The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When you can do anything you like, what do you do? In Bryan Ferry’s case, the answer seems to be ‘make a 1920s instrumental jazz record out of some of my old songs’. I have to admit that the mere idea of The Jazz Age (BMG), which is credited to The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, appealed
A lap of honour at the Royal Court. Bruce Norris has been one of the big discoveries of artistic director Dominic Cooke, who takes his bow by directing The Low Road. Norris’s greatest hit, Clybourne Park, was a savage and illuminating satire about racism. His next trick is to examine the burning issue of the
The Place Beyond the Pines stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper — you spoil us, ambassador! — and is a generational feud film about fathers and sons and legacy. Can anyone be born clean? How do past events reverberate? How might one act of violence play out, years later? It is written and directed
‘The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried’s funeral cortège no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies upon the bier, slain by
Not many actors have made a name for themselves with quite the same force as Lara Pulver. In January last year more than eight million people tuned in to BBC1 and watched her star as Irene Adler in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, the opening episode in the second series of Sherlock. I’m not saying that
I shall be radioactive For eight hours afterwards And must be careful To avoid intimate contact. The prospect of this Alarms me, but what now Suddenly comes to mind Is just how alone I felt Standing in Hereford Cathedral October 1962 Beside the Mappa Mundi With Krushchev banging on As nuclear war seemed Unavoidable, that
Newt Gingrich has a new love. ‘It’s a great study of plot,’ the failed Presidential runner and former Speaker of the House told Slate magazine. He was not referring to a ’90s sleaze inquiry, or the reasons why he lost to Mitt Romney. The object of his obsession is our very own Downton Abbey. In
‘The house that Ho Chi Minh built.’ That’s how Nicholas Hytner refers to his ample north London home. In 1989, at the age of 34, he was hired by Cameron Mackintosh to direct the musical Miss Saigon. ‘It just felt like a huge lark,’ he said at the time. The show ran for ten years
The American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) is best known for his boxing paintings, but as this surprising exhibition reveals, that was only the half of it. We don’t really know his work in this country, apart from the odd picture in a mixed show, but here is indisputable evidence that we have been missing out.
There was something vaguely disappointing about seeing Abel Tesfaye appear on stage at London’s Electric Ballroom. A wide-eyed, puffa-jacket-clad figure isn’t what you expect from his enigmatic alter-ego ‘The Weeknd’ — it seemed incongruous that we should watch this self-styled introvert performing to an audience. At 23 years old, Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) has released
You could say that Neil MacGregor revolutionised radio with his mega-series A History of the World in 100 Objects. In each of those 100 programmes he took us on an extraordinary journey of the mind, to show us what we’ve been up to since the first ‘primitive’ reindeer carvings of the Ice Age. He did
Everyone’s loving BBC1’s new, Sunday-night period mega-drama The Village (32 episodes long if writer Peter Moffat has his way). It’s taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics, which I think are all euphemisms for ‘not like Downton Abbey’. And it definitely isn’t like Downton Abbey. There’s a lot more brooding,
Why the sudden spate of movies about classical music quartets and impending death? Early this year, we had Quartet, about four senior singers in a retirement home. Now we have A Late Quartet, about a string ensemble facing the loss of one of its members. The film industry couldn’t possibly be subliminally associating classical music
To hear Christian Thielemann conduct the Dresden Staatskapelle in Wagner’s ‘stage consecration play’, in Salzburg at Easter, proved a musical experience that could only deepen anybody’s love of this extraordinary opera. To see it was another matter, as it often is. But let us first praise the musicians who, guided by their conductor, gave it
Yes, well…aphorisms are never easy to deal with, they are a naturally intimidating form of utterance. If you admit that you don’t understand them, you may well be thought thick. If you reject a request for an explanation of one, on the grounds that what it says can’t be put any other way, you may
In his ‘Love Song’, T.S. Eliot’s ageing bank-clerk J. Alfred Prufrock protests he isn’t ‘Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…’. David Farr’s new production sets out to put this to rights. The result is indeed a very strange affair. It is built around Jonathan Slinger, who last season starred memorably as Prospero in The
Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter
What sort of room do you prefer to hear classical concerts in? We have all got used to industrial-strength symphony halls and opera houses, capable of holding 3,000 people, with dry acoustics and omni-look interiors. As with art galleries around the world, once inside you could be anywhere: there is little to tell you which
The leaves hardly breathe and snakes loop round the branches, soaking up heat from cars parked nose to tail outside the seafood kiosk by this savage southern beach where the leaves hardly breathe and snakes loop round the branches, soaking up heat from cars parked nose to tail outside the seafood kiosk by this savage
It was a gamble that seems to have paid off. American online entertainment giant Netflix commissioned their first ever original series with a Washington adaptation of Lord Dobbs’s classic, House of Cards. According to its star, Kevin Spacey, the show is today the most watched ever on the service. Season one ended on a cliff hanger
Did you catch Dr Who over the weekend? Clarissa Tan, who wrote our latest TV column, was surprised that the Dr had to contend with ‘something in the wi-fi’. How’s wi-fi for a thoroughly modern enemy? Here’s the prequel to this week’s episode, The Bells of Saint John: Clarissa also watched Rachel Johnson learning to
As Easter comes upon us in this bitter spring, many of us are drawn to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passion: his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven. You don’t have to go to church to do this, for reverie or prayer can take place in a quiet landscape or by a cosy fireside, but
To some extent, all Romanticism has its origins in darkness, coming in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that introduced fear into the age of reason. ‘Reason’s Sleep Produces Monsters’ proclaims the opening drawing in Goya’s series ‘Los Caprichos’ (1797–99), which features in this entertaining exhibition. After all the cruelties that man had inflicted
Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose, Caitlin Rose. I’d feel awkward admitting that I’m rather obsessed with this Nashville chanteuse, were it not for a mitigating truth: you should be, too. Her debut album Own Side Now, released in 2010, was proof enough of her sweltering talent. And now we have a follow-up, The Stand-In, that’s superior
‘That’s the power of ritual,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, on Thought for the Day last week. He was thinking particularly of the Jewish festival of Passover with its ritual gathering of the family to eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs as a re-enactment of the experience of exile and slavery. ‘It’s an expression
It used to be that when an arch-villain wanted to decimate a community, he’d put something in the water. Now, it’s something in the wi-fi. In the new Dr Who, the Time Lord battles a baddie who runs a group called the Spoonheads, whose mission is to upload and download stuff from the wireless internet.
Obviously, we all love Danny Boyle and want to have his babies — I’d like at least two of his babies — but his latest film, Trance, is a horrid mess. A psychological take on the art-heist film, it is miscast, iffily acted, confusing, implausible (to the extent I never fully understood what was happening)
Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a
Declan Donnellan is riding high. His acclaimed production of the burlesque classic Ubu Roi has confirmed his membership of the elite group of British directors who enjoy renown across Continental Europe and beyond. The critics cheered his French-language production of Alfred Jarry’s anarchic satire when it reached Paris earlier this month. The show, created by