Arts Reviews

Opera North has launched a ‘Green Season’, which means (among other things) that the sets and costumes for its new Falstaff are recycled. On one level, that’s nothing new: this eternally underfunded company has been performing miracles of sustainability for years now, and there’s usually at least one production each season that looks like it’s been cobbled together from the lumber room. A few seasons back, when ON rebooted their ‘little greats’ season of one-act operas, they mixed ’n’ matched sets between wildly different operas, with cheerful abandon.  Sir John lives in a caravan and quaffs sack in his underpants – shades of Jez Butterworth’s Rooster Byron Still, it’s a

‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls posed this question on their feminist poster, the answer suggested by the Royal Academy’s Marina Abramovic retrospective – touted as the first solo show by a woman artist in the main galleries – is: ‘They don’t have to, but it helps.’ Abramovic achieved fame in the 1970s with a series of gruelling performances that tested the limits of her mental and physical endurance. But without the nudity, performances such as ‘Freeing the Body’ (1975), in which she danced till she dropped, and ‘Lips of Thomas’ (1975), in which she consumed

The story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is hammered into us all from an early age. But its moral lessons obscure its more literal advice about building: skimping on materials is a false economy. It’s a lesson learned too late for schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac). Who would’ve predicted that concrete made cheaper by cutting it with air, puffed up like a Malteser, would end up crumbling like one too? It’ll soon prove that the initial cost savings of Raac will be wiped out multiple times over once the risk to life and expensive, disruptive repairs have been taken into account. Getting materials wrong almost cost the