Arts Reviews

Two households, both alike in dignity. Capulets in red tights, Montagues in green. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet opens in a piazza where the clash of swords makes a fifth section of the orchestra. Strings, woodwind, brass, percussion… and steel. If Shakespeare’s young bloods and blades once seemed remotely Renaissance, made romantic by distance, Verona’s knife-crime crisis is now horribly real and present. Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio (Matthew Ball, Valentino Zucchetti and James Hay) make a convincing gang: pumped-up, freewheeling, anarchic. They goose the harlots, twit the nurse and goad each other in reckless acts of lads, lads, lads bravado. Their bragging, ragging gatecrashers’ dance is a tour de force.

On Sunday a drama began with ED905 being stolen by an OCG who’d faked an RTC that required IR, little realising that they had a UCO in their midst. So yes, Line of Duty (BBC1) is back in all its jargon-laden glory — and, judging from the first episode, it’s lost none of its ability to grip either. For those a bit rusty on their police abbreviations, that opening scene featured the female member of an organised crime group pretending she’d crashed her car with a baby inside, causing the woman in charge of a passing police convoy to stop and help. The rest of the gang then appeared in

Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel tries very, very hard to prove it. But while the result is respectful, topical and agonisingly, paralysingly sincere, it’s also a sheep in wolf’s clothing. You can’t have your victims and kill them too. You have only to look at the opera’s title, bent awkwardly round its central colon, to see the conflict. Front and centre you have Jack the Ripper — a marketing department’s darling, promising Gothic horror and lashings of gore. Following behind (in slightly smaller type) you have his victims,

There was a moment more than 20 years ago when Bankside Power Station was derelict but its transformation into Tate Modern had not yet begun. I remember thinking, on a visit to the site, how beautiful and impressive the huge rusting generators looked — like enormous real-life sculptures by Anthony Caro. Nothing that has since been exhibited in what came to be called the Turbine Hall has looked quite so strong. A quarter of a century later, the artist Mike Nelson has reversed the process — not at Tate Modern, but at Tate Britain where he has filled the Duveen Galleries with massive pieces of redundant machinery: cement mixers, engine

Which of the Beatles would you most like to have been? Not either of the dead ones, presumably. Nor the one continually derided for his alleged lack of talent. Definitely not the embarrassing, gurning, two-thumbs-up uncool one… Anyway, it’s a trick question. The correct answer, at least it is for me after watching The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC4, Friday), is Pete Best — the drummer who got ousted just before the band got big because he was too good-looking, too quiet and, some say, because Brian Epstein couldn’t handle his mum’s pushiness. Best, I’d always imagined, was the unluckiest man in history. So when he was featured on the

To stage Verdi’s Il Trovatore, they say, is easy: you just need the four greatest singers in the world. The Royal Opera has applied this principle to La forza del destino. Jonas Kaufmann sings Alvaro, Anna Netrebko is his beloved Leonora, and Ludovic Tézier her brother Carlo, with the mighty Ferruccio Furlanetto completing the set as the priest Padre Guardiano. The results have been pretty much as you might expect, ranging from the now-traditional speculation about whether Kaufmann would actually show up (he did) to reports of tickets changing hands privately for £5,000 apiece. And yes, it was extraordinary: a four-hour rush of some of the most glorious singing anyone