The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The legend of Faust is perhaps the dominant one in post-Renaissance Europe, yet it resists satisfactory artistic realisation. The most celebrated versions of the legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, seem to me to be utter messes aesthetically, retaining their status through the great passages they include rather than through any coherence. Thomas Mann’s Dr
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is his first film since There Will Be Blood and although it stars Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who give two of the most blistering performances you will see for an unspecified time period — usually, the form is to say ‘this year’, but how do I know? I’m
Last year I raved about Birmingham Royal Ballet, their artistic drive, their freshness, their impeccable artistic eclecticism and, not least, their superb dancing. It was with such memories that I went to Sadler’s Wells last week, only to leave both programmes with reservations and mixed feelings. Neither programme stood out for being particularly well constructed;
Every so often in my line of business one reads heartwarming stories about manuscripts from the past turning up in unlikely places. The most favoured of these places over the years has probably been bricked-up chimney stacks in Tudor manor houses, where one supposes the terrified owners once thrust documents that would have incriminated them
Hard on the heels of last year’s television adaptation starring David Suchet and Ray Winstone is a new version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in cinemas later this month. The new version, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, and which closed the 2012 London Film Festival, comes after adaptations which include David Lean’s 1946 classic,
What did you know of love? You, who slept in a separate bed, separate room, who knew nothing of us. You told me to let him be, let him get on with it, let him alone. You gave me your harshest advice, told me what you’d done after Grandpa was discharged from the Navy; hiding
One departs and three more come charging in. It’s always rush-hour for Chekhov in the capital. As the Young Vic’s production of Three Sisters is drawing to a close, the Vaudeville is preparing to host a star-studded version of Uncle Vanya. Up the road, at the Novello, another Uncle Vanya is about to arrive from
Every so often, about once a decade, the work of Mark Gertler (1891–1939) is rediscovered and exhibited. I remember seeing excellent shows of his work at the Ben Uri Art Gallery in 1982 and in 2002, and at Camden Arts Centre in 1992. Each time a well-selected body of his paintings is gathered together, we
When, in 1940, Walt Disney released Fantasia, his radical arrangement of animations set to classical music, he fancied that he might add new segments to it every few years so that it could grow with its audience. Alas, it was not to be. The cost of installing the new ‘Fantasound’ technology in cinemas, plus a
It seems an astonishing statistic but 99.6 per cent of radio is broadcast live, delivered straight from the studio mike to your personal loudspeaker: 99.6 per cent! Compared with TV, which must be at least 80 per cent recorded, this is an extraordinary indicator of how radio is the on-message medium right now, able to
Which is the worse crime, would you say: eavesdropping on celebrities’ answerphones? Or hosting and covering up for a ruthless predatory paedophile ring — led by your biggest, most heavily promoted star — over a period of four decades? Mm, me too. In fact, I’d say the Savile affair is as close as we’ll ever
Covent Garden, 1833. Edmund Kean, the greatest tragedian of his age, has collapsed while playing the title role in Othello at the Theatre Royal. His son, Charles, is all set to take over and has just prised the lid off a trusty tin of boot polish ready to smear dark grease all over his peachy
About two of the operas I saw in Leeds this week there is a serious question as to whether or not they are comedies. The third, Gounod’s Faust, is clearly not meant to be; I’ll be writing about it next week. The new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Alessandro Talevi is jokey and fast
Do you have a mysterious and slightly embarrassing musical blind spot? One of mine is for Dvorák, whom I don’t need to be told is a great composer. Maybe it was overexposure to the New World Symphony as a child; or maybe I’m unreasonably irritated by his Czech bounciness, just as some people write off
A degree in maths might have helped. ‘Correction of the Day,’ wind charts, slide-rules, log tables, maps of the terrain, OP reports — all combined (again and again) to make four 25-pounders point the right way. B-Troop, ‘officer material,’ we learned our parts: don’t get VD; take care when choosing your friends; prefer gin and
Now then, now then. How is this for the most inappropriate publicity stunt going? The Bread and Butter gallery in Islington is opening an exhibition tomorrow provocatively called ‘Jimmy Savile Is Innocent‘. Artists are invited to bring works on the subject to the opening tomorrow night: ‘In an age when the dead can’t defend themselves
The last time I visited Kew was to see the installation of Henry Moore’s sculptures in 2007. Moore’s monumental bronzes made an enormous impact on the botanical gardens, so much so that the gardens were in danger of becoming merely a backdrop for the sculpture. Although a good many people came to see the exhibition,
If you want to see how myths arise from misunderstandings, the Tower of Babel provides a textbook example. In ancient Assyrian babilu means ‘door of God’ and thus correctly describes the Babylonian ziggurat erected to the god Marduk by Nebuchadnezzar II and later seen in ruins by Herodotus. But in Hebrew the word bâlal means
The title of the new show at the Palazzo Strozzi is a little confusing. Most of the artists in Italy in the 1930s weren’t beyond fascism; they were in it up to their necks. They didn’t really need much persuading by Mussolini to come up with pictures like Luciano Ricchetti’s 1939 painting ‘Listening to a
Each of the Buddhist monks’ faces tells a variation on the same story. One simmers with fury, another sags with despair, a third is locked in a stoical gaze. The sign they are holding is written in Mandarin — its message the latest piece of sadistic invention by the Red Guards promoting Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
‘Shhhh! Listen!’ Peter White demands of us, his listeners. ‘You’re about to enter into a blind man’s world.’ White, who for years has presented the In Touch programme on Radio 4 on Tuesday nights and who is now a stalwart on You and Yours, has become such a finely attuned listener that he can tell
One of the many pleasures of television is that it allows us to forget our manners: we can treat it with an impolite offhandedness that would not be considered sociable — or sensible — in the run of everyday life. This isn’t a vicarious enjoyment of bad behaviour that we see on screen, but an
You know how it is: you wake up in your knock-down corrugated shack, surrounded by chickens and dogs and pigs, before staggering out into the morning sun to press the animals against your ear, listening to their heartbeats. No, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. You probably don’t know how it is, and neither did
The Met Live in HD series for 2012–13 got off to a brilliant start with a new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the most warm-hearted of comedies — in fact, a work so genial that I’m always surprised it doesn’t lapse into insipidity. This production by Bartlett Sher made that seem less of a danger
Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a
Fifty years ago it was not possible to bid at auction via the telephone — that first historic telephone bid was made for a Monet at Christie’s in 1967. Now the auction house’s Great Rooms, and indeed every other international saleroom, is lined by banks of telephones and digital screens, and absentee clients may also
Britain’s country houses were constantly in the news a generation ago. In 1974 The Destruction of the Country House, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris, offered a dismal chronicle of the houses that had disappeared in the past century. It proclaimed their importance to
Son, never boast of the bird you have done. Masters of the art of crime never serve A scrap of time. They may shit on everyone. They keep their noses clean. A fable says, There was a crooked horse who kicked an ass For being an ass, and down the line He got stitched up
Two pop-up art fairs border Regent’s Park in London. To the south is Frieze London, an edgy fair-cum-fairground offering the thrills and spills of the latest and most innovative trends in global contemporary art. Launched a decade ago, it was unique among ambitious international art fairs in proving an instant and overwhelming success. Last year
