Since 2003, the National Gallery has been organising a series of annual exhibitions in partnership with Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. (Readers will perhaps recall previous themed shows: Paradise, Making Faces and last year The Stuff of Life.) This initiative has proved so successful that the programme
The story so far of the RSC’s Complete Works marathon has been largely that of performances, some wonderfully rich and strange, coming in from abroad. Unable to spend an entire summer camped out in Stratford, I have still to catch up with some of the reputedly stronger offerings by the home team. But even the
It is a curious thing to watch Christian Bale now, having seen him all those years ago in Empire of the Sun play that fierce, hurt boy Jim Graham, whom no amount of deprivation seemed outwardly to wound, but who bled on the inside like the Spartan boy with his fox. The qualities of that
The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally.
Like footsteps in the sands of time, record companies have provided the raw material around which jazz history has been constructed — RCA Victor, which recorded the first bona fide jazz band in 1917 and was the first to cash in on the post-first world war jazz craze, and Columbia, which quickly followed. As a
In a change to the scheduled programme, I will not be reviewing Lady in the Water (PG) this week because it simply doesn’t deserve 800 words of either praise or damnation. Actually, I will just give it a little review: it’s ridiculous and awful. Mr M. Night Shyamalan, you should be ashamed of yourself. There.
, Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was born in Pochlarn, Bohemia, studied in Vienna, enlisted in a smart cavalry regiment at the outbreak of the first world war, got shot in the head and bayoneted, went back into action after a spell in hospital in 1916 and suffered shellshock. He had a stormy affair with Mahler’s widow
The German painter Albert Oehlen (born in Krefeld in 1954) is of the same generation as the infamous Martin Kippenberger (1953–97), recently celebrated so lavishly at Tate Modern. They were good friends and collaborated on various projects, including jokey mottoes on ‘I Love…’ stickers and poems. Both were of that group of German artists who
The Bolshoi Opera’s production of Boris Godunov, which they brought to Covent Garden last week, is in almost all respects in a time warp, though it turned out to be a most agreeable one. For the first time in many years, we were able to hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of the opera, which has been so
I’m such a dunderhead. Everyone told me that Miami Vice would be rubbish, and I kept replying, ‘No, no it won’t; you see, it’s directed by Michael Mann and he’s brilliant. He made Manhunter, Heat, The Insider and Collateral…it’s going to be great.’ People said, ‘But it’ll be naff and embarrassing, with spivvy hairdos and
It must be a nightmare when you spend weeks making a current-affairs programme only to find that days before it’s broadcast the subject you’ve been exploring is turned upside-down. That’s what happened to Radio Four’s Inside Money, the sister programme to the excellent Money Box, almost a fortnight ago (Saturday, repeated Monday last week). The
Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of
In an interview with David Frost only three years ago, Trevor Nunn said that the highlight of his career was doing Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in 1980. Now, 26 years later, Chichester Festival Theatre has revived the play, with Jonathan Church and Philip Franks directing. The original staging ran
Summer Festival Time: when the music-loving British populace flocks or straggles to concerts in a variety of unsuitable venues, all the way from mighty monuments like (dare one say) St Paul’s or the Albert Hall to Little Bethel and the Quaker Meeting House, the Old Forge, the Stately Home, ex-quaysides and industrial structures, parks, squares,
Within the expanding aquatic metropolis that is Istanbul, two late-20th-century bridges straddle the continents of Europe and Asia. These traffic-laden steel bridges, spanning high above the ferries and other boats which ply the busy waters of the Bosphorus below, are visibly useful links between two civilisations. They are also symbols, perhaps, of the noble dream
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is one of the great figures of Modernism, a pioneer of abstraction, whose works are known in this country mostly from reproduction. The Tate has now gathered some 60 key paintings from important international collections (a significant portion come from Kandinsky’s native Russia) and put together a superb exhibition which it’s difficult
The enlarged, updated and now undivided Sainsbury Centre has reopened with the most comprehensive selection of Polynesian art ever assembled; and yet, shamefully, it has received not a single review. It would be a waste of space to wonder why, better to state that the stunning Pacific Encounters, curated by Dr Steven Hooper of the
PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want
On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of
Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us