The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Just in front of me, visiting Spellbound at the Ashmolean last week, was a very rational boy of about seven and his proud mother. ‘I don’t believe in magic, witches or Father Christmas,’ he announced to the girl presiding over Room One. ‘Perhaps you’re spiritual but not religious,’ said the girl. The rational boy gave
Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian film composer, has died at the age of 91. Here, Richard Bratby spoke to the ‘Maestro’. Ennio Morricone’s staff wish it to be known that he does not write soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone writes “Film Music” NOT “Sound Tracks”’, explain the printed interview guidelines. ‘Maestro Morricone is a composer. Composers do
There is a moment in Bohemian Rhapsody when the screen swims with print. The reviews for Queen’s epic new single are in, and they unanimously denounce the song as a vacuous and bloated irrelevance. This feels like a brazen hostage to fortune for a biopic whose botched gestation saw writers, stars and directors roll on
‘How did this mild-mannered eye doctor end up killing hundreds of thousands of people?’ someone wondered about Bashar al-Assad in BBC2’s extraordinary three-part documentary A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad (BBC2, Saturday). It’s a question we’ve all occasionally pondered as the Syrian body count rose — 500,000 thus far — and as six million refugees
Like it or not, provincial ballet audiences love a story they can hum and any director planning to tour a swan-light, sugar plum-free menu has always done so at their peril. Tchaikovsky isn’t compulsory: a really well-known story, however undanceable, can usually do decent business (Northern Ballet’s extremely silly Three Musketeers is a reliable granny-magnet).
Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven comedy with a complex back narrative. Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend 12 years younger than her but the relationship died just as Anna was ready to sprog. Aged 38, and desperately broody, she needs to get preggers pronto. We join her on a Sperm Quest. Though
‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of her work as being about bars, bare walls and what happens when they leave jail. It’s all about meeting the prisoner as a person. She soon realised ‘how different prison writing is’. It’s much more
Wolverhampton; Workington; Blackburn; Sheffield; Lancaster; Hackney. Every year English Touring Opera does what our national opera company doesn’t: packs up its props and takes to the road, bringing opera to the bits of the UK other companies don’t even think about reaching. And not just Traviatas and Toscas either, but properly interesting, often unusual, repertoire.
‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great and terrible events — martyrdoms and nativities — took place amid everyday life, while other people were eating, opening a window or ‘just walking dully along’. As an example, Auden took ‘The Fall of Icarus’
‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled by their appearance, as they stood together in a group, by the pit’s mouth.’ As opening sentences go this is a cracker, but few modern readers of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s get far
You don’t need to be much of a psychologist to understand the trajectory of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Born to aristocratic first cousins, in a family never shy of consanguinity, he was blighted by congenital deformities and weaknesses. When his brittle legs broke in his teenage years, they stopped growing altogether, leaving the adult Lautrec tiny
Lounging confidently on the sofa of a Soho hotel suite, Dominic West has been beaming at me, but now his handsome smile dissolves into a hurt look. I have just asked him to explain why he, in common with so many actors, feels the need to voice his political views. ‘I should just pipe down
We can’t know what Horace Walpole would make of the continuing popularity of serendipity, a word he coined in 1754 to describe the accidental happy discovery of a Renaissance portrait he had long been seeking. In 2001 it became the title of a romantic comedy and this year of a song by a South Korean
Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly tired old men. Cypress Hill are now in comfortable middle age, almost as old as me, ffs. But they were ever ludicrously inventive and idiosyncratic, right back to that first album in 1991, which wrote
The morning after the first night of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides in May 1995, I received a call from Otto Klemperer’s daughter. ‘Tell me,’ said Lotte, ‘is it true that, in Mr Harwood’s play, the denazification attorney addressed Dr Furtwängler as “Wilhelm”, or even “Willi”?’ I said something in reply about dramatic licence and the
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess springs to life fully formed, and pulls you in before a word has been sung. A whirlwind flourish; the hectic bustle of violins and xylophone, and then a quick fade into an image of a woman cradling a child and ‘Summertime’, the very first number we hear sung. The aria’s fame
At the beginning of Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize (BBC4), Kirsty Wark’s voiceover promised us ‘a tale of fierce rivalries, bruised egos and, most importantly of all, countless brilliant books’. In the event, though — as the title perhaps suggested — those countless brilliant books proved rather less important
Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching sounds, and then the most chilling screech you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were feeding off the carcass of a zebra in Kenya, recorded by Chris Watson. He had been up before dawn, on the look-out for a suitable carcass to attract the scavenging vultures. He was lucky to find
Sir David Hare’s weird new play sets out to chronicle the history of the Labour movement from 1996 to the present day. But it makes no mention of Corbyn, Momentum, the anti-Semitism row or rumours of a breakaway party. The drama is located in the dead-safe Miliband era and it opens with talk of a
Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, which is Italy’s entry for the foreign language Oscar next year, is bleak, unflinching, oppressive, masculine (very), violent (shockingly) and basically everything you’d expect me to hate. Except I didn’t. It is out of the ordinary. It has a magical central performance. It is tense, as you wait for the little man
It was announced last week that the woman who bought Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ will be going through with the purchase. And who could blame her? The prospect of owning a piece of ‘art history’, as she called it, is an enticing one to any investor, regardless of its condition. The video documenting Banksy’s triumph
Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled. But architecture is more important than politics. Unless you are an anchorite or a polar bear, it’s unavoidable. And it lasts longer. The best architecture affects our mood. Exaltation, if
At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As the sun rose, the land ‘heaved up in peaks and rising vales’. The colours of the scene ‘ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive’, rising into ‘opalescent clouds’. The
Grade: B– Ooh goody — a parade to rain on! You wouldn’t believe the hyperbole expended by the rock critics on this middle-class French lass, real name Héloïse Letissier. Or maybe, being used to such mass gullibility, you would. ‘Bogglingly intelligent’ and ‘a thrillingly uncompromising artist, playing with ideas of gender, identity and individuality to
‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does
Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is a #MeToo minefield. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is a serial seducer, a man of many mistresses, a grabber of princesses. Were he alive and kissing today, he’d check himself into an Arizona rehab clinic. In 1889, it was laudanum and a loaded pistol. Rudolf ought to be tormented, driven by
You won’t be aware of this because the BBC has been keeping it very quiet. But the new Doctor Who is — wait for it — a woman! Let me say straight away that Jodie Whittaker is a delight. Opening as the new Doctor is never easy — all that tiresome establishing rigmarole you have