, who is the most experienced of the actors, has genuine poise and comic timing. His soliloquies as the editor of Scouting Magazine are by far the most sophisticated and funny moments.

On a bustling Saturday night, with a tipsy crowd, this piece would be warmly received. As it was, it could never rise beyond the diverting, and never elicit more than a titter.

The Hottest Show in Town

The Habit of Art, The National, 21/12/2009

Alan Bennett is probably the most respected of modern British playwrights. After the magnificent, gripping History Boys, expectations were perhaps unfairly high. Nonetheless, this play is an astonishing and clumsy misstep.

There is little plot to tell. A group of actors are rehearsing a fictionalized encounter between Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden. In this play, very little occurs. Auden sits in his study, and receives visitors: his cleaners, a rent boy, and Britten. Britten and Auden reminisce, without shedding much light on the subjects they discuss. This lack of meat means the play rests entirely on the charm of it's characters - which is largely lacking.

Bennett explains that he used the 'play within a play' device in order to allow exposition. What he gains in doing so is vastly outweighed by its distancing effect; it is very difficult to care about characters when the actors are constantly shedding them. Moreover, as the play hovers indecisively, it does not give enough time to the characters outside of their play; the actors are never more than sketched out. Instead, they receive a list of stereotypical traits. There is a gay, luvvie one. There is a difficult, egotistical one. There is a fresh-out-of-drama school one. There is a pretentious writer, a shy actor obsessed with the vital importance of his minor part, and an efficient, sarcastic assistant director.

Without plot or proper characterization, the play might yet have been saved by Bennett's undoubted wit. Sadly, this too was not much in evidence. There are moments - the rent boy is amusingly blunt, and Frances de la Tour provides some of the most biting wit (as well as some poignant observations) as the assistant director trying to hold together her collection of egos. Auden and Britten, though, are essentially rather dull, whilst the actors are used only for a succession of cheap jokes about the theatre. Such lines would quite happily have sustained a 20 minute entry to the school House Drama competition, but they do not have the sophistication or zing that one feels entitled to expect.

One of the most remarkable moments comes shortly after the interval, when Adrian Scarborough - playing a nervous, try-hard actor who is playing Humphrey Carpenter - insists on trying to flesh out his character by performing some of Carpenter's music. Carpenter is a relatively well-known figure, and many of the audience will know that he was a jazz musician - not, as the play unaccountably suggests, a drag artist! This, one must presume, is Nicholas Hytner's idea. He would have done well to consign it to an Acorn Antiques revival.


Every ticket for the entire run has sold out. One hopes that the many who will see it will find more in it to enjoy than I did.

I Object, Mr. Monkey

Inherit the Wind, The Old Vic, 27/09/09

This play is a clumsy beast, with a raft of flaws. The standing ovation to which the curtain fell was undoubtedly for the big names, not for the quality of the performances.

First, the play is poorly chosen. The Creationism versus Darwinism debate arouses passion and tension in the United States; in the UK, particularly in front of a secular theatre-going audience, the question has long been settled. The director may make the cartoonish Chicagoans as arrogant and self-involved as he wishes, and the audience will still side with them. It does not help that the author spends all his time attacking literalist Creationism, rather than the somewhat more intellectually robust (if still wrong) Intelligent Design.

Second, the play is riddled with the clichés of the courtroom drama. Someone shouts “I object!” every ten seconds. The judge says “Mr. Drummond, this is highly unorthodox.” Everybody complains of the heat. Midway through, the great liberal lion of a lawyer gives his Great Liberal Speech affirming his faith in humanity. In all this, nobody denies that the defendant has indeed done what he is accused of doing – it would have been a greater travesty of law if he had been cleared.

There are other flaws. There are rather too many scenes illustrating the charming colour of small town American life – cute blonde girls selling lemonade, and hymn singing and banjo playing. There is a pretty, frightened love interest, her delicate spirit crushed by her tyrannical preacher father.

There are a few higher points. Kevin Spacey’s performance is baggy and unfocused, but it is certainly not uncharismatic. Bailiff Horace Meeks is tightly drawn and sympathetic for his perhaps thirty or forty lines. Arrogant Northern journalist E.K. Hornbeck is one-note, but he gets all the best lines and delivers them well.

In the final scene, there is some suggestion that the play may complicate itself a little, as our liberal hero defends his old adversary. In the end, though, the impulse is abandoned, and the play collapses under the weight of its own self-righteousness. The final image is of Spacey posing as a set of scales, holding the Bible in one hand and the Origin of Species in the other, looking profound.

My first Greek tragedy

Medea, The Scoop, 22/08/2009

Euripides’ tragedy is a chilling parable of a life lived in the public eye, immaculately staged and performed with bloody verve by a skilful cast.

First of all, there is a good reason this play is still regularly performed two and a half millennia after it was first written. The characters are strong, the plot races along (as it must do when the audience is perched on concrete steps), and there is a satisfying amount of blood and guts. The language (in a version by Stella Duffy) is direct and meaty, and the description of Princess Glauce’s death is gruesomely evocative.

The most compelling part is the series of press conferences towards the beginning of the play. The wronged Medea stands at the podium before an eager chorus of journalists, making her case to the public. She is succeeded by her supercilious husband Jason, and the powerful, uncaring King Creon, who in turn sway the fawning journalists to their cause. The staging turns the play into an ancient Pete and Jordan in extremis. The inclusion of Medea and Jason’s angelic children – who do not normally appear – makes the violence of Medea’s revenge even more immediate.

The performances are in general strong. The Steam Industry group of players have form in Greek drama, and do fairly well here. Siobhan O’Kelly is smart, Scottish and spiky as Medea, whilst Joe Fredericks’ Jason is an unflattering Blair. Both, though, cannot quite make the transition to maddened despair. Fredericks in particular gets caught in this emotional transition, and ends up in anodyne histrionics (though in fairness, he has only few lines in which to effect this emotional switch). It matters little; by this point in the play, the mechanics of tragedy have taken over – characterization matters less when Fate takes control, and the extremity of the actions leaves little room for acting subtlety.

One final note. The Scoop is an outdoor amphitheatre, and the performance is free. I should like to be bohemian and enthuse about the democratic spirit and how theatre is supposed to be. In truth, it was a little annoying. There are an awful lot of places in London where chatting is actively encouraged. Watching a play (and when sitting behind me) is not one of them. That these distractions (and the occasional microphone glitch) did not detract from the evening is a tribute to the power of the story.

Arcadia

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard, Duke of York’s Theatre, 29th May 2009

This play is a bitch. It sucks you in with an opening scene of easy drawing room farce. Then, quite without warning, the smooth theatrical mechanics have transported you to an intricacy of interlocking debates on history, science, poetry, sex and philosophy; a complete list of the issues it explores would fill this review and more. That there are no answers is fine – this is art, not science – but the sheer number of questions is dazzling.

A pure set of classical architecture and unobtrusive lighting is occupied by a large cast of considerable skill. Ed Stoppard sulks handsomely as Valentine, while his nineteenth century counterpart, Septimus, is coolly handled by Dan Stevens. Jessie Cave is convincingly vulnerable and precocious as Thomasina. Meanwhile, Samantha Bond is complex and poised as one half of the duelling academics; it is a shame Neil Pearson cannot quite match her.

That the staging and production should be unadventurous is fitting; this bulging, baggy work leaves little room for directorial intervention. The air sizzles with ideas, from which the audience is better not distracted. Occasionally, though, this can render the production a little cold. This is particularly true in the modern scenes, which lack overtly sympathetic characters. Similar ground has recently been covered with more charm by Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys.’

Nonetheless this is a philosophical meditation of astounding virtuosity, supported by the wit and careful theatrical machinery of one of the most skilful playwrights of the age. Just don’t go because you couldn’t get tickets to ‘The Lion King.’

Buffylicious

I have just watched the first ever episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on an extraordinarily low quality Indonesian streaming site. I'm probably hooked already. It's not Shakespeare, but I like it. Everybody is smart and sassy. EVERYBODY is ridiculously good looking - even Thomas the Vampire sounds like Sean Connery. I also like the fact that the fantasy is silly and slightly self-knowing - it's a nice change from the plodding earnestness of Tolkien.

I watched it a few times when I was 14 or 15, but only for a few minutes at a time, for adolescent drooling over Sarah Michelle Gellar (something I'm not above now, admittedly). I certainly wasn't concentrating on dialogue or characterisation. I usually had my finger hovering over the remote, in case anybody came in and read my rather transparent motives for watching it.

Bed now (I'm supposed to be getting my sleeping patterns under control in time for exams, and it's 1am already!), but I look forward to episode 2 tomorrow.

Online-Real Life Etiquette

Further to a brief exchange with Unmutual, I want to say a few words about the nature of blogs. Relatively anonymous, and with a similar subject matter, they feel something like a diary. There is, of course, one crucial difference: they are public.

Naturally that means blogs require a certain amount of self-censorship. That's fine. But people still seem to be more willing to share personal things online than they might have been in a face to face situation. Even if they are quite circumspect, and say nothing that they dont mind their readers knowing, a regular reader can still find out a lot more than they would in real life, simply because the number of conversations is greater.

Which brings us to the problem. It can be downright weird when someone mentions something that you wrote. Even quite anodyne posts can have the effect of killing conversations. For instance:

Major Tom: I really hate that David Bowie.
Ziggy: I know, I read your blog post. You really dont like him, huh?
Major Tom: No I dont. He's just so supercilious.
Ziggy: I know. I read your blog post.
Major Tom: Yeah.
Ziggy: So...um...I have to go to the toilet now.

As someone who relies quite heavily on anecdotes for conversation fodder, this is a particular problem.

But then, it is also downright weird to repeat a conversation you've already had online.

No resolutions offered, I'm afraid. But if you guys have any, I'd be interested to hear them.

Bong. Bong. Bong.

This is not a drugs related post, but rather about the news. Though drugs may well have been involved in the design of Jeremy Vine's election graphics.

I'm not going to rant about how shit TV news is. Go watch Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - he shares my views, plus he does masturbation jokes.

Instead, I want to mention a few of the news sources I do use, trust and love.

The first is BBC World Service. It's a magnificent institution. Friendly, expert and with a genuinely global focus. In fact, those adjectives could apply equally to another favourite of mine, the International Herald Tribune. It's the international spin-off of the New York Times. It has a magazine-y writing style, and a confidence that the reader is intelligent and interested. Also, they are quite happy to put tiny, quirky stories on the front page - Carol Ann Duffy was front page news for them! Unlike the World Service, it does have a moderate-liberal bias. That's fine with me, because that's about where I am, but you need to read some of their columns with care.
The next is The Economist. The quality of the journalism is simply unparralleled. They have an excellent style guide, which makes their writing more careful than anything else. They know more than anyone else. Their strong opinions are always clearly seperated from facts; a prescription for action, or some predictions, usually follow a clear explanation of the situation.

Finally, there is The Guardian. They are too liberal for me, especially when it comes to foreign affairs - for about 3 years, they published an identical story every day on page 3, about suicide bombs in Iraq. It is wearying, and their writing is always completely loaded with assumptions. That said, their writing style is excellent; the quality of prose is extremely high. Also, their sport coverage is by far the best around, because it mixes serious analysis with genuine humour.

I would love to work for any of these, someday.

Blog officially populated

Now that this blog is well and truly underway, I can relax. Hope you enjoy reading some of those reviews.

This is a little old now, but I see Carol Ann Duffy has been made Poet Laureate. That she's the first woman, and the first openly gay person, to have held the position, are cool firsts, but more to the point she is an amazing poet.

I'd never read any of her stuff - at a conservative all boys school, she didnt come up on the curriculum, surprisingly enough. When I heard the news, though, I sought out the five or six of her poems that are available online. What a turn of phrase she has. It's unbelievable. I have to get a copy of 'The World's Wife'.

How about this from Mrs Lazarus:

'I breathed/his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,/moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew'

More, more. I want more.

Pinter, Marvellous Pinter

This was a Pinter double bill, of two of his more obscure early plays. I've made a resolution now that, having seen almost all the Pinter canon (bar the Caretaker), I'm going to see some other serious drama. I've finally seen Beckett, there's some Ibsen on at the Barbican right now, and I'm sure I can locate some Chekhov. For the moment, though, Pinter is good fun.

The Lover and The Collection

This Pinter double bill is about sex, captured, trapped and examined. It is the constant undercurrent, the backdrop and the motivating force for accusation and counter-accusation, for lies, and for games turned serious.

In the first of the two plays, ‘The Lover’, a happily married couple (Richard Coyle and Gina McKee) dispel the monotony of suburbia by role playing as adulterers. The game continues on and on, becoming more powerful, until their double characters invade every part of their lives, and pretence and reality become intertwined beyond separation.

The second play, ‘The Collection’, once again deals with truth and sex. An angry husband (Coyle) alleges that playboy Bill (Charlie Cox) has slept with his wife, and as the two men build up a curious rapport, Bill amuses himself by altering his story, delighting in the anguish he causes James. Meanwhile, Harry (Timothy West), Bill’s patron, rushes around trying to resolve the trouble which Bill is determined to cause.

Both plays are extremely well acted; in particular, Gina McKee is gloriously erotic as the wife in ‘The Lover’, and Charlie Cox is charmingly supercilious as Bill in ‘The Collection’. Timothy West is, of course, as good as you would expect as the frustrated, disappointed landlord, half lover, half father to Bill. Both plays are equally well staged, with an overpowering black wall betraying the apparent coziness of the living room, and a set which manages to evoke both moldering Kensington decadence (‘The Collection’) and dull Home Counties suburbia (‘The Lover’) without alteration.

Yet there is something missing. It is not the ending – neither play ends conclusively, but this is Pinter, and you would not expect it to. It is not the language, which is as witty as always. These plays feel somewhere in the middle; they are neither as glaringly intimate as ‘The Dumb Waiter’, nor as aggressive as ‘The Homecoming’. This double bill has all the hallmarks of Pinter, and is most certainly worth seeing – but it is not his satisfyingly brutal best.

Sigur Ros and Snap judgements

I once wrote a piece entitled 'Are Sigur Ros the most boring band in the world?' It may be the most wrongheaded piece of writing I have ever done, and it serves as a lesson to me in not making snap judgements. On my second listen, I fell in love with Takk, their best album, and have yet to fall out of love with it. I later saw them at Rock Werchter, a Belgian festival, and would rate it at the very least in my top 3 gigs. It was a gorgeous evening, and just as the sun went down and the sky turned whitewash blue, they played. The lead singer played his guitar with a cello bow, and at one point the camera zoomed in on him, on his knees. This delicate icelandic pixie, a feather in his hair, had collapsed from the sheer emotion of it, and was on his knees crying, with the cello bow shredded in his hand.

The Magic Flute

My experience of opera is pretty limited. A few years ago, I saw La Boheme. The music was undoubtedly beautiful, and the acting surprisingly passable, but I wasnt sufficiently taken by it to rush back. That said, I acquired a few bits and pieces of opera - a greatest hits sampler, something or other by Mozart (I can't be bothered to check what it was), and Turandot. This, though was my second foray into live opera:

The Magic Flute, Duke of York Theatre

Opera has an image problem. It is generally seen as staid, mannered and difficult. This production of Mozart’s final opera sets out to correct that stereotype. Brimming with energy, colour and humour, it borders on what advertising executives like to call an ‘extravaganza’.

That is not to say that this is a faultless production. The translation from German, in its quest for accessibility, has more than a few rather trite rhymes, and opera always loses some of its mystique in English. Some of the performances, too, are a little weak. Although Pauline Malefane is magnificent, imperious in both voice and acting, as the Queen of the Night, and her daughter Pamina (Nobulumko Mngxekeza) is a touching actress, both of the lead male performers – Mhlekazi Andy Mosiea as Tamino and Khanyiso Gwenxane as Papageno – lack the stage presence to fill what is not a particularly big theatre; their voices haven’t quite the power, and their acting is a little obvious.

The best scenes, therefore, are the ensemble ones, when the enthusiasm and energy of the chorus results in a joyous overlay to the tinkling marimbas (a type of xylophone which replaces the orchestra in this production). It is all one can do to prevent oneself joining in, and conductor Mandisi Dyantyis is clearly itching to do the same, leading the musicians with as much energy as any of the performers.

Directed by Mark Dornford-May and produced by Eric Abraham, both adoptive South Africans themselves, this show is a fascinating experiment. The result is a qualified success. At the moment, the company is searching for the funding and the audience to support it in its native South Africa; tonight demonstrated that they overwhelmingly deserve that chance to develop.

Child 44

A very short review of Child 44, a potboiler which mysteriously made its way onto the Booker shortlist last year.

'Child 44' is a decent enough debut; a thriller which checks all the boxes. It is not, though, a Booker Prize-winning novel, and it is rather surprising to find it on this list. The writing is rather clumsy and lumbering: characters do not have depth so much as lists of attributes, and Smith has never heard of the writer's rule 'show, don't tell'. Meanwhile, the historical detail is on occasion innacurate - even the KGB (which is for some reason referred to as the MGB throughout) didn't execute 'several hundreds a day'. Indeed, the vigour with which Smith attacks the Soviet system is curiously anachronistic; in 1962, this might have been a powerful political statement, but it certainly isn't now. Although not an unqualified disaster, neither can this book rightly be called a success.

Les Miserables

I first bought tickets to this show as a present to my then girlfriend. That means it has some complicated memories associated with it, but mostly it's just an amazing soundtrack. The day I saw the production was an odd one - an inability to revise led to my wandering out of the library, into Covent Garden, where I bought two pairs of shoes, ate Chinese food and then went to see Les Mis. This is my report:

Les Miserables – 12/03/08

Les Mis has been running 22 years, longer than any other show in the West End, and on a Wednesday night, it was sold out. And with good reason. It is the best show in town. One friend of mine (studying music at Oxford, no less) compares it favourably to a Mozart opera. The sophistication of its plot, the beauty of its solos, the energy of its chorus numbers and the grandeur of its staging put lesser shows to shame. That said, this was a disappointing production.

Many of the performances were remarkably misjudged. Drew Sarich as Valjean was wild eyed and angry, with an accent that wandered around the Atlantic; too immature to be the moral centre of the play. Hans Peter Janssens, meanwhile, had an oddly clipped style as Javert, reducing him from a zealous Angel of Justice to a pedantic bureaucrat, pursuing a 20 year old error in his records. Worse still, he gabbled and garbled many of his lines; certainly he could hit the notes, but even I, who know the soundtrack inside out, had difficulty deciphering some of his key lines. Eponine’s gorgeous number ‘On my own’, meanwhile, was belted out with all the fragile vulnerability of Shirley Bassey.

Oddly, the most convincing performances came from Marius and Cosette. Usually absurdly saccharine and improbable, their story was transformed into a delicate meeting of lovers by the simple expedient of not overacting, amid all the posturing and exhibitionism. Equally marvellous were Chris Vincent and Melanie La Barrie as the Thenardiers, who were as hilariously horrible as they ought to be.

These, though, were the exceptions. The failure of so many of the main characters – all of them with illustrious lists of credits – would seem to point the finger at the musical direction. Whoever was at fault, this was not up to the (admittedly incredibly high) standards of Les Mis.

It is a testament to the show that despite all this, I still came out humming the tunes.