The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Never have my asseverations in this column attracted so much attention as those about the Dean and Archbishop of Sydney. If anyone were to think that Anglicanism was a dead topic, they should visit Australia. One has only to scratch the surface and out pour the most passionate arguments, though not from the employees of
Uncle Vanya Rose Theatre, Kingston The Death of Margaret Thatcher Courtyard At last the Rose has burst into bloom in Kingston. Luckily I allowed myself twice the suggested 40 minutes to get there from Waterloo. It took me quarter of an hour to extract a ticket from the computerised machines, which have been brilliantly programmed
Salome Bridgewater Hall Peter Grimes Nottingham Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House Salome Bridgewater Hall Peter Grimes Nottingham Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House Does Richard Strauss’s Salome still have the power to shock, as the writers of programme notes like to claim? Not, anyway, in a concert performance, such as was given in the Bridgewater Hall
In the past, television battle scenes consisted of half a dozen men in armour knocking seven bells out of each other. Then the camera angle switched and the same six men were still bashing the others, but from below. Next one of them fell (‘Aaaargh!’) and the other five kept on. It was not altogether
‘Being Roman,’ declares Catullus, the poet protagonist of Counting the Stars, ‘is a state of mind’. As in earlier novels — The Siege, House of Orphans — Helen Dunmore allows the reader to enter the ‘state of mind’ of a specific moment in history. Here, Julius Caesar’s Rome, in all its squalor and grandeur, brutality
The conquering white male, guiltily plundering, seduced by exoticism and abundance but never quite sure that he’s not just the clueless foreigner being taken for a ride: so we have Tony Parson’s pugnacious hero Bill, clad in his designer suit. He is the ambitious corporate lawyer, billing for every hour he breathes, hoping to ‘make
Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age
Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms. With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the
Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced
Should readers be in Edinburgh at any point in the next two weeks, you can pop along to the Dundas Street Gallery where my little sister and two of her artist friends are holding an exhibition of their work. If you’re not in Edinburgh, you can view some of Claudia’s work here and here as
By Leafy Ways: Early Work by Ivor Abrahams Against Nature: The hybrid forms of modern sculpture Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 4 May The Henry Moore Institute is one of our foremost sculptural venues, a focus for study and scholarship, equipped with an impressive library and archive specialising in British sculpture. Opened in 1993 on
The Bucket List 12A, Nationwide As Rob Reiner should know better and Jack Nicholson should know better and Morgan Freeman should know better, what you have here is a film which has to make you ask: how come they didn’t? You’d think one, at least, would say somewhere along the line: ‘Thanks, but if it’s
James son of James Barbican Three Short Works Royal Opera House James son of James Barbican Three Short Works Royal Opera House It is a pity that the definition ‘theatre dance’ is commonly used to indicate any choreographic activity that takes place on stage, for it could be much more effectively used to describe those
‘I think continually of those who were truly great,’ wrote Stephen Spender, which must have been awkward when he was trying to read a map, cook the lunch, or write that bloody awful poem about pylons. But I, too, have been thinking, if not continually, then at least often, about two great men, both dead,
There was something ironic about a play entitled The Trial and Death of Socrates being broadcast on the weekend that our own great thinker, Rowan Williams, was undergoing what may turn out to be the biggest trial of his career. Maybe he tuned in on Sunday evening to Drama on 3 and heard Joss Ackland
I have waited several years for this moment — in fact, ever since the late 1990s upsurge in interest in gardening began to fade, the press stopped talking about it as the new sex, and the jeunesse d’orée turned their fickle gaze elsewhere. Now, as partygoers shade their hungover eyes from the glare of financial
The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language. Even those who do not feel ready for the 1,000-page novel based on
When, after his exertions on behalf of the love-struck Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster hears himself compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, his literary knowledge rises to the occasion: ‘the chap with the nose’. It was Edmund Rostand’s play of 1897 that brought Cyrano and his protuberance their modern fame. The 17th-century soldier and writer who gave
‘I’m not going to pay good money’, Groucho Marx famously quipped, ‘to join a club that lets in people like me.’ In the case of the Carlton Club on St James’s Street, whose 175th anniversary last year was marked by this handsome history, requirements were quite explicit. Membership depended on opposition to the 1832 Reform
If you’re after a profound cinematic experience, then you could do far worse than to invest in Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921), which got its first UK DVD release yesterday. The premise of this silent, Swedish film is ripped from a dark fairytale. Anyone who dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve
Tom Hollander’s first meeting with a theatrical agent didn’t turn out quite how he expected It was the late Eighties and it paid to be brash. But I wasn’t brash I was green. Just down from university and wearing a second-hand double-breasted suit I had a meeting with London’s Most Powerful Agent. On Wall Street,
From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg Royal Academy, until 18 April Sponsored by E.ON It is a salutary and instructive experience to forego the relatively civilised Press View of an exhibition, when only the denizens of the world’s press and assorted successful liggers are allowed in, and attempt
Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House A Midsummer Night’s Dream Linbury There is a hard core of central works which any major opera house needs to have, in a production that can survive many changes of cast and conductor, even of obtrusive revival director. Die Zauberflöte is unquestionably among them, a work that we constantly need
Why would anyone want to listen to a programme about the Oscars? Surely the whole point is to see those ghastly frocks and gimcrack smiles, effortfully put on for-the-camera-only? And yet Paul Gambaccini was sent over to Hollywood to recreate the ‘magic’ of the Oscars for a new Radio Four series (Saturday), And the Academy
No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is
One frequently reads of chaps for whom their epiphany was the first sight and sound of Julie Andrews. Mine happened a good few years earlier, lying bed-bound with polio, just after the war. Someone had sent my mother a boxed set of the Broadway cast of Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman’s flamboyant voice belted
Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let
‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham,’ in an opinion Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) shared with one of his fictional characters, ‘to which the reader could regulate the degree of his credulity’. Furthermore, the inhabitants of novels should be allowed ‘a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living’. The distinction between reality and
This book shows how successive cabinets have handled the deadliest secret of modern times, what to do about nuclear bombs, since the first ones went off in 1945. As the subject was so secret, not much has ever been allowed out into the public domain; but Hennessy’s scholarly skills have been such that he has