You know those sad, confused people you sometimes see, standing on street corners and shouting dementedly at passing cars. Well, the other week, that madman was me. I was in Sheffield to cover the Crucible’s Michael Frayn season, and had risen early to write my review. And then my usually reliable laptop failed to come
Will Gore talks to David Suchet about his forthcoming West End role and his debt to the Belgian detective The first thing I notice about David Suchet is his facial hair. It isn’t a stick-on Poirot tash, unfortunately, but a grey beard that he has grown for his latest role, James Tyrone, in the West
Not many ballet companies convey young love as credibly as Birmingham Royal Ballet. And I am not talking about select soloists, but the company as a whole, for youth, freshness and vibrancy are its most distinctive traits. Add to that a slick sense of style, impeccable technique and co-ordination and you have the perfect ballet
There should be a sign on the door. ‘Plotless play in progress.’ Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, won first prize in a 1957 scriptwriting competition organised by Kenneth Tynan and judged by Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, Peter Hall and others. The West End promoters thought the script uncommercial and never gave it
Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, whose UK première was at the Royal Opera last week, has received the severest critical panning I can recall for any new opera. It is no masterpiece, but I wonder why it has been rounded on when so many new — not to mention old — pieces with no more going
Two documentaries this week made us ponder what our country, with its 1 per cent of the world’s population, exists for. How God Made the English (BBC2, Saturday) had the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch musing about the way we have believed for a thousand years that we were God’s chosen people, having taken that baton from
One of the more considerable pleasures of exhibition-viewing outside London recently was the Claude show at the Ashmolean. London exhibitions are becoming mobbed by crowds, and there is little enjoyment in shoving or being shoved in the supposed pursuit of artistic enlightenment, and absolutely no chance to contemplate individual pictures in the hurly-burly. As the
Totally unexpectedly, as I don’t like Brit gangster films particularly — so many sociopaths, so little time — I loved, loved, loved, loved, loved Wild Bill and, for those of you who are slow on the uptake, let me say four times more: I loved, loved, loved, loved it. It may not even be a
On the page a minute’s worth of words doesn’t look like much. A hundred and forty-four or thereabouts. But try spouting forth for 60 seconds on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition and those 144 words become an awful lot to find, especially when they have to be summoned up at speed from
‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating
