The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘I’m not a snob. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters.’ The author of this self-knowing gem is Simon LeBon and I read it on a freesheet discarded on the bus that took me to see Martin Crimp’s state-of-the-nation play, Attempts on her Life. Amazingly, this tossed-aside gag was the high point of my evening. Mr
The first revival of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest showed that, impressive as the first series of performances had been, three years ago, they were sketchy compared with what we see and hear at Covent Garden this time round. Certainly it sounded far more exciting this time: the opening deluge of sound was both more overwhelming
It is not surprising that Baroque operas have long attracted the interest of contemporary choreographers. Apart from the numerous dance passages that punctuate these works, their classically inspired plots, rife with political, cultural and social metaphors, are inexhaustible and stimulating sources of inspiration for any modern-day artist. Not to mention the fact that a radical
I wonder whether Cameron and co. in their attempts to stir up worries about climate change, carbon emissions and the future of the planet ever spend much time listening to nature in the raw. Of course, to understand what’s happening on a global scale might well require expensive flights to the far reaches of the
A courier staggered up the stairs to my flat bearing Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures with an essay by Rudi Fuchs (Tate Publishing, 1,200 pages, 1,500 full-colour illustrations, £39.99). It’s a two-volume hardback which comes in its own carrying case, but I was glad not to have to bring it home myself as it
Which language should students at a music college perform an opera in for the public? I’d have thought that, though it’s no doubt very good for them to learn to sing in various non-native languages, it’s at least as important that they practise singing as communicatively as possible. Which does not mean that they should
Happy birthday to The Entertainer. The ultimate state-of-the-nation play is 50 years old. I’ve never quite bought the idea that Archie Rice, a failed music-hall comedian, is supposed to represent Britain’s decline as a superpower. A clapped-out comic to symbolise the death of a military hegemony? Don’t get it. But at the time this revolutionary
In this film Sandra Bullock plays Linda Hanson, wife of dishy Jim Hansom (Julian McMahon), mother to two adorable little girls, Megan and Bridgette, and one of those blissfully contented stay-at-home moms who — even though this is very much horses for courses — still make you want to puke a little. It’s a happy,
The pity of war has been well documented ever since we as rivalrous, destructive human beings developed pen and paper. But this latest British conflict against Iraq is the first in which the new possibilities of internet communication have really taken off. Blogs, emails, the YouTube and MySpace websites have given the soldiers out in
Joanna Lumley bears a distinct resemblance to the delectable Mrs Algernon Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who, while still in bed of a morning, supervises the painting of a mural, fills in the crossword, offers useful advice on matters of state, attends to pressing correspondence, corrects a child’s construing of Horace and deals with a
It’s always a pleasure to visit Pallant House. At the moment, it seems particularly good value: three separate exhibitions plus the permanent collection, not forgetting the restaurant and excellent bookshop. William Roberts (1895–1980) is one of those forgotten giants of British Modernism who has been crying out for reassessment, and now here’s the perfect-sized exhibition
Handel’s Orlando, apparently one of his greatest operas, is much more impressive in the first revival of Francisco Negrin’s production at the Royal Opera than it was at its first outing in 2003. Though my visual memory is most unreliable, I remember it as revolving dizzyingly, with characters whipping through door after door as the
‘How I hate!’ is the first line of Torben Betts’s new play. Not a promising start. A teenage Goth with a scowl like a squashed spider crouches in her bedroom ranting against her smugger-than-smug parents. A revolution erupts. The Goth cheers and is then raped by a mad soldier. The civil war ends and order
One of the most persistent and tiresome misunderstandings about how sacred music was performed in the past is that boys’ voices were always involved. In any number of places this was simply not true: male voices, yes, always; children’s voices, not at all necessarily. The country where boys seemed to have been used most standardly
Just to remind you, this is the week my splendid anti-Left polemic How To Be Right is published and if you Speccie readers aren’t its natural constituency I don’t know who is. So buy it, please, or I’m never going to be able to put Boy through that brilliant prep school I mentioned a few
‘Keep your angels about you,’ was the inspiring advice given by William Blake in Peter Ackroyd’s Drama on 3 (Sunday), based on ‘the story’ of the visionary poet and artist who was born 250 years ago in 1757 and who is famous for giving us ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’ and ‘Tyger tyger’.
To be called ‘the squinter’, which is what ‘il Guercino’ means, might not seem an auspicious nickname for an artist, but it doesn’t appear to have stood in the way of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), who became one of the most famous Italian artists of the 17th century. Not only was he a distinguished Baroque
‘His clothes are drenched in brine, his beard drips with seawater, and his brow is covered in perspiration due to his continual efforts to reach sinking ships to save them from the angry waves.’ Such is the lively picture of St Nicholas recorded by an anthologist of popular Greek calendar customs, contrasting somewhat with the
The Illusionist is one of those films that gains points for trying to be clever and different and ingenious but then promptly loses them all for being not clever or different or ingenious enough. It’s frustrating, really, because you can feel the good film trying to get out — ‘let me out, let me out!’
Sunday evening at the Barbican was a revelation, no less gushy word will do. Janacek’s comic opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek is the Cinderella in his operatic output, if you don’t count the very early works, whole or fragmentary; even the weird but kind of wonderful Osud is more likely to turn up these
Michael Keegan-Dolan is to dance–theatre what radical and elusive Banksy is to the visual arts. Indeed, these two acclaimed bad boys of modern-day culture have a great deal in common; both derive their art from cruel satire of the everyday, which they portray with similar irreverent and shock-provoking strokes, in spite of their different means
I used to write a few political profiles in my time, and the one thing I always hoped was that the subject would refuse to co-operate. You had to offer to interview them, naturally, otherwise there might be legal difficulties. But you prayed they would say no. That rarely happened. When I did see them,
Got the right place? Yup, this looks like it. I’m about to meet TV’s grumpiest man, and his fixers have booked us a room in a fashionable media institute in Covent Garden. I peer through the frosted glass at what appears to be a hotel, a bistro, a therapy centre and a health farm all
If ever there was an exhibition which warranted a speedy and assessing first look, and then a longer, more lingering concentration on certain pictures, then Citizens and Kings is it. Subtitled ‘Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830’, it doesn’t have an exactly prepossessing moniker. Citizens and Kings sounds like something out of one of
The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century
Sheridan Morley died suddenly last weekend. He was The Spectator’s theatre critic from 1990 to 2001. His knowledge of both the stage and its leading practitioners was encyclopedic, while his many theatrical anecdotes were hugely entertaining. He and his wife, the producer and critic Ruth Leon, were planning to spend more time shuttling between London
The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the
‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed. First, the contrasts: Tchaikovsky the emotional, passionate, subjective, confessional, pouring his heart
Exactly 400 years ago, 24 February 1607, the first great opera received its première in Mantua. It’s a crucial date in the history of the arts in Western Europe, and it would have been agreeable to be able to report that Opera North, in its new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, did it justice. And musically