The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Fifty years ago, the Royal Court theatre detonated its second H-bomb. The first had been Look Back in Anger, in 1956. The next was The Entertainer, John Osborne’s follow-up play, which opened 50 years ago in April. Out were blown the West End play’s French windows and in came the kitchen sink. The memorable first
When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in 1915 while fighting for the French, he was only 24. It’s hard to believe that so young a sculptor could have done as much or left as large an imprint on art history. When Gaudier’s partner, the mercurial Zofia Brzeska, died intestate in 1925, it was indeed fortunate for
Johan Kobborg’s staging of La Sylphide is one of the Royal Ballet’s super hits. It is thus a good and glorious thing that it is back on stage. This time, too, the brief two-acter is aptly coupled with a short piece: Frederick Ashton’s Rhapsody on some evenings and Kobborg’s Napoli Divertissements on others. While the
In the last ten years there has been (a) an alarming rise (b) a slight but significant rise or (c) no statistically significant change in global mean temperature. Actually, the answer is (c) but if the one you gave was (a) or (b) I’m hardly surprised. How could it not be when pretty much all
The phrase ‘English song’ is often met with suspicion, bringing with it a whiff of the morris dance, the come, follow follow and the hey nonny no — and the work of Roger Quilter, composing in the first half of the 20th century, is no exception to this reaction. However, for those with ears to
Here are two exhibitions which remind us of the richness of art, the many approaches and lines of inquiry which became available to the artist in the 20th century. Picasso, that protean genius, managed to encapsulate most of these revolutionary developments in one career and one gargantuan personality. Aubrey Williams, no slacker or shrinking violet
Wicked is a musical based on the early life of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. So what’s wrong with it, apart from the subject obviously? Well, if you go to a musical you don’t expect to spend three hours denied the pleasure of a hummable tune, a decent gag,
Donizetti’s La fille du régiment is one of his three comedies that retain a place in the repertoire. It is mainly celebrated for its hero Tonio’s aria ‘Pour mon âme’, which has a succession of nine top Cs, a great stunt for a tenor who can pull it, or them, off, but without artistic interest.
Attentive readers will recall that, in recent years, I have worried and wittered and wrung my hands in these pages about the increasing incidents of unusual weather episodes (OK, have it your own way, climate change) and, in particular, whether these ‘abnormal’ conditions are simply temporary blips or represent a definite trend. No longer. I
Here he is. One of Britain’s leading young directors. Tall, sturdily built, mid-thirties, with a mop of thick dark hair and a starter beer gut obtruding discreetly beneath the woolly slopes of his green jumper. Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, is best known as the founder of Propeller, a company that specialises in all-male
Born in Gujarat, western India, in 1951, Shanti Panchal studied art in Bombay before coming to London on a British Council scholarship in 1978. He has made his home in this country ever since, with regular trips back to India, and enjoys a justly high reputation for the distinctive large-scale watercolours he specialises in. However,
Until last week I was the only person on the planet not to have seen The History Boys. I now rejoin the human race in a state of wonder. Such a whopping hit, such flimsy materials. The setting happens to be familiar to me, a state school in the 1980s where a group of smart
If Sean Langan isn’t the bravest, best and most likeable foreign correspondent on TV, I don’t know who is. And what a bumper week this has been for his admirers. On Monday, a Dispatches documentary (Fighting the Taleban, Channel 4) about the six-day battle he witnessed in Garmser, Helmand, when a half-platoon of British infantrymen
Some time after 10 p.m. on 28 November 1966 Truman Capote sashayed into the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York to place himself at the epicentre of New York society. All that autumn New York had speculated about the possible guest list for Capote’s Black and White ball. Capote had nurtured and
Bob Dylan on Radio Two? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. His Bobness, the hippie troubadour and Voice of Sixties America on the Light Programme, the station for Hooverers and flu-sufferers? But Radio Two has been transforming itself in the past few years, sneaking in Jamie Cullum and Suzi Quatro alongside Cliff and Terry, Ronan
Although it must be a nightmare to administer a museum in these philistine and turnstile-obsessed times, the nation’s galleries are still doing their best to provide a service of sorts to the minds and hearts of the populace. If there is a perceptible drift towards dead-cert favourites, who can blame the institutions which now have
A couple of Christmases ago I recommended in this column an exceedingly unfestive offering: Torsten Rasch’s song cycle/symphony Mein Herz brennt with its lacerating mix of heavy-metal pop and late romantic/early modern orchestral intensity, whose music wholly transcended the callow protest of its lyrics in unforgettable excoriation. This year, something at the opposite end of
Shakespeare’s ill-advised reimagining of Falstaff as a buffoon at large in Windsor has always been fair game for adaptation. The story goes that he wrote The Merry Wives in response to Queen Elizabeth’s wish to see Sir John in love. The fee may have been a good one and the Bard actually subverts the wish
You won’t yet have made your New Year resolutions but one thing you might want to add to your list is Join a Choir. It’ll be much cheaper and so much less boring than going to the gym, and yet all that hard work breathing in the right places and struggling to hit top C
One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is
Another major show at the V&A, this time devoted to the more distant past, and thus inevitably of less general interest than a survey of, say, Modernism. It’s not always easy to bring to life a period so different from ours as the courtly and sophisticated Renaissance, though the mix of civilisation and barbarity that
In the five years that I’ve been The Spectator’s drama critic, one of the nicest afternoons I’ve spent was in the company of my fellow critics. No, not at a matinée, but at a lunch for John Gross, who was retiring as the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls after 16 years. Charles Spencer made
Puccini’s Bohemians really knew how to have a good time at Christmas. Huddled in a freezing cold Parisian garret, Rodolfo is reduced to burning his own play for warmth and has just consigned the final act to the flames when Schaunard bursts in and flings on to the table a shower of coins he has
The opening scene in Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It has our heroine distressing supermarket mince pies with a rolling pin in the hope that other parents at the school carol concert will presume them home-made. I loved her for that, just as I did the Calendar Girl who wins the cake
There is a strange kind of amnesia that overtakes me in certain shops: bookshops, DVD shops, CD shops. I stare hopelessly at the rows of titles, usually becoming desperate to spend a penny within a matter of seconds, before buying something I’ve never heard of, or have read/seen/heard already, and rushing out to find a
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Living rooms up and down the country will reverberate to the sound of families rowing, and the television being turned on to provide distraction. But whereas a generation ago the nation could be united by watching the only film on offer, The Sound of Music on BBC1, today’s
Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an excellent choice for one of the music colleges to put on, containing as it does a fairly large number of characters, none of them with extremely demanding parts, though they all need to be as good actors as they are singers. The RCM’s cast that I saw,
It’s always puzzled me that so few theatre critics are involved in making (rather than interpreting, dissecting and sometimes destroying) theatre. Hats off to Time Out reviewer Robert Shore, who’s quitted the breaker’s yard for the production line. Anxious about this new departure, he admits he ‘finds criticism almost impossible to bear’, although he ‘doesn’t
This Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war has all the things you might expect from a Bosnian film about the devastating emotional consequences of war: suffering; pain; Soviet-style concrete estates with stinking stairwells; drab little apartments; dreary knitwear; hard-faced people tramping wearily though the slush and the snow; more suffering; more pain,