The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
King John arrives at the Globe bent double under the weight of garlands from the London critics. Their jaunt up to Northampton for the première seems to have cast an opiate glaze over their faculties. Plays that are rarely revived earn their hermit status for a reason. They lack social skills or winning graces. They’re
With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done, but now he’s returned with a second film that is equally stunning, equally riveting — in its horrifying way — and equally unforgettable. To have one such film in you, but two? I think it
The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m sure, even if he directed the Queen’s televised Christmas message. So matching him up at English National Opera with the madness, obsessions and phantasmagoria of Tchaikovsky’s whirring and troubling The Queen of Spades was simply
I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south of France, we had a bonding moment almost Brokeback Mountain-esque in its bromantic intensity. Roberts had hired an expensive speedboat for the day (as Andrew Roberts would) and we’d left very little time to get
Like a lot of essentially cautious people, I like my music to take some risks, play with fire and damn the consequences. In truth, of course, most musicians are every bit as conservative as the rest of us: they do whatever it is they do and if it sells, they keep on doing it until
Evan Davis’s series on business life, The Bottom Line (made in conjunction with the Open University), has become one of those Radio 4 staples, something that’s just there in the schedule and all too easily taken for granted. Productivity, contracts and contacts, the new appreneurs (creators and sellers of apps) are not subjects I feel
For anyone who has been interested in classical vocal music since the middle of the last century, whether choral, operatic or solo, there has been one inescapable name and voice: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. His repertoire was gigantic, surely larger than that of any singer ever. He began public concerts and recordings in the late 1940s and
A tiny fly is moving over the page of my dull book this sultry evening, and it is my conceit that it has a message for me. It pauses on Rigoletto and, skirting pronouns and prepositions, lingers on the hyphen of orang-utan before a significant pirouette over rhubarb tart. When I wake up it is
With 60 million international subscribers and a programme-making budget of about $3bn, Netflix is steamrolling most of the received wisdom about how we make and watch television. Already riding high on the success of prestigious hits like House of Cards and Daredevil, Netflix is expecting to bust new barriers with Sense8, whose 12 episodes became
Have you heard the one about girlfriend-killer Oscar Pistorius not having a leg to stand on? Or what about the Germanwings knock-knock joke? If you find gags like these funny, you could come and stand with me on the terraces at Brentford FC. When we played Leeds United earlier in the season, we chanted at
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic. Each always contains so many diverse and potentially incompatible elements that orchestrating a smoothly blended result is dauntingly difficult. But, as with many almost impossible tasks, some manage it much better than others. Michael Craig-Martin,
If you’re in the least bit squeamish you’d better stop reading now. What follows is not for those who blanch at Casualty and come over all faint at the sight of blood. I’m told it’s a first for radio — following an operation in real time and going right inside the experience. It began at
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Janet Suzman, and you might get some idea of what ITV’s Vicious is like. Alternatively, I suppose, you could just watch the thing and realise
‘I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to get this chance in life,’ said Christine McVie, as the opening jangle to ‘Everywhere’ rang out. Judging by their ecstatic reaction, the audience felt much the same way. Look, I’ll be honest. I’m not going to give you a dispassionately critical review of Fleetwood Mac,
In October 2011 anti-capitalist vagrants built an open-air squat outside St Paul’s within shrieking distance of London’s financial heart. The City thrummed all night with the dob-dob-dob of bongo recitals while the rebels held angry debates beneath their plastic canopies and declared the Square Mile knee-deep in ordure. To press the point they used nearby
Queen & County is John Boorman’s follow-up to his 1987 semi-autobiographical film Hope & Glory, although why a sequel now, after 28 years, I don’t know. (We’re not in regular contact.) I can only tell you that if you absolutely loved the first film, as I did — and still do — the news I’m
There’s been a clutch of middle-aged danseuses taking leave of life in one way or another recently. We’ve seen the abject (Mariinsky star Diana Vishneva’s solo show at the Coliseum) and the magnetic (Alessandra Ferri mournfully channelling Virginia Woolf at the Royal Ballet). A fortnight ago, the Paris Opéra’s aristocratic Aurélie Dupont retired from the
As Sepp Blatter has so affectingly remarked, the organisation he formerly headed needs evolution, not revolution. There is a consensus that this is also what David Pickard will bring to the Proms, when he takes over after this season. Of course, Pickard’s job is going to be more complex than Blatter’s ever was. The challenge
In eastern Congo years ago on a road logged into a hill I drove or was driven one evening to see pygmies who claimed they were being eaten. This was possible. I’d met a woman with my name who’d watched the fire on which her arm was cooked and then devoured. The pygmies turned out
Can you ballet-dance to words? How can choreography make any seriously worthwhile addition to a piece of music like Mahler’s vocal symphony Das Lied von der Erde? Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 ballet Song of the Earth, currently on at Covent Garden, is frequently hailed as a masterpiece, but just as often you read comments by people
Alan Bennett’s Lady in the Van tells the story of a homeless woman called Miss Shepherd who moved her van into the playwright’s drive temporarily and ended up staying there for 15 years. Speaking about the film adaptation, which stars Maggie Smith, at Hay, Bennett claimed that Miss Shepherd would not be given the same welcome by
On 1 July, at a swanky party at Tate Modern, one of Britain’s museums will bank a cheque for £100,000, as the Art Fund announces this year’s Museum of the Year. Sure, the money will come in handy. Sure, the publicity will be useful. But this posh bunfight can’t disguise a growing sense that museums
At the Turner Prize dinner of 2003, as the winner, Grayson Perry, took a photo call with his family wearing a girlish dress and huge bow in his hair, a German contemporary artist who was sitting at the same table leant over and hissed in my ear, ‘Only in England!’ He got it right in
It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps to make amends it is treating us to possibly the most historian-studded, blue-screen-special-effects-enhanced, rare-documentastic, no-hyperbole-knowingly-under-employed series ever shown on television. Armada: 12 Days to Save England (Sundays, BBC2). Having clearly spent a lot of money
Goodness knows what the Great Cham would have made of Radio 4 airing an adapted version of his philosophical fable, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, on Sunday afternoon. Perhaps he would be surprised to see it done at all: the works of Dr Johnson are hardly fashionable these days and Rasselas is probably little known to
It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by Anna Picard in last week’s Spectator), Carmen at the Coliseum on Wednesday, Donizetti’s Poliuto at Glyndebourne on Thursday and Carmen, also at Glyndebourne, on Saturday. A trajectory that Nietzsche would have approved of, moving from
Man Up is a British rom-com starring Simon Pegg as Jack and Lake Bell as Nancy. Nancy’s problem, at the outset, is that she is 34 and still single — has yet to ‘man up’ — and is therefore a failure, and if you can buy that as a premise for a film, then that’s
St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion world before his suicide in 2010. It opens with a mysterious stalker, Dahlia, breaking into McQueen’s Mayfair home and demanding that he make her a dress. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shrieks but she placates
Professor Stanley Wells writes that the newly identified picture of Shakespeare on the title page of Gerard’s Herball (1597) is ‘obviously not Shakespeare’ but neither he, nor Mark Griffiths, the botanist who made this discovery, have fully understood why it is obviously Shakespeare. That the figure is a poet is undisputed. In his right hand he
