Arts Reviews

One reason I find most TV thrillers such a huge waste of life is that the bad guys so often turn out to be evil capitalists, corrupt Tory MPs or sinister right-wing terrorist organisations. This owes more to the wishful thinking of instinctively bien-pensant scriptwriters than to reality. Since the war — or even before the war, if you accept that the Nazis were National Socialists — all the greatest threats to our existence and civilisation, from the IRA to militant Islam, from rampant trade unionism to communist imperialism, have come from the extreme Left, not the Right. Until watching The Plot Against Harold Wilson (BBC2, Thursday), I was inclined

Phoenix Dance Theatre is ‘25 years young’, as a filmed documentary shown halfway through last Thursday’s performance reminded us. The notion of youth is a relative one, particularly in the performing-arts world, where a quarter of a century is often regarded as a respectable old age, synonymous with a well-established reputation, a sound history and, arguably, a string of successes. Indeed, 25 years down the line, Phoenix remains a vibrant dance company that thrives on the collaboration with cutting-edge performance-makers. I was not surprised, therefore, to attend a programme, intriguingly entitled Stories in Red, that encompassed a wide variety of styles, techniques and forms; after all, artistic eclecticism has long

Verdi’s Macbeth is one of those operas which I always have hopes will be greater than it ever actually seems in performance. Its seriousness of intention is plain from the outset, and by and large Verdi maintains an intensity which the subject requires, and which isn’t to be found in any of his previous nine operas. The Witches are a problem, and all the special pleading on their behalf still doesn’t begin to solve it convincingly. But there are other, more elusive things about the opera than that which cause me difficulties, and which mean that Macbeth, for all the great interpretations of the two chief characters which there have

It is hard to imagine the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood as the same man. In 1958, Truman Capote wrote the story of a social butterfly whose anxieties are banished by a trip to Tiffany’s; in 1959, he began his dark examination of a quadruple murder, In Cold Blood, a book he finished just before it finished him, in 1966. In Cold Blood was the first non-fiction novel, attaching skilful and superior writing to a sensational ‘real-life’ subject. Capote turns the microscope from the subject matter of the book on to its author, making a clinical study of his experience during these six years. Reading of

Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to congratulate the writer, David Harrower, on his ‘bold’ choice of subject matter. They like playwrights who don’t pander to commercial interests — it demonstrates how serious they are about their craft. In addition, Harrower’s attitude to paedophilia is complex and nuanced — he refuses to condemn the middle-aged perpetrator, even though his victim was only