Last year, within the space of five weeks before Christmas, I lost two friends who had illumined the world for me and made it a more enlivening place. Both were artists, both were in their eighties and both were determined individualists who recognised each other’s work without being in any way close allies. John Craxton
Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler adapts Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, an audacious enterprise. Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler adapts Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, an audacious enterprise. Unfortunately, it fails, as I think all the composer’s operas do, apart perhaps from The Love for Three Oranges, and mainly because he gives no evidence of
There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. Perhaps I am oversensitive, but vast stone lions and super-size friezes depicting epic battles conflict with Holy Minimalism in
11 and 12 Barbican, until 27 February A Life In Three Acts: Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill Soho, until 27 February Peter Brook, the world’s most maddening theatre director, returns to London with an adaptation of a novel set in the French colony of Mali in west Africa. Brook is never as bad as his
Crazy Heart 15, Nationwide Crazy Heart is the film in which Jeff Bridges plays a broken-down, washed-up, boozy country music singer who may or may not be saved by the love of a good woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and while I wanted to love this film, and strived to love this film, and hadn’t really contemplated
After weeks of waiting, it was all over in a matter of seconds. Weeks in which I’ve listened to every episode, just in case. Weeks of enduring night after night the awe-inspiringly-dull Annette and Helen saga. Weeks of wondering how The Archers’ scriptwriters would cope with the death last October of Norman Painting, the actor
The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. The closer we get to the Great Disappointment — aka the forthcoming Heath administration — the more I miss Margaret Thatcher. Just how much I was reminded by Michael Cockerell’s new series The Great
Taxi touts outside greeted me with a hopeful ‘Bula’. Mynah birds squabbled in the jacarandas and teenagers on the nearby parkland were throwing long passes with a rugby ball. Not quite your average UK betting-shop setting, but this was the Fiji branch of Grants Waterhouse. I had stepped in seeking a little inspiration for the
