Arts Reviews

If Monty Python were working in 1607, they might have come up with something like Francis Beaumont’s raucous The Knight of the Burning Pestle. A parody of popular chivalric romances of the day, the play follows the adventures of Rafe, an oafish grocer’s apprentice who decides to dub himself “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”, or in modern English, “The Knight of the Diseased Penis”. Yes, this play is a three-hour syphilis joke. So it’s a curious choice for the first season of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, an indoor alternative to the longer-standing open air Globe. But as our hero wanders from The Strand to Waltham Forest, via Aldgate

That’s right. The evil scumbags who work in the City appear to be doing a better job at being modern and liberal than the state-subsidised art world. According to last year’s Creative Skillset Employment Census, 5.4 per cent of those working in the arts were from the black or ethnic minorities. In the City, by contrast, figures from 2012 show that 30.5 per cent of employees were from the black or ethnic minorities. So the decades of smug hand-wringing, the diversity drives and ethnicity awareness classes, the form-filling and box-ticking, has produced an arts workforce that Enoch Powell would have been proud of: 94.6 per cent white. Whereas in the neoliberal cesspit that

If you don’t go out on a Saturday night, you stay in and imagine what it would be like to be out. And if you do that, there’s a chance you’ll find yourself in front of Take Me Out, the dating programme that airs on the ITV primetime slot once enjoyed by Blind Date. Last Saturday, incredibly, it completed its sixth series. Such is the Tinder-like trend for having dates brought to you, rather than actually having to go out to get them yourself. And what an eye-opener it is. Thirty women, apparently tailored by the same outfitter, totter down a staircase, and take up position behind thirty electric lecterns.

For a committed, if unsuccessful, capitalist, I enjoy French culture an embarrassing amount – every last state-funded drop of it. Give me five-act operas with cast lists the size of a small Chinese city, give me obscenely expensive works of public art, give me inhumane concrete estates, give me unintelligible modernist music and I’ll be drooling with pleasure all night. In fact, I’m seeing a five-act French opera with a cast list the size of a small Chinese city tonight in Bordeaux. That’s the kind of disgusting thing I like to do. In my defence, I am aware that what I am doing is immoral and what is being created should be

What do you say to an arts graduate? Hamburger and fries, please. It’s an old joke but one that still rings true as students consider the value of a university education. A new survey from the graduate recruitment site Totaljobs.com today suggests that 40 per cent of graduates are still looking for work six months after graduating, whilst a quarter are still unemployed a year later. The news isn’t much for those who manage to bag a job – the latest ONS’ employment figures suggest that nearly half of graduates who have found work are in jobs that don’t require degrees. But even if the student of today takes the

Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration at Two Temple Place (until 27 April) is like a giant cabinet of curiosities. Maps, gizmos and memorabilia are spread across two floors of this glorious high-Victorian building on the Embankment. There are drawings from doomed polar expeditions, bones and teeth of fish from the Woodwardian Collection (see above), early botanical diagrams, hoards of medieval gold, the loot of empire (the Sufi snakes-and-ladders board in ebony and mother-of-pearl is memorable) and John Maynard Keynes’s armchair. The exhibits are drawn from the eight museums of the University of Cambridge. Much is made of the fact that this is the first time the university’s museums have collaborated