The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive at the Wormsley Estate you enter a fantastic, baffling world. Figures in black tie stroll between topiary hedges in obedience to unstated rules, while serving staff hover a few paces behind, gliding silently in to
‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. Given the previous two and a half hours, the answer would seem to be a decided no. It is a frothy confection even by the standards of his later operas, the
Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the
‘Sunil Lanba, Salman Quaraishi, Omar Syed…’ Names play from a crackling gramophone. We hear what they were before the war. Teacher. Engineer. Dancer. And what they endured during it. ‘I put down telephone cables in the mud,’ says one man. ‘Voices in the mud. Half of them already dead, sir.’ Already dead repeats and repeats.
Tracy Letts begins his trailer-trash comedy Killer Joe with the corniest of platitudes. A runaway druggie named Chris Smith needs $6,000 to stop ‘some guys’ from killing him. He asks his dad who declares himself skint but together they plot to bump off Mrs Smith, Chris’s mum, and collect her life insurance. Interesting idea. Luckily
‘The rule in our household is: if a TV series hasn’t got subtitles, it’s not worth watching,’ a friend told me the other day. Once this approach would have been both extremely limiting and insufferably pompous. In the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime, though, it makes a lot of sense. There’s something about English-speaking
‘When I’m on good form,’ Edward Bawden told me, ‘I get to some point in the design and I laugh and talk — and if I’m laughing, it probably means the work is rather good.’ You can see his exuberance everywhere in the exhibition of his work at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It is a thoroughly
Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing
Headlines announcing that Radio 4’s flagship Today programme is losing its audience while Radio 3’s Breakfast has put on numbers got me up and listening extra early to find out which of all the presenters is most likely to keep me tuned in. Why have the efforts to brighten up Today, with longer interviews, more
