The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from the Courtauld Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, WC2, until 25 January 2009 This is the first full display of the Courtauld’s holding of Turner watercolours, recently enriched by nine paintings from the Scharf Bequest. The exhibition is further enhanced by loans from the Tate, and offers a splendid introduction to
Gethsemane Cottesloe State of Emergency Gate There’s a massive hole in the middle of David Hare’s new play. It’s called Iraq. What an issue that was. What a best-seller. Talk about box-office. For two or three years it seemed that Hare had single-handedly won the Iraq war but his victory proved tenuous and short-lived. Once
Boris Godunov English National Opera La rencontre imprévue Guildhall School of Music and Drama The new production of Musorgsky’s most important work Boris Godunov, at English National Opera, raises more questions than it answers. It is an impressive achievement, showing a seriousness of commitment to the work on the part of everyone involved, and yet
Body of Lies 15, Nationwide Body of Lies is the latest film from producer/director Ridley Scott and it is an espionage thriller set mostly in the Middle East — Iraq, Jordan and Syria — featuring espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and, if you can keep up, which I didn’t, there is probably a considerable amount of counter-counter-counter-espionage
Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. But I genuinely found his sitcom, Outnumbered (BBC 1, Saturday), co-written with his long-time collaborator Guy Jenkin,
Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind. When, finally, you can no longer ignore what is happening all around you, at least you can be comforted by the
Until the BBC’s Culture Show reminded me of it this evening, I had no idea that it is now 25 years since Local Hero was released. Christ, that makes one feel old. If Bill Forsyth’s classic is not the best British movie of the past quarter century, it is certainly the loveliest. And, oddly, timely
Danny Kruger explains how his theatre company helps offenders to go straight Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson was a drug dealer, with a five-year stretch for murder behind her and no nice future ahead. But then a random meeting in a Baltimore nightclub, with an actor in the hit TV show The Wire, led to a starring
The Baader Meinhof Complex 18, Key Cities The Baader Meinhof Complex is, well, just horrible really. Horrible, horrible, horrible and for those of you who are slow out there — and I know who you are; don’t think I don’t — it is horrible; just horrible. It is brutal, relentless, nihilistic, violent, terrifying, relentless, psychopathic,
I had what reformed alkies call a moment of clarity last week. On one of my regular trawls through the Amazon website, I clicked the One-day 1-Click button and ordered the first CD in what I felt in my guts was going to be an expensive and enjoyable binge. But instead of the usual response
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare Mark Morris Dance Group Barbican Like child prodigies, enfants terribles do not last forever. As both epithets imply, there is always a fairly traumatic moment in which they stop being children. True, enfants terribles normally outlive child prodigies, at least because the label is never so strictly related
It’s a real shame that Frank Gehry’s pavilion next to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park has just been demolished. It was England’s first built project by this great Canadian-born architect and was a terrific addition to the park. During its three-month lifespan the huge wooden and glass structure was a place for live music
Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists Royal Academy, until 2 January 2009 The role played by dealers in modern French art seems to exceed that of their English counterparts. Perhaps this is because the French were more bombastic and self-serving, but we remember the names of the great dealers such as Vollard
Elektra Royal Opera House For You Linbury Studio The revival at the Royal Opera of Strauss’s Elektra in the production by Charles Edwards, who is also responsible for the sets and lighting, is so drastically modified from 2003 as to amount to a fresh start on the piece. It is still modernised, set in a
Yard Gal Oval House Lucky Seven Hampstead Last week I saw a little-known play, Yard Gal, which I’m pretty sure is a classic. Written ten years ago by Rebecca Prichard and revived with scintillating and furious energy by Stef O’Driscoll, the play follows the lives of two drug–whore teenagers, Boo and Marie, living in the
You’re a middle-class Pole living in modest bourgeois comfort in a detached house in the handsome Austro–Hungarian city of Lwow in 1939 when there’s a knock at the door. Two officers from the newly arrived Soviet army of occupation have come to tell you that from now on all bar one of the rooms in
Henrietta Bredin talks to Edward Gardner, English National Opera’s music director There is a ridiculously tiny, narrow room carved out of the foyer of the London Coliseum, known as the Snuggery. I think it was originally intended as somewhere for King Edward VII to retire to for a touch of silken dalliance or simply to
W 15, Nationwide W, which should be pronounced ‘dubya’, the Texan way, as in George ‘Dubya’ Bush — but never as in, for example, Dubya. H. Smith — is Oliver Stone’s dramatised portrait of the 43rd American President and it’s pretty much neither here nor there; neither sympathetic enough to be one thing nor, alas,
Overture 2012: Power and Passion Royal Albert Hall Julie Gilbert/Jean-Baptiste André The Place Triple Bill Royal Opera House I have to confess that the idea of 120 children and teenagers dancing to Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony did not sound particularly appealing. I have nothing against children, but their performances bore me to death. The problem is
I watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4, Thursday) if only so that you don’t have to. It’s rather lazy, like the unpleasant message he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone and then broadcast on Radio Two. You’d think that if they were going to be offensive to a well-loved old thespian gent they
From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, until 13 December Private collections of art are fascinating, both for the light they shed on the tastes and preoccupations of their owners, and for the otherwise often hidden network of associations they can reveal. Paintings and sculptures made on a
To Be Straight With You Lyttelton American Briefs Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1 It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these
I Capuleti e i Montecchi Of Thee I Sing Opera North, Leeds Slightly perversely, Opera North has been running a series of ‘Shakespeare operas’ ending with Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which means that the programme book consists largely of articles explaining that the story doesn’t derive from Shakespeare at all. So what? I
The election of Professor Sir Curtis Price as the next Warden of New College, Oxford, is remarkable in two respects: he is (or was) American and he is a musician. The American side of it is just one of those things. Sir Curtis has lived and worked in the UK since 1981 and has been
Let’s focus for a change on what the BBC does best. Take, for instance, a short half-hour programme on Radio Four, buried in the schedules, mid-evening on a Monday, in which the German historian Rainer Schulz took us behind a bit of actualité to expose an otherwise unheard, unseen aspect. In Belsen after Belsen (produced
Toby Jones, Karl Rove in the film W, explains his character’s relationship with President Bush Condoleezza Rice’s teeth lie discarded beside her bottle of water. Colin Powell’s wig needs adjustment. Across the table, Scott Glenn removes Donald Rumsfeld’s steel-rimmed spectacles and continues his description of the seven months he spent in the Philippines shooting Apocalypse
No one quite believes it, but the new Guns N’ Roses album is finally coming out. Axl Rose has been working on it for 17 years, demonstrating, as rarely before, the fine line between perfectionism and padded cell. It is a reminder, though, that in these busy times quite a few acts have gone missing
Quantum of Solace 12A, Nationwide Quantum of Solace is the latest James Bond movie, which I thought I would make clear from the start. These films arrive with such little pre-publicity and hoo-ha they can often slip by quite unnoticed. (As one regular cinema goer told me, ‘I’d have at least liked the chance to
About 25 years ago, during a particularly bad acid trip, I had my soul stolen by Mister Migarette, an evil glowing man with a huge hat, like the mad hatter’s, who lived in the ash on the end of my cigarette. It put me off smoking for a while and I considered giving up. But