Five of the best ... films
You Were Never Really Here (15)
(Lynne Ramsay, 2017, Fra/UK/US) 85 mins
This daring thriller discards conventional storytelling in favour of an intense, almost hallucinatory approach, but it’s told with expert control and ruthless efficiency. The plot takes us deep into the damaged psyche of a freelance lone wolf (Joaquin Phoenix, at his best) who locates missing children. Something like Taxi Driver without the talking.
A Fantastic Woman (15)
(Sebastián Lelio, 2017, Chi/Ger/Spa/UK) 104 mins
Deserved winner of the best foreign film Oscar last week, Lelio’s modern melodrama highlights a trans woman’s dignity in the face of considerable adversity: firstly, the death of her partner, and then the reaction from his family and the authorities. Daniela Vega is tremendous in the role. She will survive.
Mom and Dad (15)
(Brian Taylor, 2017, US) 86 mins
From the man who brought us Crank, a grindhouse Home Alone. For mysterious reasons, millennial kids find themselves under attack from their parents. That’s especially bad news if your folks are Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage. Nasty, trashy and unpredictable (apart from Cage’s reliably unhinged performance), it fully commits to its premise of all-out generational warfare.
I, Tonya (15)
(Craig Gillespie, 2017, US) 119 mins
What really went down with ice-skater Tonya Harding and the plot to sabotage her arch rival? This lively comedy-drama admits it doesn’t know, but spins a good yarn anyway: a tale of trailer-park aspiration that’s both sympathetic and satirical, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Margot Robbie excels as the poor but talented Harding, Allison Janney even more so as her hideously sour mother.
Sweet Country
(15) (Warwick Thornton, 2017, Aus) 113 mins
This powerful, panoramic outback western revisits historic race issues in a way few American ones ever have. It’s an almost biblical tale: an Indigenous Australian farmhand and his wife take flight after he shoots dead a bigoted white rancher in a surreal landscape where the relationship between indigenous people and “settlers” is anything but settled.
SR
Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs
Sigrid
BBC Sound of 2018 winner Sigrid makes the kind of happy-sad electropop that fellow Scandinavian Robyn seems reluctant to create any more. Elegant banger Strangers recently gatecrashed the UK Top 10, a few weeks after a star-making performance on Graham Norton, while this headline tour finds her stepping up to mid-sized venues. One to watch, obvs.
Brighton 12 March; London 14 March, touring to 24 March
Tune-Yards
Wild musical genius or children’s TV presenter with too many percussive instruments? Merrill Garbus’s critically lauded music project has always been divisive and recent album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, is unlikely to change that. But if you are a fan, remember your kazoo.
Gateshead, 13 March; Edinburgh, 14 March; Manchester, 16 March; touring to 20 March
Rae Morris
Blackpool’s finest musical export since Little Boots has already released one of 2018’s best albums in the shape of the delicately experimental Someone Out There. In theory, she could take the rest of the year off. Obviously that’s not how major label pop works in the age of depleting sales revenues, so she’s off on a quick UK tour.
Newcastle upon Tyne, 15 March; Glasgow, 16 March; touring to 28 March
Frightened Rabbit
Like the Sugababes before them, Scottish indie rabble Frightened Rabbit have gone through various lineup dramas. Initially a solo project, they then became a duo, then a trio, then a five-piece, then two of them went off to do their own album, then they all reconvened in time for one of the National to co-produce their last album, Painting of a Panic Attack. Phew.
London, 10 & 16 March; Glasgow, 11 March; Edinburgh, 12 March; touring to 17 March
MC
Joan Jonas With Jason Moran
American pianist Jason Moran follows nobody’s rulebook about a jazz musician’s true path. His instinct for the unexpected has distinguished him since the 90s in mixed-media ventures, movie scores, world-music crossovers and more. This collaboration with video and performance artist Jonas extends a unique creative partnership that began in 2005.
Tate Modern: The Tanks, SE1, 16 & 17 March
JF
Four of the best ... classical concerts
La Traviata
English National Opera’s last production of Traviata – a spare, wonderfully perceptive staging by Peter Konwitschny – has inexplicably been jettisoned. In its place comes a production by newly installed artistic director Daniel Kramer that was first seen in Berne last autumn. Claudia Boyle sings the role of Violetta and Lukhanyo Moyake is Alfredo, while Leo McFall conducts.
Coliseum, WC2 16 March to 13 April
Arditti Quartet
The world’s leading contemporary-music quartet have been regular visitors to the Wigmore Hall in recent seasons. Their latest concert includes three UK firsts: new works for string quartet by Philippe Hurel and Marc Andre, and Cosa Resta, a piece for countertenor and string quartet by Salvatore Sciarrino, with Jake Arditti as the vocalist.
Gardiner’s Schumann
Familiar and less familiar Schumann dominates John Eliot Gardiner’s pair of concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra. Each programme contains a symphony (the second and fourth respectively), and one of Schumann’s neglected masterpieces, Overture, Scherzo and Finale, is also included (15 March).
Barbican Hall, EC2, 11 & 15 March
WAKE
For more than 30 years, Graham Vick has been achieving remarkable results with the opera company he founded, and whose productions include a major role for local communities. Birmingham Opera Company’s latest venture is a new work from Giorgio Batistelli, WAKE, a retelling of the story of Lazarus.
B12 Warehouse, Birmingham, 14 to 20 March
AC
Five of the best ... exhibitions
Tacita Dean
When does something become old? As photographic film went digital, Dean was there to turn her camera on a suddenly archaic lab. She also photographed the decaying hulk of Donald Crowhurst’s boat Teignmouth Electron. Her poetic vision gets a national stage here and at the Royal Academy later in spring.
National Gallery & National Portrait Gallery, WC2 15 March to 28 May
Joan Jonas
This revolutionary New York artist has been questioning gender and identity since the 1960s. She was one of the first artists ever to use a video camera to record her explosive performances. In installations such as The Juniper Tree (1976), featuring a Japanese kimono, silk paintings, mirrors and video, Jonas broke all the boundaries.
Tate Modern, SE1, 14 March to 5 August
POP! Art in a Changing Britain
As early as the 1940s, Eduardo Paolozzi collaged pages from US magazines he acquired from GIs to create the first pop art (a technique also used by his contemporary, Nigel Henderson). British pop was driven by the gap between austere postwar reality and images of US consumerism. From Richard Hamilton’s fast cars to David Hockney dreaming by his LA pool, they pictured a modern utopia.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, to 7 April
Eric Fischl
How good a painter is Fischl, who became famous in 1980s New York for bringing figurative art back into fashion? He was scorned by the critic Robert Hughes, but who wasn’t? Fischl’s seriousness seems proven by the fact that he is still at it: painting eerie, unresolved scenes from American life that keep you guessing at their hidden narratives. Donald Trump appears here as a nightmare clown. He makes Pennywise look cute.
Skarstedt Gallery, SW1, to 26 May
Ten Days Six Nights
This year’s BMW Tate Live festival celebrates the influence of Joan Jonas on performance art, video and installation. Participants include Mark Leckey, Sylvia Palacios Whitman and jazz pianist Jason Moran (see p25). Palestinian folklore becomes installation in the work of Jumana Emil Abboud, while Jonas presents a new retrospective and will orchestrate a live outdoor ritual by the Thames.
Tate Modern, SE1, 16 to 25 March
JJ
Five of the best ... theatre shows
Mary Stuart
A coin toss will decide which queen Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams will play at each performance of Schiller’s drama, which pits the Protestant Elizabeth against her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. It’s no gimmick in a riveting production that highlights the random nature of fate. No matter who you see in which role, you will be gripped.
The Duke of York’s, WC2 to 31 March; touring to 28 April
Matilda
Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin capture all the gleeful nastiness of Roald Dahl’s original – then add some more. It is not just the wit of Minchin’s songs and the cleverness of Kelly’s book (often the element that lets a musical down), but how they make it look so effortless. Like their lovable heroine, this is a highly intelligent production that wears its learning lightly.
Cambridge Theatre, WC2, to 10 February
The York Realist
The ambiguities in Peter Gill’s 2001 play, set in York in the early 1960s, are finely excavated in Robert Hastie’s delicate revival, which boasts two fine performances from Ben Batt and Jonathan Bailey as the agricultural labourer and London theatre director who fall in love during a staging of the York Mystery Plays. There are gulfs between country and town, and the middle and working classes, in a play that is full of emotional evasions and things left unsaid.
Donmar Warehouse, WC2, to 24 March; touring to 7 April
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
It is a big play and it’s got the big acting to match in Richard Eyre’s revival, which stars Lesley Manville and Jeremy Irons as a couple who have spawned a deeply unhappy family. Eugene O’Neill described his 1941 play of terrible addictions as one written “in tears and blood” and it was so grounded in autobiography that he forbade it to be published until 25 years after his death. That wish was ignored, and Eyre’s production reveals it as a play of despair and rage, but also one of love.
Wyndham’s Theatre, WC2, to 8 April
Education, Education, Education
The Wardrobe Ensemble takes you back to school and back in time to 1997 and the election of Tony Blair as PM in this sharply comic show about how governments fail schools and schools fail their pupils. Take That, Oasis and the Spice Girls provide the soundtrack, but this smart piece of theatre is far more than an exercise in nostalgia.
Penryn, 10 March; Newbury, 14 March; Lincoln, 16 March; touring to 8 June
LG
Three of the best ... dance shows
Ballet Black
A fable about desire and possession set in 1950s South Africa, Cathy Marston’s The Suit promises to be a serious addition to Ballet Black’s repertory of story ballets. For this double bill, it is paired with a revival of Arthur Pita’s deliciously maverick riff on Shakespeare, A Dream Within a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Barbican Theatre, EC2, 15 to 17 March
Royal Ballet: Bernstein triple bill
The Royal pays tribute to Leonard Bernstein with three ballets composed to scores by the US composer. On offer are premieres of Wayne McGregor’s Chichester Psalms, a new work by Christopher Wheeldon and a revival of Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety.
Royal Opera House, WC2, 15 March to 9 April
Northern Ballet: Kenneth MacMillan programme
Former Royal Ballet principal Zenaida Yanowsky makes a starry guest appearance in Las Hermanas, a hothouse study of sexual rivalries. Completing the programme are Gloria and dance showcase Concerto.
Leeds Grand Theatre, 16 to 17 March
JM
