The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Eighty-seven Hackford Road, SW9, is unremarkable but for a blue plaque telling the world that Vincent van Gogh once lived there. The building has been empty since 2012 but now the Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers has filled it with voices. ‘Yes, these Eyes are the Windows’ (until 22 June) is an Artangel-commissioned installation that
When first they ushered me into that hall To take my place on a cheap fold-out seat, My eyes clamped shut, and so missed all The conjured stillness of the school: young feet Unshuffled, heads dropped down in donned respect, And teachers, too — attendant, cramped in rows Of less observant hush. A time to
In Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England, it never stops raining. As she writes in her evocative programme note for the RSC stage adaptation of Wolf Hall, she first envisaged the life of Henry VIII’s political fixer, Thomas Cromwell, as ‘a room: the smell of wood smoke, ink, wet dogs and wet wool, and the steady patter of
It really is rotten luck, and also cruelly ironic. Just as Glasgow was done debating how best to demolish its hideous Red Road flats, its most beautiful building, Glasgow School of Art, goes up in smoke. No one hurt, apparently, which is a relief, but an awful lot of artwork lost, a unique archive and
Should fat be an issue in opera? Are our opera critics overgrown schoolboys with a body fixation? To judge from reports and editorials in print and online over the last two days, you can answer ‘no’ and ‘yes’ respectively. Simple? No, not really. On Monday morning, the critics of various national newspapers published reviews of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier. These reviews
P.J. O’Rourke’s chickens are giving him trouble. ‘Two of them aren’t laying eggs right now,’ he explains. But he doesn’t know which ones. ‘I’m not sure who’s the guilty party.’ We’re driving to the field where his trees are harvested for timber and where he and his father-in-law have built a one-hole golf course. ‘How
I spend an hour with the theatre director Polly Teale. She’s 50ish with a tall, willowy physique and strong, aquiline features. Her hair is arranged in a combed bob whose flicky fringe overhangs her bright, deep-set eyes. She’s easy-going and so good-natured that at one point she asks me about myself — a courtesy few
Josef Albers (1888–1976) is best known for his long engagement with the square, which he painted in exquisite variation more than a thousand times. A German–American painter, he trained in Berlin and Munich before enrolling at the Bauhaus (the leading modernist art and design school) in 1920. He was a student there for three years
In Venice, around 1552, Titian began work on a series of six paintings for King Philip II of Spain, each of which reinterpreted a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The resulting work proved to be the apogee of his career and became what may be the most influential group of paintings in post-Renaissance European art. Studied,
We’re now on day three of the Chelsea Flower Show, and this year the BBC have taken their coverage to the max. As well as the quotidian hourly slot with Monty Don, Joe Swift and newcomer Sophie Raworth, in the week preceding the show we were also treated to the daily Countdown to Chelsea. What
Oskar Morgenstern grew up in Vienna, John von Neumann in Budapest. Clearly the same Austro-Hungarian intellectual spirit which gave rise to Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele and their seminal joint work Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour is still alive in that part of the world, because the Austrians chose a bearded transvestite to represent them
‘The natural aids to horsemanship are the hands, the legs, the body and the voice.’ But a Thelwell pony sometimes required some, er, additional aids. Norman Thelwell’s first pony cartoon was published in Punch magazine in 1953 and struck a nerve with readers; so much so that the editor asked Thelwell for a double-page spread
Tucked away in the schedules, just before midday, just after midweek (on Thursday), just four lines in the Radio Times, was one of those radio gems. Nothing remarkable on the surface, but every so often sparkling with insight, or a different way of seeing. Woolf in the Jungle (produced by Dan Shepherd) took us to
According to its executive producer Griff Rhys Jones, A Poet in New York (BBC2, Sunday) sought to rescue Dylan Thomas from the ‘forces of sanctity and hagiography that now hover over his shade’. Instead, we’d be reminded that he was ‘a hollering bohemian roustabout’ — which is presumably Griff’s longhand for ‘a drunk’. By that
When you see the latest corporate entertainment juggernaut hurtling at you, what are your options? When I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past (what?) hurtling at me, I thought: I can either jump aboard or I can swerve off-road. In this instance, I chose to swerve off-road — I’ve seen Godzilla; I’ve done my time
How do you write a play? Here’s one theory. Put a guy up a tree, throw rocks at him, get him down again. It’s a good working template. Nick Payne’s latest script, Incognito, uses a different scheme. You put 21 guys up a tree, set them jabbering for 90 minutes and then go home. This
In all its minute details, Der Rosenkavalier is rooted in a painstakingly stylised version of Rococo Vienna that, paradoxically, is further fixed in a web of cannily juxtaposed anachronisms. Upset their balance and you risk upsetting the balance of the whole piece. That’s no bad thing, of course, but Richard Jones’s bold new production for
George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and its fascinatingly elusive visual metaphors. Many recent stagings have failed to meet such criteria, but not the performance I saw last week. Things did not exactly start especially well, as the opening group of ladies
If I live as long as my father, I’ll be checking out on 9 December 2017. Since every man in my family drops dead of a heart attack at a ridiculously young age, it’s not inconceivable. I mean, obviously the chances of me dying on precisely that day are tiny, but it’s my ballpark figure.
Do you ever wonder, as your little darling balks at doing her violin or piano practice again, what all the pain is for? All those battles, and then when she escapes your clutches she’ll give it up. In later life the blanket of amnesia will fall over those childhood years and it might be as
Every now and then, you’ll come across an article which puts a case for something or other being taken seriously as an ‘art form’. Designing computer games, cake-making, upholstery, you name it, sooner or later it’ll be up there with painting the Sistine Chapel. And the more elaborate or intricate the process of production, the
The phrase ‘Constable Country’ summons up a quintessentially English landscape: river and meadows, open vistas bordered by trees, the greens and golds of cultivated acres, with the wide (and often blustery) skies of East Anglia over all. John Constable (1776–1837) is one of our greatest artists and certainly one of the most popular. His vision
In many respects the average art-lover remains a Victorian, and the Florentine Renaissance is one area in which that is decidedly so. Most of us, like Ruskin, love the works of 15th-century artists of that city — Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Ghiberti — and are much less enthusiastic about those of the 16th. But a superb
‘Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,/ daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,/ grass shimmers green…’ The characteristic undulations of the voice of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg greet the visitor on entering Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art at the National Museum Cardiff. Bearded and mellifluous, projected to mythic proportions
Before there was Hello!, OK! and Closer, there was Oggi. Oggi was the magazine my Italian mother used to flick through on the long dark English winter evenings. Its celebrity photo spreads were for her the armchair equivalent of the Italian national pastime, the ‘passeggiata’. The Years of La Dolce Vita, revisited in a new
I have to remind myself that Waiting for Godot is a confounding piece of theatre. It’s supposed to be. The famous repudiations Beckett made to its interpreters, the ignorance he professed of its characters, were more than just cryptic obfuscation. ‘The only thing I’m sure of,’ he is said to have said, ‘is that they’re
Living up to its fabled buzz, the Kop roared and rose even before kick-off. Down in the main stand I watched; John Barnes adjusting his captain’s band on the hallowed turf. Waves of red in rows and rows – a kid in that season’s kit, I swelled with a kind of borrowed pride, belonging without
In 1967, two Cologne-based gallerists came up with the Cologne Art Market — a trade fair where German galleries could set up temporary gallery-style spaces for a few days to showcase their stock. The following year, three dealers in Basel copied the idea but opened up their event to international galleries. For years these two
Soldier scribes are rare, soldier artists rarer still, and soldiers who can write and draw rarest of all. General Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) was one such polymath. He scribbled and doodled as he fought his way around Victoria’s empire. He was a decorated veteran of the Siege of Sebastapol, the Second Opium War, India and