The awards season may be over, but can I nominate Neil White for a gong anyway? He genuinely deserves one. After all, he’s the chap from Nottingham who watched all of the 600 or so films that were released into British cinemas last year — and then blogged about them at www.everyfilmin2011.com. You might question
There’s one exception to the sometimes trivial and artificial events of the Cultural Olympiad: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library (until 25 September). Where other shows emphasise London’s separateness, Writing Britain subordinates the capital to the geography, peoples and history of the British Isles as a whole. Writers have recorded Britain’s development
Off to Narnia. Director Rupert Goold has recreated C.S. Lewis’s permafrosted fantasy world in a circus tent moored in Kensington Gardens. And at the height of summer too. An impossible feat. But tons of cash, and many months of preparation, have been sunk into this effort. The show starts with The Wardrobe looming up in
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out
One of the great things about working in a collapsing industry is the cornucopia of possibilities that begins to open up of all the stuff you could do instead. In the past 18 months I have toyed with becoming: a speechwriter, a radio shock jock, a YouTube cult, a think tank senior visiting fellow, a
It’s a rare pleasure to find an unfamiliar artist of the 18th century whose work speaks to the contemporary mind as lucidly as Carlo Labruzzi (1748–1817). I had never heard of him before this show, being still in my playpen when the last Labruzzi exhibition excited the art world in 1960. Although celebrated in his
So, another week, and another Judd Apatow comedy — The Five-Year Engagement — rolls into town, and blah-de-blah-de-blah and yet more blah-de-blah-de-blah although the difference this time, which I feel honour-bound to mention, is that I totally loved it. I laughed. I cried (twice; properly). It is funny, even though no one falls on top
It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound
