Andrew Lambirth on our continuing fascination with the Orient Almost everywhere you look these days there’s an exhibition to do with China or the Far East. Tinselly young oriental artists are fêted as if they were better than their limp-brained occidental counterparts, and scarcely a considered brushstroke between them. The East is Big Business and
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny Usher Hall Ysaye Quartet Queen’s Hall The Two Widows Edinburgh Festival Theatre The Edinburgh International Festival got off to a soggy start this year. The Usher Hall, where as always the opening concert took place, is heavily shrouded, while Stage Two of a renovation process which will
Josef Maria Auchentaller (1865-1945): A Secessionist on the Borders of the Empire Palazzo Attems-Petzenstein, Gorizia, Italy, until 30 September The story that unfolds in this fascinating exhibition is a strange and poignant one. The Viennese-born Auchentaller was a contributor to the Munich Secession of 1892 and a key player in the Vienna Secession of 1897,
Lecturing on a course in Seattle has taken me away from London in recent days, and therefore from the excitement of Roger Wright’s first Prom season. As Wright himself said in a preliminary interview, if the season goes well he will claim it as his first; if it goes badly he can reasonably say that
Dybbuk King’s Theatre Britt on Britt Assembly Rooms Surviving Spike Assembly Rooms Perhaps it should be the Inter-notional Festival. The posh bit of Edinburgh, the International Festival, is incurably besotted with the idea of conceptual hybrids, of cross-fertilisation between cultures. Their first offering is Dybbuk, a show about Jews, ghosts and exorcism, set in Poland
Hamlet Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Star casting at Stratford runs the risk of propelling a show into an orbit hard to track or make sense of. Such is inevitably the case with the casting of David Tennant as Hamlet. Director Gregory Doran apparently got the idea from the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? In
What a dilemma. The synchronised diving, with young Tom Daley taking part for Team GB, was due on at 7.30 on Monday morning, but that’s when I have to write my column. How could I watch the Olympics on TV when I should be writing about radio? And yet, having missed the cycling and Nicole
It’s three in the morning and a BBC executive is home in bed. Suddenly he wakes up, sweating. ‘What is it, darling?’ asks his solicitous wife. ‘I had a nightmare,’ he replies; ‘I dreamed that one of our viewers was bored. Bored! Just for a moment, but, my God…’ It’s the only explanation for some
I have always been reticent about recommending gardening books for anyone short of something to read on holiday. After all, gardening books are often heavy and unwieldy, their appearance is not improved by contact with sand or sangria, and they make you terribly homesick for your own garden. But, since reading Keith Simpson’s suggested summer
