The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian National Gallery until 18 January 2009 When people think of the Renaissance, it’s to Italy that their thoughts immediately turn. The names of Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo and Michelangelo spring to mind, although the Renaissance in northern Europe was of equal importance, as a glance at Dürer, van Eyck or
Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision Manchester Art Gallery, until 11 January 2009 Needlepoint nose-dived during the 19th century. This came about, like so many errors of taste, through a process of democratisation. The ladylike pursuit of the leisured classes penetrated the parlours of the many. In place of hand-drawn designs devised by the stitcher,
Matilde di Shabran Royal Opera House Aida English National Opera Iolanta Royal Festival Hall Matilde di Shabran is one of Rossini’s least performed operas, and having seen the Royal Opera’s production, which derives from the Pesaro festival of 2004, I understand why. Broadly speaking, it is a comedy without jokes or other humour, and in
Martin Gayford considers whether we are in the final, pre-popping stages of an art bubble Journalists arriving for the press view of Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery last week were greeted by placards. Why, the slogans asked — you might think reasonably enough — could that institution not pay its staff a little more,
The Irish government has spent €27 million on a stunning new opera house in Wexford, which is having a flawless and crisis-free baptism in the current opera festival there. The old Theatre Royal was knocked down in November 2005, and the money the festival managed to raise was just €6 million of the €33 million
Mariinsky Ballet Sadler’s Wells Tiago Guedes: Various Materials The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre I know I am not alone in thinking that an all-Forsythe programme was not an ideal choice for the Mariinsky Ballet’s opening night in London. As the man who dared successfully to manipulate ballet’s centuries’ old principles, William Forsythe is regarded
Further thoughts on the ever renewed quest for the perfect acoustic for performance and audition of music. Over the past five months I’ve heard one of my string quartets given five of its six première performances in exceedingly diverse and discrepant venues, so much so as (sometimes) to make almost a different piece of it.
Ghost Town 12A, Nationwide Ghost Town stars Ricky Gervais in his first leading Hollywood role, and how much you like this film will probably depend on how much you like Gervais — what? You expected him to turn in a Daniel Day-Lewis-type performance? — and how much Gervais you can take at one sitting; the
Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday); Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday); Saturday Night Live (NBC); The Sarah Silverman Program (Paramount, Monday and Tuesday); Desperate Housewives (Channel 4, Wednesday) I don’t want to come over as obsessive, but I was delighted to see the return of Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday). This show, which
It happened just before the eight o’clock pips on Radio Two on Good Morning Sunday. One of those rare moments when something clicks on air and you’re suddenly so connected to what’s being said that you feel you’re in a private conversation. It’s just you and the voice on the other side of the microphone
The Burial at Thebes The Globe Walton double bill Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House What is our best chance of experiencing Greek tragedies as works that are alive and life-giving, as we can sometimes experience Shakespeare? I’m taking it that we don’t understand Greek, but there are major problems even for those who do. Seamus
Oedipus Olivier La Clique Hippodrome Here it is. The National’s autumn blockbuster, Oedipus. Of all the plays of classical antiquity this is the best, the most accessible, the least tedious, and Jonathan Kent’s impressive production allows the beautiful and awful symmetry of the storyline to work its magic. Yet Kent and his designer Paul Brown
Love’s Labour’s Lost Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare uses the most transparent of silly plots as a pretext for pyrotechnics with the raw material of his craft. On a sudden whim, a king and three courtiers dedicate themselves to scholarship and celibacy. A princess and her companions arrive and duly scupper this
Who’d be a car dealer now? With new sales 20 per cent down and dropping, manufacturers moving to four-day weeks, dealerships closing and the used-car market awash with unsold vehicles, they must feel like turkeys being sized up for Christmas. And that’s before anyone has felt next year’s swingeing road-tax increases on post-2001 mid-sized vehicles
It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a
Jack B. Yeats & Oskar Kokoschka Compton Verney, until 14 December In 1962 Oskar Kokoschka drew record crowds to his Tate retrospective — belated recognition for the Austrian-born artist who had lived in London, on and off, since 1938. Herbert Read blamed the long delay on Kokoschka’s ‘un-Englishness’, so it’s ironic that his latest comeback
One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, it may be possible to draw a telling analogy between the practices of the world financial markets which propelled the global economy to the brink of recession and those which prompted the phenomenal rise of the international contemporary art market. After all, so many of the players are
Correggio and the Antique National Gallery and other locations in Parma, until 25 January 2009 Unlike the other leading artists of the Italian High Renaissance — Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian — Correggio lived a life of provincial obscurity. Unable to find any likeness of him, Vasari was obliged in his Lives of the Artists to
Anthony Caro’s Chapel of Light Church of St-Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg The Barbarians and Clay works Musée des Beaux-Arts, Calais, until 23 February 2009 Paper works and Table sculptures Musée de Gravelines, until 21 February 2009 Steel sculptures Lieu d’Art et d’Action Contemporaine, Dunkirk, until 21 February 2009 There was once a small town called Vence, just
The great days of cinema are not over: they live on in Terence Davies, writes Peter Hoskin How to write about the cinema of Terence Davies? Words just don’t stand a chance. I could deploy every superlative going, and reduce every one of the three short films and five feature films he’s directed into their
No Man’s Land Duke of York’s Mine Hampstead Slow, fractured, monumental, ineluctable, No Man’s Land lurches at you like a disintegrating ice shelf. The first act opens with two drunks staggering around a Hampstead mansion downing whisky and making oblique statements of self-revelation. Spooner, a broken-down poet, has been invited home by Hirst, a millionaire
The problem with this wretched crisis is that it infects even TV. There I was on Sunday night, trying to enjoy some soothing, mellow quality time with dear Stephen Fry — or ‘Steve’ as he now styles himself in his six-part travelogue Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) — and the whole experience was filtered through
Compagnie Beau Geste Parsons Green Toilet Tango Bathstore, Baker Street Stephen Petronio Dance Company Queen Elizabeth Hall Australian Ballet Sadler’s Wells Theatre Manon Royal Opera House The dancing digger and its partner, the exceptional Philippe Priasso, are back in town. Aptly regarded as a highlight of last year’s Dance Umbrella, Compagnie Beau Geste’s Transports Exceptionnels