Arts

Arts feature

Lloyd Evans

‘Keep the spark’

Lloyd Evans visits the NoFit State Circus in Wales and watches an unusual rehearsal T here are lots of things you can’t do any more. Smoke in a pub. Buy a video recorder. Trust the bloke who runs your bank. And you can’t run away to the circus either. These days the wannabe stilt-walker or

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Escape from reality

Gerhard Richter Portraits National Portrait Gallery, until 31 May George Always: Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 31 May Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is one of the most influential figures in the art world. This show of his portraits is slightly more enlivening than his recent coloured-panel exhibition at

Irish stew

Dancing at Lughnasa Old Vic Burnt by the Sun Lyttelton It’s almost physically painful to see the vandalism wrought at the Old Vic by the new stage configuration. It’s like looking at some doomed Darwinian experiment, a cloven-hoofed butterfly, a spaniel with a trunk, a winged slug. Worse still is the fussy, over-ambitious set for

Bellicose Bellini

I Capuleti e i Montecchi Royal Opera Education Double Bill Glyndebourne Of all the painfully premature deaths of composers, there can’t be any doubt that Schubert’s is the least endurable. Shatteringly great as his finest works are, one can envisage him striking out on new paths and taking his place beside his adored Beethoven. Mozart

British institution

Now that the Allegri Miserere season is fully launched — the text is suitable for Lent — it seems fitting to ask why every choir in the land thinks it incumbent on them to sing this piece of music, for 150 years only ever sung within the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Now that the

Stunted growth

Eonnagata Sadler’s Wells Theatre Twelfth Floor Queen Elizabeth Hall Has dance-theatre given up the ghost? Judging by the two performances I saw last week, Eonnagata and The Twelfth Floor, it would appear so. Not surprisingly, one may add, given that, after more than two decades, the provocative, elusive, multilayered, postmodern genre has exhausted any chance

Woof to all that

Marley & Me PG, Nationwide  Marley & Me is based on American journalist John Grogan’s best-selling memoir about his young family and their Labrador — ‘the world’s worst dog’ — and it all sounds horribly cloying and lame, I know, but don’t rush to judge unless you simply can’t help yourself, in which case do

Get real

Did you know that in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire there were death squads of heavily armed policemen whose job it was to assassinate anyone who got too close — be he witness, investigating officer, or informer — to unmasking their mysterious bosses’ sinister web of lies, deceit, corruption, betrayal, wife beating, torture and serial killing?

Forgotten voices

Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio Four) began and ended with the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, mourning the loss of her country’s independence. Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio Four) began and ended with the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, mourning the loss of her country’s independence. In A Tibetan Odyssey —