The new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera has received mixed reviews. It shouldn’t have done. They should have been unmitigatedly hostile, indignant, outraged — except that all those reactions would almost certainly have delighted the director, Barrie Kosky. What might please him less is the accusation of tedium, of making what often
‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at the same play last month: ‘The best I have seen on-stage.’ How about the Evening Standard? Then: ‘Like trying to solve a crossword puzzle where every vertical clue is designed to put you off the
‘Hi, it’s Jonas.’ When the great tenor rings from Vienna, I ask if there are any topics he wants me to avoid, such are his minders’ anxieties. ‘Ask anything,’ laughs Jonas. ‘I’m not shy.’ He is heading in from the airport to see a physio — ‘these concerts, you have to stand there all the
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the nastily burbling bass guitar that did it. I had been wondering what I was listening to and then it dawned — a Level 42 tribute band. Naffer than T’Pau. Whitey does bland, tuneless funk. And
It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a waffle-festival that descends into a torture session. Who would choose to spend time with the Tyrone family? Dad is a skinflint millionaire. Mum is a wittering smack addict. They’ve produced two layabout sons. One is
Shortly after my rave review of McMafia eight weeks ago, I got a long message from an old friend chastising me for being so horribly wrong. Could I not see that the series was boring, convoluted and badly acted? Was I aware of how many better series there had been on Amazon and Netflix recently
Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Greta Gerwig with a plot synopsis that need not detain us as it is basically only this: girl has a mum. (Or: girl has a mum, and sometimes they row and sometimes they don’t.) But thus far it has won near universal critical praise, two
Some of us grew up worrying about reds under the bed, which was perhaps not as foolish as all that if a report on Saturday morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 is to be believed. Amid a cacophony of weird-sounding bleeps and disembodied voices, Gordon Corera, the BBC’s security correspondent (always clear, calm and collected,
