The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Gerald Kaufman on the late, great dancer and film star ‘who could stop a man by just sticking up her leg’, and the accidents that led her to a role that became a movie sensation When I discussed Singin’ in the Rain with Cyd Charisse, who died last week, she was of course aware that
Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons Tate Modern, until 14 September This year, Cy Twombly celebrated his 80th birthday. As the leading modern American artist who decamped to Europe and went his own way regardless of developments at home, Twombly was for many years out in the wilderness. But he held his course and now he
Ariadne auf Naxos Royal Opera House The Pilgrim’s Progress Sadler’s Wells One of the odd things about the Strauss–Hofmannsthal collaboration is that while the literary half was endlessly aspiring, writing works which might serve the high function which Wagner saw for music–drama, even if Hofmannsthal didn’t much care for Wagner’s works, the musical half was
Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic ‘No man sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.’ Dr Johnson was speaking of a poet who looked to his friends for solace after his verses had been savaged in the press. He got none. That’s the risk all artists take. I’ve been through this
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Opera North, Manchester Powder Her Face Royal Opera, Linbury At certain times all conditions seem to conspire to favour some opera composers, and to make others seem virtually impossible to produce satisfying accounts of. At present everything is going Britten’s way; every time I see a production of almost any opera
Two men, a single piece of music and a script that’s barely 40 minutes long. And yet when it was over I felt quite stunned; shaken and unnerved by a totally unexpected dramatic twist. I’d been so absorbed, thinking in my own clever way that I knew what was going to happen, that I understood
St Kilda, a set of islands off the coast of Scotland uninhabited for 78 years except by around a million seabirds. Suddenly the BBC sends a crack team of exclaimers to this remote and beautiful place. ‘Amazing!’ they cry. ‘Fantastic!’, ‘stunning!’, ‘great!’, ‘breathtaking!’, ‘spectacular!’ Now and again the team try to dredge from their psyches
Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September Alan Green: Joan Miro Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July I can never visit the Wallace Collection without lamenting the filling of the erstwhile courtyard with an airless restaurant which scarcely does justice to the
Afterlife Lyttelton Dickens Unplugged Comedy Afterlife is pH-neutral. It doesn’t enhance Michael Frayn’s reputation and doesn’t damage it either. Max Reinhardt was one of the great theatrical magicians of the 20th century and it’s easy to see what drew Frayn and his long-standing collaborator, the director Michael Blakemore, to the challenge of putting his life
The Edge of Love 15, Nationwide The Edge of Love, which is based loosely on real events, explores the ménage à quatre that existed for a few years between the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), his childhood friend Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley) and her eventual husband, William Killick (Cillian
Good grief. This is a terrific, amazing story. Congratulations to Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant. It’s almost like an Ealing comedy except, of course, you know, serious. And, I think, really rather wonderful: At first sight, the Kingsway seems an unwelcoming place. Wind whips around the 15-storey tower blocks, the windows in the lobby doors
Henrietta Bredi joins in the preparations for Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ ‘Come, thou blessed of the Lord’ sing the sopranos and altos, and now the tenors and basses are joining them, with a wondrously layered swelling of sound. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end — this is the
Like anyone else who’s spent any time in Washington these past 20 years, I was stunned by the sad news of Tim Russert’s death, aged just 58, on Friday. these must be terrible times for his friends and family. Like Matt Yglesias, I’ve criticised Russert before, but de mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that.
A 1980s cartoon from Private Eye shows a teenage boy, dressed in animal skins, staring intently into the dancing flames of a small fire. Behind him, bearded and leaning on a club, stands his scowling Neanderthal father, horrified: ‘When I was a boy we had to make our own entertainment.’ The great Douglas Adams believed
Summer Exhibition Royal Academy, until 17 August The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, now in its 240th year, is still an event, even if visitors don’t dress up quite as ornately as once they did. For the first time I attended Buyers’ Day. The atmosphere is convivial but competitive, as people jostle to see
‘London smells Tory,’ announced Ian Martin, the Beachcomber of architectural journalism post-Boris in his weekly column in the Architects’ Journal. Heritage wars have broken out over the future of a concrete housing scheme, Robin Hood Gardens in East London by Alison and Peter Smithson, that is beloved of architects, but not, it seems, of many
There are artists you admire and there are artists you love, and for me Bob Dylan has long fallen into the former category. I have been listening to him, sporadically, since I was a schoolboy, when his rebellious stance and imagistic, freewheeling lyrics had an obvious appeal to a bolshie adolescent at a boy’s boarding
Rosmersholm Almeida Love — The Musical Lyric Fat Pig Trafalgar Studio A Norwegian melodrama about suicide, socialism and thwarted sexual passion. If you saw that on the poster would you be tempted? Nor me. Add the authorship of Ibsen and you might change your mind but you’d be unwise. Rosmersholm is a clumsy, unengaging late
Margaret Thatcher – the Long Walk to Finchley (BBC4) You don’t have to look very hard for signs that the Tories are going to romp home in the next general election. There was another one on TV this week: a drama showing Margaret Thatcher as an achingly sexy young woman who made fantastic speeches and
We’ve just uploaded a new set of culture picks from our arts editor, Liz Anderson. You can access them here.
Don Carlo Royal Opera House Verdi’s Don Carlo is as much of an obsession for me as one of my favourite operas. Though it isn’t perfect, and can’t be made perfect, whatever you include or eliminate from the extraordinary number of options available (including two languages), it has so many prolonged scenes of incontrovertible greatness,
Irina Palm 15, Barbican and key cities The big film this week is, I suppose, The Incredible Hulk but I chose not to see it because, aside from anything else, isn’t this the second Hulk film in about ten minutes? When was the Ang Lee one? I have no idea why it’s come round again
Petroc Trelawny visits the world’s largest piano factory in the country where under Mao it was dangerous to play the instrument As my plane makes its final approach into the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the mountains give way briefly to green paddy fields, and then industry takes over. Beneath are hundreds of vast blue-roofed
MUSIC Proms: Get booking now for this two-month season (18 July to 13 September). Highlights include the Berliner Philharmoniker with Sir Simon Rattle (Brahms and Shostakovich) on 3 September; Handel’s Belshazzar conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras (16 August); Daniel Barbenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra playing Haydn, Schoenberg and Brahms (14 August); plus endless other goodies. For
‘Mr Pont, may I introduce you to Miss Austen?’ There is something infinitely touching about a creative artist who dies young, not before displaying sure evidence of a glorious gift but without having time to set up the arching parabola of developing genius. One thinks of that magic group at the beginning of the 19th
Mongol 15, Nationwide Mongol traces the early years of the legendary warrior Genghis Khan and does not feature, at any point, the world’s greatest adventurer/archaeologist or four fortysomething women living and loving in New York. Yes, it is probably safe to come out now. They’re all gone! However, having said that, the other morning when
Megan asks for suggestions for a tribute tape to the late and lamented Democratic primary race. A quick glance at my iPod suggests these tunes… “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards” – Billy Bragg “A Century of Fakers” – Belle & Sebastien “Let’s Get Out of This Country” – Camera Obscura “The Queen is Dead”
This weekend, by chance, brought us television biographies of the two most famous British women of the 19th century. They were very different programmes, for good reason. Queen Victoria’s Men on Monday was made for Channel 4, so of course it had to be in that channel’s long iconoclastic tradition: General Custer, a great tactician;
British cinema is renowned largely for its spirit of documentary realism. Think Ken Loach, think Mike Leigh, or – more recently – think Shane Meadows. The four-disc, forty-film box set ‘Land of Promise: The British Documentary Film Movement, 1930-1950’ (recently released by the British Film Institute, and available here) represents the primordial soup from which
