Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems
A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities. I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal Lecter. It seems that Lithuanians are famous only in Lithuania unless they’re the monstrous inventions of non-Lithuanians – an injustice Dulwich Picture Gallery is helping to correct with its M.K. Ciurlionis exhibition. Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’ although, alas, in this instance cinema does not appear to love him back. The magic of film-going is the theme but there is almost no film-going in it and what there is isn’t magic. Peculiarly
I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of my family were blasting out a patchy David Bowie playlist: Stand Up Against Revisionism. It’s harder than ever these days not to succumb to printing the myth – reality can be so so-so – but
