The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is familiarity; there is love. It could be one of the pictures on my phone from last weekend of my daughter with her six-month-old. In fact, it dates from Tuscany c.1290,
Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the start of Towards Zero, BBC1’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, a man we later discovered to be a lawyer addressed the camera. ‘I like a good detective story,’ he told us. ‘But they begin in the
Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen from 207. I was disappointed but not surprised that one of the greatest paintings in the world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Die Anbetung der Könige im Schnee’ (The Adoration of the Kings in the
No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others: Lennon and McCartney, Morecambe and Wise, Clough and Taylor. And it’s perhaps even harder for a behind-the-scenes collaborator to step out in their own right. Jack Antonoff, for example, is one of the creative powerhouses
The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The protagonist, J.S. Bach, receives a mysterious summons from Frederick the Great of Prussia. The long first act takes us through Bach’s professional woes and his physical infirmities. His weak vision is being treated by an
Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled
Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s a dystopian sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson twice over (all will be explained) but while it initially kicks some decent ideas around, it eventually descends into a cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci
Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on
As a teenager, I very nearly went to boarding school after falling in love with the architecture, the greenery and the sense of freedom. What ultimately put me off was the school’s obscene fixation with sport and my discovery that I would be expected to run around those fields not just once or twice a
Christie’s is making digital-art history again – or at least trying to. Between 20 February and 5 March, it is hosting Augmented Intelligence, the first major auction dedicated solely to AI-generated art. This follows a series of headline-grabbing stunts, including the first major sale of an AI-generated artwork in 2018 – ‘Portrait of Edmond de
I am a regular attendee at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh’s most ornate and venerable concert venue. On more than one occasion recently I have seen Hamish Hawk here – albeit each time he was showing the audience to our seats. Hawk has graduated from Grand Circle stair duty to centre-stage spotlight, the kind of local-boy-made-good
Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible,
Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows –
The Last Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas dancer who has reached the end of her career (too old). And she is wonderful, a revelation. I’d like to say I saw it coming but I did not. Did you? When she was doing all that bouncing in slo-mo along the beach in Baywatch
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen opened at Covent Garden earlier this month, and reader, I messed up. I broke my own golden rule with new operas: don’t do any homework, don’t try to memorise the plot, and whatever you do, don’t revisit the source material. The aim is to experience the new work on its
Nicholas Hytner’s Richard II is a high-calibre version of a fascinating story. A king reluctantly yields his crown to a usurper who wants his violent revolt to seem like a peaceful transfer of authority. This delicate, complex narrative is presented as a boardroom power struggle in corporate Britain. Snappy suits for the dukes and princes.
There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically if anyone gets too near her nest – not that her eggs are about to hatch, let alone run. The recent threat of the British Council to ‘deaccession’ – to put it more bluntly, sell
The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will part to reveal two rows of yellow grimacing teeth. Then its clockwork arms will wheel up and down, banging a little drum as fairground music plays. And then someone nearby dies in an extremely gory
Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful
The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the
Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-grand-daughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch
I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way
Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at
There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly cold Monday night in Philadelphia, Lauren Mayberry – over from Glasgow, and halfway through a month of criss-crossing the USA – took to the stage to survey a crowd of maybe 500 people, in a
My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers
Among my many fake and useless skills, I’m a reasonably decent tarot reader. I can do one for you now if you like. A very simple three-card spread: your cards are the Seven of Wands, the Hierophant and the Six of Pentacles. There are lots of vaguely drippy ways of interpreting a three-card spread: past-present-future,
Arts Council England may be successfully clobbering the poor old genre of opera into the ground, but its sister art dance continues to be nurtured ever more generously, and the London scene is as ebulliently youthful and healthily various as it’s ever been. At the top end there’s the Royal Ballet, currently a match for
Tracey Thorn released an album in 2010 titled Love and Its Opposite. When it comes to songwriting, it’s the ‘opposite’ that tends to throw up the more compelling discourse. The anti-love song has been a staple in popular music since Elvis’s baby left him and he wandered off to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Presley is a useful