If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t want to know what happens in Mascagni’s Iris. Take that as a spoiler alert: our Japanese heroine is so young that as the opera opens, she’s playing with a doll. She’s abducted, installed in a
What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder the top ten jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe are starting to sound as though they were banged out in a cracker factory. But this one, from Ross Smith, did make me laugh: ‘Sleep is my
David Walliams is one of the biggest-selling children’s authors in the world (having shifted some 25 million copies in more than 50 languages). And he’s now become the first children’s novelist since Roald Dahl to have their book turned into a full-scale RSC musical extravaganza. As fun as these big musicals might be, they aren’t
The history plays are different. In dramas like Othello, Hamlet and Much Ado, Shakespeare laid out the plot with great clarity because the stories were new, or newish, to his audiences. But Richard III belonged to the recent past. The wonky monarch’s death predated the play’s debut by just over a century, so Richard’s era
True to the Andrew Roberts rule that the only bearable series on TV these days are ones with subtitles, I’ve started watching Der Pass (Sky Atlantic). Not unlike The Bridge and The Tunnel, it starts with a dead body exactly straddling a border, thus requiring the intervention of detectives from two national jurisdictions. This time,
We were looking at a 1956 Fiat Multipla, a charming ergonomic marvel that predicted today’s popular MPVs. Rather grandly, I said to my guide: ‘I think you’ll find the source of the Multipla in an unrealised 1930s design of Mario Revelli di Beaumont.’ He looked a bit blank. This exhibition is a rare attempt to
Ordinary Love stars Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson as a long-married couple whose lives are disrupted when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Not very Christmassy, you might think, but it’s not a ‘cancer story’, as has been said in some quarters, it’s a love story, told profoundly and beautifully and honestly rather than cloyingly
