The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Love’s Labour’s Lost Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare uses the most transparent of silly plots as a pretext for pyrotechnics with the raw material of his craft. On a sudden whim, a king and three courtiers dedicate themselves to scholarship and celibacy. A princess and her companions arrive and duly scupper this
Who’d be a car dealer now? With new sales 20 per cent down and dropping, manufacturers moving to four-day weeks, dealerships closing and the used-car market awash with unsold vehicles, they must feel like turkeys being sized up for Christmas. And that’s before anyone has felt next year’s swingeing road-tax increases on post-2001 mid-sized vehicles
It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a
Jack B. Yeats & Oskar Kokoschka Compton Verney, until 14 December In 1962 Oskar Kokoschka drew record crowds to his Tate retrospective — belated recognition for the Austrian-born artist who had lived in London, on and off, since 1938. Herbert Read blamed the long delay on Kokoschka’s ‘un-Englishness’, so it’s ironic that his latest comeback
One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, it may be possible to draw a telling analogy between the practices of the world financial markets which propelled the global economy to the brink of recession and those which prompted the phenomenal rise of the international contemporary art market. After all, so many of the players are
Correggio and the Antique National Gallery and other locations in Parma, until 25 January 2009 Unlike the other leading artists of the Italian High Renaissance — Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian — Correggio lived a life of provincial obscurity. Unable to find any likeness of him, Vasari was obliged in his Lives of the Artists to
Anthony Caro’s Chapel of Light Church of St-Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg The Barbarians and Clay works Musée des Beaux-Arts, Calais, until 23 February 2009 Paper works and Table sculptures Musée de Gravelines, until 21 February 2009 Steel sculptures Lieu d’Art et d’Action Contemporaine, Dunkirk, until 21 February 2009 There was once a small town called Vence, just
Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small
There is a startling passage in this book. It recounts an intimate moment (among many, it should be said) between the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and his Secretary of State and long-time adviser, Condoleezza Rice. They are sitting on the porch of Bush’s Texas ranch. It is December 2006 and, after
Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir.
Love All, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Love All is a dreadful title — sounds like the memoirs of a lesbian tennis player — for an elegantly old-fashioned novel. It is set in the late 1960s; but there is little to anchor it to this period: the occasional references to the Beatles, or to Mary Quant,
Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge No eminent Victorian has shaped our daily lives in more ways than Florence Nightingale. Her influence continued far beyond her 20 months of bloodsoaked toil in Scutari and the Crimea. Her vision of a public health-care system was the foundation of the National Health Service. Disassociating nursing from religious vocation
Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos ‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the memory it contains.’ The need to see and understand and later to remember is the theme that runs through Berr’s remarkable diary of Jewish persecution
The great days of cinema are not over: they live on in Terence Davies, writes Peter Hoskin How to write about the cinema of Terence Davies? Words just don’t stand a chance. I could deploy every superlative going, and reduce every one of the three short films and five feature films he’s directed into their
No Man’s Land Duke of York’s Mine Hampstead Slow, fractured, monumental, ineluctable, No Man’s Land lurches at you like a disintegrating ice shelf. The first act opens with two drunks staggering around a Hampstead mansion downing whisky and making oblique statements of self-revelation. Spooner, a broken-down poet, has been invited home by Hirst, a millionaire
The problem with this wretched crisis is that it infects even TV. There I was on Sunday night, trying to enjoy some soothing, mellow quality time with dear Stephen Fry — or ‘Steve’ as he now styles himself in his six-part travelogue Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) — and the whole experience was filtered through
A hundred chorus girls sashaying through a Busby Berkeley musical. Bugs Bunny munching nonchalantly on a carrot. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Hollywood’s greatest swordfight (‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ or ‘Captain Blood’ — take your pick). Bette Davis pulling the trigger in ‘Deception’. James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into a moll’s face. Alex
Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice
Compagnie Beau Geste Parsons Green Toilet Tango Bathstore, Baker Street Stephen Petronio Dance Company Queen Elizabeth Hall Australian Ballet Sadler’s Wells Theatre Manon Royal Opera House The dancing digger and its partner, the exceptional Philippe Priasso, are back in town. Aptly regarded as a highlight of last year’s Dance Umbrella, Compagnie Beau Geste’s Transports Exceptionnels
Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours Serpentine Gallery, until 16 November Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1940–58 Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, until 12 December At the Serpentine is an exhibition of little squares of colour, randomly arranged in grids. There are 49 paintings on show, each one composed of four panels consisting of 25 squares
Burn After Reading 15, Nationwide Burn After Reading, a ‘comedy thriller’, is the latest Coen brothers movie, their first after No Country for Old Men, and it is a very, very hard film to like. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, I strained to like it with all the fibres of
Partenope English National Opera In his introduction to Handel’s Partenope in the programme book of ENO’s new production, John Berry, artistic director of the company, writes: ‘Partenope is full of wonderful music and a perfect vehicle for the gifted director Christopher Alden.’ We see where the priorities are — some dead metaphors are quite interesting,
The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as
Origins: A Memoir, by Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson The Lebanese Amin Maalouf is best known as a writer of historical novels in French, such as Le Rocher de Tanios, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1993. Yet before moving to Paris during the Lebanese civil war of the mid-1970s, Maalouf was a newspaper
Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally Which would you rather read, The Great Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day-by-day account of the whisky he drank and the cigarettes he smoked while writing it? La Comédie humaine or a list of the cups of coffee Balzac downed, between midnight and sunrise, while putting all of those
A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, by Michael Holroyd It is rare today to come across a non-fiction book that does not include in its title or subtitle the assertion that the tale it tells is ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘fas- cinating’, publishers presumably having decided
We’ve just posted up Lloyd Evans’s review of Thomas Friedman’s talk at Intelligence Squared last night on his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future. It is well worth reading.
Dominic Cooke on why we must guard against a self-perpetuating climate of fear and timidity Forty years ago, the Theatres Bill removed from the Lord Chamberlain his centuries-old power to censor the British stage. Under a law unchanged since 1843, every work intended for production in British theatres had first to be submitted to, and
Merce Cunningham Dance Company Barbican Swan Lake Royal Opera House Scottish Ballet Queen Elizabeth Hall As if by tacit agreement, Dance Umbrella and the Royal Ballet started their new seasons with classics of their respective dance cultures. A regular Umbrella visitor, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is a safe choice to kick off with, for