Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition
Winner’s Curse is a hybrid drama by Dan Patterson and Daniel Taub which opens as a lecture by a fictional diplomat, Hugo Leitski (a dinner-jacketed Clive Anderson). Leitski offers to teach us the subtle art of negotiation. An expert diplomat, he explains, must convince each side that they’re the winners in the negotiation and that
My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of him and what little I knew – his massive, sweary, on-court tantrums – did not inspire much enthusiasm. But then I watched Break Point and realised that here was exactly the kind of man I’d
You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for his survey exhibition, Extinction Beckons. ‘It’s been a very intensive four weeks,’ says an assistant putting the finishing touches to the multi-room installation ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ (2001) when I visit two days before
The Belgian film Close, written and directed by Lukas Dhont, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is up for an Oscar, is a coming-of-age-story that’s exquisite and heart-breaking. Take tissues, and probably not just the one box. I was deeply touched by their little white vests, purchased no doubt from the Belgian equivalent
The debate sparked by Josh Baker’s BBC podcast on Shamima Begum, and her teenage flight to join Isis, has divided opinion sharply into two camps. According to one, she was a naive 15-year-old cynically groomed by hardened operatives in the most feared terror organisation in the world. No, says the other, she was a capable
Even before albums became bloated, thanks to the largesse offered by CDs and streaming, most contained filler: those so-so songs merely passing needle time, weak aural bridges between the big hits and superior deep cuts. Bubblegum-punk and Auto-Tuned pop, sung in a distinctly nasal American-Yorkshire hybrid Increasingly, live concerts have filler, too. With the collapse
Careful what you wish for. There can be no definitive way to stage an opera, and it’s the critic’s duty to keep an open mind. Still, we’ve all occasionally gazed at a white cube that represents an Alpine meadow, or watched a chivalric hero slouch across the stage in tracksuit bottoms, and felt our hearts
