Even at 78 and from a distance, Sir Peter Hall has the look of an alpha male. There he is about 100 or so feet away, advancing towards me across the polished boards of his rehearsal room; head forward, bear-like, with the lonely charisma of a boxing champ. As he passes, the younger members of
Fidelio Garsington Parthenogenesis Linbury Beethoven’s Fidelio is one of the most moving operas in the repertoire, but I’ve usually been more moved by it in concert than on stage. The gaucheries of its plot, which include, really, hardly having any plot — we encounter, after the relatively light opening, the embodiment of noble feminine determination,
The Winter’s Tale Old Vic Phèdre Lyttelton I seem to be alone in feeling great waves of pity for anyone involved in an assault on The Winter’s Tale. This strange dud of a text remains mystifyingly popular with theatre folk. It’s two plays shunted together. Act one is a mawkish palace tragedy, act two is
Telstar 15, Key Cities Telstar is a biopic about the ‘ground breaking’ 1960s song writer and independent record producer Joe Meek, but unless you know a lot about Joe already — and, I confess, I didn’t — you’re never that clear about what ground he broke exactly. If you fancy seeing this film, I would
In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them. This is the invention of what many people still call ‘modern music’. For it was in 1909 that Schoenberg wrote his Five Orchestral Pieces and the monodrama Erwartung. These were early atonal works which used
Julius Caesar Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Romulus and Remus, at least in the flesh, aren’t usually numbered among the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The famous sculpture of the she-wolf suckling Rome’s founding twins is a not unfamilar sight in modern productions. It’s also favoured by Lucy Bailey as an iconic image for launching her
I wish I had been at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on the evening of 18 May 1909 for the dress rehearsal of the new Saison Russe, organised by Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, or ‘de’ Diaghilev as he liked to be called. I wish I had been at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris on the evening
Lulu Royal Opera House It’s not often that I have felt so disinclined to write a piece about the past week’s opera-going, especially when it was an occasion I had looked forward to so much: Berg’s second opera Lulu, one of the strangest works in the repertoire, but even if not a masterpiece — it’s
Like most addicts I have become accustomed to smuggling stuff into my own house. In the old days it was bottles of Scotch or wine. More recently it has been a couple of hundred quid’s worth of CDs after a binge in HMV. The trouble with CDs is that they take up so much space.
‘Visualisation’ is the latest buzzword at BBC Radio. ‘Visualisation’ is the latest buzzword at BBC Radio. ‘Audiences,’ announces the press release, ‘will be able to watch some of their favourite radio shows being broadcast.’ (Note the use of the word ‘audiences’; we’re no longer thought of as mere listeners.) There’ll be ‘glanceable’ content, webcam streams,
‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday) as he bursts into a dungeon. ‘Hi, my name is Kröd Mändoon, and I’ll be your liberator this evening!’ says the hero of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming
You have probably idly wondered, as you stood in a queue for the loos at Chelsea Flower Show, why the Royal Horticultural Society stages its greatest flower show of the year in the week before the Whitsun Bank Holiday. Late May is good for irises, Oriental poppies, alliums, hardy geraniums, seed-raised verbascums, lilacs, wisteria and
Summer Exhibition Royal Academy, until 16 August Every year the Summer Exhibition arrives with promises of innovation and difference, every year it’s much the same. People gamely ask ‘what’s it like this year?’, and the imaginative struggle for a novel way to describe it. Yet its great strength is its unchangeability — the extraordinary (occasionally
Hamlet Wyndhams Arcadia Duke of York’s ‘No one can do the definitive Hamlet. It’s too big for that. But you can do an enormous amount.’ Wise words. Jude Law’s as it happens. All Hamlets fail and it’s a great tribute that Law’s fails remarkably little. His stage presence is thrilling, intense and highly athletic, and
Looking for Eric 15, Nationwide Looking for Eric is Ken Loach’s latest film, and while one worships Ken Loach generally and his early work in particular — Cathy Come Home; Family Life; Kes; all of which will still blow your socks off today — I’m just not at all sure about this. I mean, it’s
Così fan tutte English National Opera After many productions of Mozart’s bleak comedy Così fan tutte, there has been a hiatus, welcomely brought to an end by ENO, which brought the first operatic production of the great Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami from Aix-en-Provence. Denied a visa by the imbecilic British embassy in Tehran, he
H3: Bruno Beltrão and Grupo de Rua Sadler’s Wells Theatre Regardless of the unbearable media hype surrounding the few highs and many lows of Britain’s Got Talent, I am pleased that Diversity, an exciting street dance group, won the competition. The award somehow gives public recognition to an art form that has long struggled to
I caught it by chance while stuck in traffic on the Bank Holiday weekend, but it turned out to be one of those programmes that really alters the way you think about something you’ve never questioned before in such detail — in this case, the actual construction of classic songs such as ‘Midnight Train to
‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. ‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. It was a family joke, indicative of just how boring Delingpoles all found the world’s most boring game. But then my father bred
The elderly lady in the little Skoda reversed cautiously in the supermarket car park, then sharply accelerated into the car behind. Next she accelerated sharply forwards into the car adjacent to the space she had left. She repeated her reverse manoeuvre into a third car, then her forward manoeuvre — this time while trying to