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A winter off. That’s what Penelope Keith had planned for this year. But when an opportunity arrived to play Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals she couldn’t turn it down. ‘It’s one of the great women’s parts so I thought I must have a bash at that.’
We meet in a compact, slightly unloved dressing-room in the Theatre Royal, Brighton, where she sits in light-brown slacks and a soft-pink cardigan with her back to a bright mirror festooned with good luck cards. An assistant brings me a cup of coffee and Keith instantly spots that I have nowhere to...
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It’s an idea so simple in concept, so elegant in execution, so bursting with potential, that you kick yourself for not thinking of it yourself. ‘You put your project here,’ explains 28-year-old solicitor and budding internet entrepreneur Michael Troughton, scrolling down the front page of his flash new website. ‘And you put your money there.’ Even his cat comes to investigate.
What Troughton is describing is WeFund.co.uk, the first British attempt to apply crowdfunding to arts financing. Barack Obama used crowdfunding for his 2008 presidential bid — that is, asking a lot of people to give a small amount of...
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So I’m sitting in what’s laughably called the Serenity Garden at a London psychiatric hospital that shall remain nameless, and one of the patients approaches me quietly and asks me what I do. Not what I’m locked up for (psych hospital etiquette forbids it), but what I do. She’s cute in an anorexic, self-harming kind of way, so I tell her that I play the piano. ‘What, like in a band?’ she asks, remarkably unslurred by meds. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just me. I’m a concert pianist. Classical shit.’
‘Wow! Seriously? Man, that’s so cool! So I guess you started...
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Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), better known as Canaletto, is a safe bet and a crowd-pleaser, and the weary critic is entitled to ask — not another Canaletto show? What can there be left to say? But note the exhibition title — Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals. Venice comes first, the great tourist trap herself, kingdom of the sea and romance-magnet, and in the placing of the words the unashamed popularism of the show emerges. Or so the cynic might think. In fact, this exhibition is not simply a celebration of Venice, but a carefully selected survey of Venetian view painting...
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In the spring of 2008 I went on a press trip with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, to Hadrian’s wall. It was one of a series of jaunts planned by the BM in the run-up to its great Hadrian exhibition, a little Roman holiday. But though the wall was fascinating, I spent most of my time inspecting the director. He’s charming and universally admired — but also enigmatic. What are his politics? What does he do for fun? Nobody seems to know.
So I watched him at Segedunum in Newcastle, talking to local grandees, charming, mercurial,...
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When Hollywood wants to captivate an audience of ‘grown-ups’ — those who have become desperate to escape the awful dreariness and suffering of their everyday lives — it shows them an alternative soothing world into which they can be plugged, for just a few hours.
These poor suckers — we’ll call them ‘cinema-goers’ — yearn for this glossy, idealised world, which will be not a dream (because dreams can be puzzling and obtuse) but a calming vision, populated by beautiful characters who will look human, but not too human. These characters will tend to inhabit large, bare apartments to...
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