The most gruesome television moment of the week I caught on Saturday night, part of the Red Nose Day mutual congratulation fest. A gang of minor celebs had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and Davina McCall — she must be hard to live with, running into the bedroom, shaking her face in yours and screaming that the
I find it impossible to be dispassionate about the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. For me, it is not just an area of part-designed, part-semi-natural landscape of 300 acres in south-west London, as well as a world-renowned centre of research and learning in botany and horticulture. Kew is where I learned the science and craft of
Gerhard Richter Portraits National Portrait Gallery, until 31 May George Always: Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 31 May Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is one of the most influential figures in the art world. This show of his portraits is slightly more enlivening than his recent coloured-panel exhibition at
Dancing at Lughnasa Old Vic Burnt by the Sun Lyttelton It’s almost physically painful to see the vandalism wrought at the Old Vic by the new stage configuration. It’s like looking at some doomed Darwinian experiment, a cloven-hoofed butterfly, a spaniel with a trunk, a winged slug. Worse still is the fussy, over-ambitious set for
I Capuleti e i Montecchi Royal Opera Education Double Bill Glyndebourne Of all the painfully premature deaths of composers, there can’t be any doubt that Schubert’s is the least endurable. Shatteringly great as his finest works are, one can envisage him striking out on new paths and taking his place beside his adored Beethoven. Mozart
Now that the Allegri Miserere season is fully launched — the text is suitable for Lent — it seems fitting to ask why every choir in the land thinks it incumbent on them to sing this piece of music, for 150 years only ever sung within the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Now that the
Eonnagata Sadler’s Wells Theatre Twelfth Floor Queen Elizabeth Hall Has dance-theatre given up the ghost? Judging by the two performances I saw last week, Eonnagata and The Twelfth Floor, it would appear so. Not surprisingly, one may add, given that, after more than two decades, the provocative, elusive, multilayered, postmodern genre has exhausted any chance
Marley & Me PG, Nationwide Marley & Me is based on American journalist John Grogan’s best-selling memoir about his young family and their Labrador — ‘the world’s worst dog’ — and it all sounds horribly cloying and lame, I know, but don’t rush to judge unless you simply can’t help yourself, in which case do
Did you know that in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire there were death squads of heavily armed policemen whose job it was to assassinate anyone who got too close — be he witness, investigating officer, or informer — to unmasking their mysterious bosses’ sinister web of lies, deceit, corruption, betrayal, wife beating, torture and serial killing?
Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio Four) began and ended with the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, mourning the loss of her country’s independence. Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio Four) began and ended with the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, mourning the loss of her country’s independence. In A Tibetan Odyssey —
Picasso: Challenging the Past National Gallery, until 7 June The ostensible subject of this show is Picasso’s relationship with past art, and accordingly the visitor might expect to see great works of the past hung next to Picassos for purposes of comparison. This does not occur. The exhibition contains only some 60 paintings by Picasso,
Doctor Atomic English National Opera Der fliegende Holländer Royal Opera House John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic, in a production shared with the New York Met, had its UK première at the English National Opera, and was greeted with the kind of cheers that you don’t often encounter in opera houses. It bored me in
The Young Victoria PG, Nationwide The Young Victoria stars Emily Blunt and is based, apparently, on an idea first pitched by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York: ‘I know! Let’s do a film about Queen Victoria, but when she was young, and call it “The Young Victoria!”.’ She is listed as a producer as is, bizarrely,
There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. In 2005, Paul
England People Very Nice Olivier Toyer Arts It’s been a busy year for offence-junkies. Richard Bean’s new play has prompted anti-racism protests at the National. What for? The play is certainly racist in the narrow sense that it mocks the distinctions between races (or regions, for the most part, since Bean belongs to the same
Last weekend we learned that Heston Blumenthal had closed his Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, because 40 or so customers had reported feeling ill. I’m not surprised. I felt ill just watching the start of his new series, Feast (Channel 4, Tuesday), and not a morsel had passed my lips. (Actually, some years ago I
Science fiction has never been the same since Douglas Adams so brilliantly lampooned the genre in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first heard on Radio Four aeons ago, back in the era of flares and hippie hair. Science fiction has never been the same since Douglas Adams so brilliantly lampooned the genre in The
There’s a dog-leg road junction a mile up the lane off which I live that’s made dangerous by the pub that partially obscures traffic from the right. There’s a dog-leg road junction a mile up the lane off which I live that’s made dangerous by the pub that partially obscures traffic from the right. It’s
Van Dyck and Britain Tate Britain, until 17 May In the course of my work last week, which included attending the press view of van Dyck at the Tate and visiting a couple of artists’ studios, one in north London and one in Oxfordshire, I found myself thinking about the current state of exhibition catalogues.
Fidelio Cadogan Hall Vita Nuova Royal Festival Hall Birtwistle and Benjamin Linbury Studio Fidelio is an opera which, in my recent experience, almost always overwhelms me in a concert performance and almost always leaves me embarrassed or indignant when staged. Embarrassed, because the transvestite necessities of the heroine would almost never convince anyone, as Cherubino