Arts

Arts feature

Does anyone like 3-D?

Roger Ebert believes not, and that its use in films is an annoyance and a distraction Has it really come to this? I read in Variety, the film industry journal, that ‘Mark Thomas of Elsinore Films is producing a 3-D musical Hamlet targeting the Harry Potter and High School Musical market’. I am not concerned

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Art of darkness

The East Anglians; Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, until 13 December Most exhibitions of photographs could be viewed just as satisfactorily from an armchair with a book of high-quality reproductions, but not The East Anglians. There are 58 colour photographs in this show, and they need to be

Gasping for entertainment

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Theatre Royal Haymarket Inherit the Wind Old Vic ‘What do you want?’ a film producer asks Holly Golightly about half an hour into Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but if I find out I’ll tell you first.’ At this point my hopes for the evening collapsed. Rule one of

Easy romp

Zombieland 15, Nationwide Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee 15, Key Cities I can’t say I care much for zombies — that is, film zombies; I’ve never met a real one — but the horror-comedy Zombieland is quite fun and does feature such a delicious cameo from Bill Murray it almost makes up for all the overlong

Musical triumph

Tristan und Isolde Royal Opera House Tristan und Isolde is a masterpiece that can be given widely different interpretations, since even by Wagner’s standards it is permeated by ambiguities. He may have intended, as he wrote in that famous letter to Liszt, to write ‘a monument to that most beautiful of dreams’, that is, completely

Take Two

A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache

Star quality | 10 October 2009

Scottish Ballet: 40th Anniversary Season Sadler’s Wells Theatre Scottish Ballet has been frequently praised for its stylistically impeccable and theatrically superb renditions of George Balanchine’s works. It is thus more than fitting that the company’s 40th-anniversary programme kicks off with Rubies, the sparkling central section of Jewels, his acclaimed 1967 triptych. Rubies, which is often

Moment of truth

I wonder how many people still listen to plays on radio now that there is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube and the hours taken up with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just that we’re being taken over by techie gadgetry so that there is less and less time to do anything

There will be blood

All right, I surrender. There’s just no way on earth I can deal in 600 words with all the great, or potentially great, TV that has been on lately. Emma; Alex: A Passion for Life (the sequel to that moving documentary about the brilliant Etonian musician with cystic fibrosis); Generation Kill. Truly, it has been