Arts Reviews

In 1845, the theatre impresario Benjamin Lumley made history by inviting the four greatest ballerinas of the day to appeartogether on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. It is fitting, therefore, that next week, 169 years later, Sergei Danilian’s internationally acclaimed project Kings of the Dance should reach the London Coliseum. After all, the project, which had its world première in 2006, is a modern adaptation of an old idea, even though it is an all-male event this time round, and more than just an exploitation of trite balletomania, which is probably what Lumley went for. Echoes of the old balletomania can be found in the title itself,

FILM: Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer)  Critics who saw it at the Venice Film Festival thought it either ‘laughably bad’ or a ‘masterpiece’. This week you get the chance to decide whether Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a kind of alien butcher on the hunt for human meat to ferry back to a group of extraterrestrial gourmands, is in the mould of Glazer’s Oscar-nominated Sexy Beast or, like his Birth, will sink without trace. OPERA: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera House Richard Strauss’ barmy opera about a part-human, part-gazelle Empress whose husband will turn to stone unless she can find a shadow for herself (and

A play about the 2012 Delhi rape was never going to be easy viewing and unsurprisingly Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya is painful to watch. It’s easy to close a newspaper when details are too graphic or flick a TV channel when the news becomes unbearable. But this performance is painful because it confronts the most difficult of truths in the most gritty detail. And we, as the audience in the stifling intimacy of the Southbank’s Purcell Room, were unable to look away. Conceived by Indian actress Poorna Jagannathan and scripted by South African playwright Yael Farber, Nirbhaya is currently being performed in London as part of the Women of the Word festival at

The other day I got an invitation to a do called ‘For Now and Forever – a reception and photo exhibition celebrating the life of Hugo Chávez’, with speeches by various left-wing notables, including the one and only Len McCluskey. It’s been a year since Venezuela’s cuddly comandante passed away, and supporters of his Bolivarian revolution want you to know it. Attracted by the prospect of a free glass of wine and the comedy value of hearing somebody say ‘¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!’ unironically, it was a no-brainer. And so I found myself in Fitzrovia’s Bolívar Hall, surrounded by the most 70s crowd this side of a Van der Graaf

If Margaret Thatcher is remembered by many more as a caricature than as her actual self, then blame Spitting Image. The show, which ran from 1984 to 1996, portrayed her variously as a cross-dresser, a fascist and a bully but, to her credit, she never complained. Or, if she did, there’s no record of it. Of course it wasn’t just politicians who were targeted; anyone in the public eye was also ripe for a takedown, from Kylie to the Queen. Deference — what’s that? To mark the programme’s 30th anniversary, BBC4 has created an Arena documentary that takes viewers behind the scenes of the Spitting Image process; introducing us to

Two words tell you everything you need to know about today’s announcement that BBC3 is to become an online-only channel: ‘spoiler alert’. The phrase is now part of the cultural language, an everyday reality for consumers of all types of media. And that’s because broadcasting – the notion that we all watch the same thing at the same time – is, for huge numbers of people, dead. Not dying – dead. That’s why it doesn’t matter that you’ll now only be able to watch BBC3 on the iPlayer. Of all Auntie’s channels it’s surely the best one to be pushed off the terrestrial cliff first — it’s aimed at the

There’s a campaign running at the moment to rebrand History of Art and clear up some of the myths surrounding the subject. It’s seen as a posh subject, studied by posh girls, and with good reason too: A-level History of Art is offered at only 17 state secondary schools out of more than 3,000, plus a further 15 sixth–form colleges. By contrast, over 90 fee-paying schools offer the subject. I not only studied it at school, but went on to read it at university. And yes, the majority of the people I met while studying it were posh girls from privileged backgrounds. At university, the course was read by a

The Today programme’s early morning audience were roused by a very excited reporter chasing Bono at the Oscars this morning. ‘Bono! BONO!’ he shouted, before the Great Man himself strolled over to offer Radio 4 listeners some, er, unique wisdom. listen to ‘BONO! BONO! on the Today programme’ on Audioboo

One of the greats of French cinema, Alain Resnais (1922 – 2014), has died. His early films, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961), which experimented boldly with visuals and narrative, were the key inspiration for the French New Wave, dictating the direction Godard and Truffaut headed in. But where some saw innovation, others only saw pretentiousness. Of Last Year in Marienbad, the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote: ‘The term ‘sleeping beauty’ provides, I think, a fairly good transition to Last Year at Marienbad — or Sleeping Beauty of the International Set, the high-fashion experimental film, the snow job in the ice palace. Here we are, back at the no-fun party