Arts feature

‘Oompa Loompa juice,’ says the actor Alex Jennings when I ask if he takes any supplements to preserve his looks. He’s 57 but could pass for a decade younger. We meet backstage in his Drury Lane suite, which boasts a fridge crammed with pink champagne, where he’s preparing to play the lead role in Charlie

An eccentric English aristocrat who constructed a 20-mile network of underground corridors to avoid coming into contact with his fellow humans on his country estate; a Japanese dentist who has amassed an enormous collection of decorative details from buildings spanning a century, retrieved from Tokyo demolition sites; the German inventor of ‘Scalology’, who has spent

On  18 September, the Scots will decide whether they want to become independent. But it is only a coincidence that Scotland’s most celebrated violinist is launching an album that brings together Scottish folk music, the tunes of Robert Burns and Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Nonetheless, I want to know where Nicola Benedetti stands on the

I watched the new DVD of Gregory’s Girl on the train from London up to Edinburgh. I hadn’t seen Bill Forsyth’s school-yard comedy in more than 30 years. Incredibly, it hasn’t dated in the slightest. When I saw it in the cinema, in 1981, as an acne-ridden adolescent, this tender romance was a revelation —

I spend an hour with the theatre director Polly Teale. She’s 50ish with a tall, willowy physique and strong, aquiline features. Her hair is arranged in a combed bob whose flicky fringe overhangs her bright, deep-set eyes. She’s easy-going and so good-natured that at one point she asks me about myself — a courtesy few

The phrase ‘Constable Country’ summons up a quintessentially English landscape: river and meadows, open vistas bordered by trees, the greens and golds of cultivated acres, with the wide (and often blustery) skies of East Anglia over all. John Constable (1776–1837) is one of our greatest artists and certainly one of the most popular. His vision

Glyndebourne, the great Sussex opera house, celebrates its 80th anniversary this summer. Hurrah! There is a new music director, too, 31-year-old Robin Ticciati. Hurrah! And he opens the season next week with a new production of Der Rosenkavalier directed by Richard Jones. Hurrah! Summer has begun. There are few finer plots of land to be

‘America,’ said John Updike, ‘is a vast conspiracy for making you happy.’ If that’s true, there have been few more successful conspiracies than the Broadway musical — that is, the ‘book’ (meaning ‘play’) musical — a dramatic form that blends drama of character and narrative with song and dance. ‘Words make you think thoughts, music

‘Well, Commissioner, anything exciting happening these days?’ Those were the first words — all seven of ’em — spoken by a new character introduced in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics. That character was a chap called Bruce Wayne. You may know him better as the Batman. And, if you subtract May 1939 from

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) is one of the great painters of the Venetian School, often joined in an unholy trinity with Titian and Tintoretto. But he was not Venetian, and only arrived in the city when he was well into his twenties. His formative years were spent in Verona, hence his popular name (he was also

When the New York art dealer David Zwirner opened his London gallery in October 2012, observers expected him to make a statement of intent. Zwirner, who the magazine Art Review placed at number two in its 2013 Art Power 100 survey, is one of the art world’s most important three gallerists (the others are Larry

In 1857, the National Gallery’s pioneering director Sir Charles Eastlake bought one of Veronese’s most sumptuous paintings, ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’. The purchase was met with strident and very personal opposition from a Tory, Lord Elcho, in the House of Commons, but his objections were swatted aside by Lord Palmerston and we were

There’s a problem, as we all know, with female roles in the theatrical canon, and it reaches all the way back to the Bard. Shakespeare’s women lack the richness and variety of his male characters. Modern theatre practitioners have tried all kinds of ploys to correct this imbalance. Next month the RSC launches a season

Today’s top public schools are plush country clubs with superb facilities, lovely food, first-class teaching, no fagging, no beating and, one imagines, minimal sexual interference from the staff. Most even have things called girls. While excellent at turning out world-class actors, the public schools these days are far too nice and unbrutal to be of

In 1845, the theatre impresario Benjamin Lumley made history by inviting the four greatest ballerinas of the day to appeartogether on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. It is fitting, therefore, that next week, 169 years later, Sergei Danilian’s internationally acclaimed project Kings of the Dance should reach the London Coliseum. After all,

Paloma Faith is an unusual pop star. Her flamboyant, retro appearance is upholstered by a deep-thinking mind and she articulates herself in an uncut East London accent. She hangs out with the author Hanif Kureishi and you can expect to find her at an art opening. When we meet in London’s Soho House, she is

Mark Shields is a painter of considerable versatility and skill who is unable to rest on his laurels. Born in 1963 in Northern Ireland, where he still lives, he developed a powerful realist style that owes much to the Old Masters, and scored early success with meticulous portraits and still-life paintings. If he had been

It has been a bracing start to the year at English National Opera. David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, praised to the skies for the musical performance under Edward Gardner, returned to the Coliseum. Next up is Rigoletto (reviewed on page 50), directed by Alden’s twin, Christopher. Then comes Rodelinda, in another new production (or

The symbol engraved on Augustus’ signet ring was a sphinx. Julian the Apostate described him as ‘a chameleon’. He seized power declaring himself the saviour of the Roman Republic, but in the process abolished it. He ruled as an autocrat but maintained the fiction that he was no more than the Republic’s First Citizen —