The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount, our contracts state death will foreclose. Eventually our assets will diminish sans heart and eyes, brain and breath. There falls a repayment of the spirit, the sum we bequeath, pounds of flesh. When we are
Having met with an equal mix of critical acclaim and revulsion at the Edinburgh Festival, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B – based on the ‘human zoos’ and ethnographic displays of the late 19th century – opens today at the Barbican. I have not seen it yet, but as someone with coloured South African heritage – well aware
It isn’t often that you can say you’ve seen an opera not only of but about our times. But Anna Nicole – which I saw Thursday night at the Royal Opera House in London – is such a work. The music is by Mark Anthony Turnage, the libretto by Richard Thomas. It sets off by causing
At the entrance to Anselm Kiefer’s forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy visitors will encounter a typically paradoxical Kiefer object: a giant pile of lead books, sprouting wings. When I asked Kiefer to explain this strange object, he immediately — and characteristically — began talking about alchemy. Lead, of course, was the material from which
The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he visited this country twice (he came to London in 1906 and 1908), it was the experience of continental Europe — and particularly Paris — that was crucial for his development. The title of this exhibition
His Christian name is only two syllables, with the stress (following the African-American pronunciation) on the second. Two syllables that are a byword for urbane cool. A mellifluous shibboleth – the quintessence of all that is decent and upstanding. You see, I’ve grown up on Denzel’s films. From boyhood to manhood, from teenage recalcitrance to adult responsibility,
Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of the Juilliard School, just about to embark on their professional careers in music. It’s a hard life. They’re asked to be perfect, which of course is unattainable. She wanted to encourage them to keep going,
From the long ride, fresh trees licked by enough blue light to cross-patch antique trousers, we come at last past casks head-dressed with tulips to this puzzling concourse where white signs agree to open a house decked by strangers with an attentive love. ‘Mynheer, do you remember? Yes, twenty-five years.’ Our polls are whiter than
Inspired by Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry’s Part of Me (2012) and One Direction’s This Is Us (2013), Nick Cave has released a documentary about himself. No doubt he wanted to prove that this old dog has new tricks. The whole movie is shot in candy-crushed 3D to appeal to the emteevee-ohmigod
It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael Frayn’s cumbersome backstage farce asked us to follow the actors’ personal stories as well as their on-stage foul-ups, and the surfeit of detail proved a bit of a brain-scrambler. This is a badly rehearsed thriller
A few weeks ago I was at the perfect wedding. My young friend Will Heaven, a comment editor at the Telegraph, married the beautiful Lida Mirzaii, his girlfriend since university. The service was in Wardour Chapel in Wiltshire, a neoclassical masterpiece described by Pevsner as ‘so grand in its decoration that it seems consciously to
I can’t think of anyone else still alive who knew him, and could reminisce with me about his special kindness, his panache — (ice-white shirts, cufflinks which, looking back, were just a trace too gleaming) his well-known love of the stage and his dramatic tours round the domain he cherished — the Department of Dental
These are your lives. Yard Theatre, until 4 October Tom Cruise. That’s the big offer from a newish venue, the Yard Theatre, lurking on the fringes of Hackney Wick. The 80-seat space is located in an upwardly mobile sprawl of discarded warehouses and asset-stripped factories reinvented as artisan boozers. You can get there by train,
Otello ENO, in rep until 17 October Anna Nicole Royal Opera, in rep until 24 September So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you might expect. Decked with pink balloons and the acrid smell of popcorn, the Royal Opera House waved the garish
What exactly, I found myself wondering, would jihadists do without modern four-wheel-drives? Car ads are customarily shot on the French Riviera’s Grande Corniche or on a very particular road in Tuscany that all art directors know. But the sight of 43 brand new and coruscatingly white Toyota Hiluxes rolling across the infernal Syrian-Iraq border added a
It is 450 years since the birth of William Shakespeare. The anniversary has been hard to avoid in this country, which is entirely appropriate. Shakespeare helped to shape not only our language but also our conception of character and our understanding of the human condition. Our experience of love, of facing death, of loss and
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union” startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]An explosion of confetti will greet the announcement of Scottish independence. This isn’t another one of Alex Salmond’s fanciful promises, but an installation by a visual artist named Ellie Harrison. She wants Scotland to become a
The Imperial War Museum has reopened after a major refit and looks pretty dapper, even though it was overrun by hordes when I visited (it was still the school holidays). There’s a new and effective restaurant, inevitably, but also a new sense of spaciousness. I am not concerned here with weapons of mass destruction, merely
I can see your teeth clench with rage at the gift I have pressed on you, which manoeuvres you into the role of grateful recipient of my unctuously offered, expensively wrapped and poisonously unwelcome offering. It’s hard to say if you are smiling or snarling as you turn to extol the wrapping paper.
Referendum fever reaches Stratford East. Spoiling, by John McCann, takes us into the corridors of power in Holyrood shortly after a triumphant Yes vote. We meet a foul-mouthed bruiser named Fiona whose strident views and vivid language have propelled her into the public eye during the referendum battle. Her reward is Scotland’s foreign ministry. The
1984 and all that. Which side were you on? The side of Margaret Thatcher, her hairdo and person standing rigid against a rising tide of industrial activism and British declinism? Or the side of the miners, socking it to the Tory scum and their jackbooted adjutant, Johnny Law? There’s no doubting which side this new
As everybody in the world except me seems to have seen Kate Bush’s live shows — against all apparent arithmetical sense — these have been gloomy weeks in the primary Berkmann residence. Even the mother of my children managed to acquire a last-minute freebie, even though she only really likes the first two or three
‘I don’t know what I think,’ says Lenny Henry, echoing what many of us who were listening were probably also puzzling over. ‘Part of me thinks it’s art by the sheer fact that an artist has decided that something like this should happen for the amusement and intrigue of his fans…’ Henry was at the
For some of us, the biggest TV question of recent weeks hasn’t been how Newsnight is doing without Jeremy Paxman, British drama’s fightback against American competition or even the treatment of Diana Beard by the editors of The Great British Bake Off. Far more important is whether a small BBC4 quiz show can survive a
I have just spent a few moments in bed with the popular comedian Russell Brand and I have to say that I enjoyed it hugely. We did not have full penetrative sex, sadly, and when I say ‘in bed with’ I mean it sort of figuratively, or vicariously. What happened is that I watched Russell’s
I don’t know why it’s become important to me: the idea of a theatre supper at home? Maybe it’s a methodology for life that after decades of practice we can make it what we wish it to be: modest yet appetising, practical yet with an element of excitement pending? After so many supermarket visits made
Who is there left that you can talk to? Days go by. ‘Friendless, deserted’ (The Beggar’s Opera?) — left in the lurch (what lurch?) — you languish. Time to make plans to die? You box up some age-stained letters, set aside more stuff, but your heart’s not in it. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Another
Think of a hand-slip, a spun summit bothered by mist, the whirr and thrum of dark metals, a stranded face minding a gap which widens, widens, leaves one candle to burn in silence, late summer wings to char on glass, unspoken words to spell their spells forwards, backwards — fine fruit to hang in armouries
There’s a Radio 4 programme, presented by the smug moraliser Marcus Brigstocke, called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, which gets famous people to do things they’ve never done before, like watch Star Wars. I’m not famous, but before last night I’d never seen Strictly. The very idea of it bored me. I don’t like ballroom
