The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This is the season of the self-portrait. At the Royal Academy until 11 December are 150 self-portraits by Edvard Munch (reviewed in this column three weeks ago), the depth of his obsession bordering on sheer tedium. Just opening at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major museum study in this country of the self-portrait,
One of the hardest things about being a drama critic, at least for me, is that so many plays stubbornly resist categorisation — and Shoot the Crow by the Northern Irish writer Owen McCafferty is a prime example. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Is it a proper, grown-up piece that wants to be
It was with the 1832 ballet La Sylphide that Marie Taglioni acquired international repute and legendary status. Her angel-like, gravity-defying dancing earned her the affectionate appellation ‘Christian’ dancer, which sits somewhat uncomfortably with the mischievous nature of the eponymous role. Stark contradictions, however, were typical of the Romantic era: the idealised woman could be angel
Stiletto heels, a baby’s dummy, Spice Girls ephemera and glittering embroidery — the predictable paraphernalia of womanhood is all on show in What Women Want. But the latest exhibition at the enterprising Women’s Library in the East End of London is underpinned by some surprising revelations. So we have a 1972 edition of Spare Rib
Nowadays ‘Kienholz’ is a brand. Its founder, Edward Kienholz (1927–94), was a self-taught artist who grew up on a farm on the borders of Washington and Idaho. He made a living as an odd-job man and drove a truck stencilled ‘Ed Kienholz Expert, Estab. 1952’, before co-founding a commercial art gallery and establishing a reputation
It was a story straight out of the Arabian Nights. Two immense temples are lifted high into the air, and transported to a remote desert site. At the same time an entire hill is created in order to replicate the original setting. Such, essentially, is the story of Abu Simbel. The twin temples of Abu
Norma Percy’s latest documentary, Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace (BBC2, Monday), was another remarkable production from Brook Lapping, a company that specialises in catching history on the fly, as it whizzes past. The first episode (of three) covered 1999 and 2000, when Bill Clinton became the latest US president to imagine that he could
The Hallé Orchestra launched its new season last week in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, with a rich programme featuring works by two late Romantic masters. They played Elgar’s Enigma Variations as well as one would expect of a band that enjoys an unparalleled relationship with that composer, and they performed Death and Transfiguration, one of Richard
Joss Whedon is believed to be the first ever third-generation TV writer. In the Fifties, his grampa John Whedon wrote Leave It To Beaver, still earning big syndication bucks today, and in the Sixties The Donna Reed Show. In the Seventies, his dad Tom Whedon wrote Alice, and in the Eighties Benson. And in the
Farewell to Bonfire Night, farewell to the heedless celebration of ‘gun- powder, treason and plot’. Events since 9/11 have branded us all with the grim reality of religiously inspired terrorism. Play after play now seeks to dramatise the underlying causes. Who’s to say that the theatre doesn’t stand at least as good a chance as
Welsh National Opera’s Don Carlos is a magnificent achievement, despite a fair number of more or less serious shortcomings. It establishes, at any rate, that this is by far the most probing and powerful of Verdi’s operas, while being, whichever rich selection of scenes is chosen, far from perfect. Despite its Wagnerian length, almost four
If you are driving along the A14 coming west towards Cambridge, the tower of Bury St Edmunds cathedral suddenly pops up on the skyline at a bend in the road. I saw it this way in March, when the pinnacles, battlements and ogee windows first emerged from plastic sheeting and scaffolding. By June, the whole
Now that my children attend a state primary, I naturally have more of a vested interest in the future of our education system than I did in that brief moment of idiocy when I allowed my wife to persuade me that I could afford to send them private. I haven’t read what either of the
The 2005 Dance Umbrella season kicked off last week with the London debut of the Forsythe Company, created after William Forsythe’s longstanding and successful collaboration with Frankfurt Ballet ended for debatable administrative and artistic reasons. The event attracted an audience of electrified Forsythe diehards, but was not memorable. The oddly mixed programme started with two
The production of Carl Nielsen’s comic opera Maskarade at the Royal Opera is the most brilliant we have seen there for a long time, spectacularly so. It’s a pity that the opera itself doesn’t live up to the treatment it receives, but it’s just about good enough not to let the production down badly. Maskarade
Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, isn’t quite up to his usual standard. It’s not terrible, but it feels as though it was yanked from the director’s improvisatory workshop when it was still in the development stage. It’s about a family of secular north London Jews, and, from the first, everything about them is
America, more than any other country I can think of, encourages such extreme opinions that it’s sometimes difficult to analyse why such views are held. There are rigid anti-Americans, of course, who variously dislike its capitalist and free-market system, its silent majority’s lack of sophistication, or its military and technological might. Much of this is
I tried hard to love Elizabeth I (Channel 4, Thursday) because such work and effort had gone into it, but it was an uphill job. The opening scene, of a doctor examining our heroine’s vagina, was no doubt meant to be challenging and attention-grabbing, but it felt unnecessarily gynaecological. As Barry Humphries would have said,
Wild Wales; Land of Song; Green Valleys: the clichés cluster. The Vale of Glamorgan Festival fulfils most if not all, in a wholly uncliché’d way. Subtitled ‘a celebration of living composers’, it could be forbiddingly severe, courting box-office disaster. But its chosen living composers are far removed from the erstwhile compulsory rebarberation, wilfully inaccessible to
‘If anybody had made a film of my year,’ says John Tomlinson, our latest musical knight, as he lolls on a sofa on the top floor of the Royal Opera House and enjoys a gentle chuckle, ‘I suppose it would have been called My Left Knee!’ It has been a memorable year for the world’s
A rush of air. A mighty whooshing. That was the noise that filled my ears during the opening five minutes of On the Ceiling. It was the horrid turbulence of weighty ideas being picked up and flung earthwards to no good effect. Nigel Planer’s new comedy has such a brilliant and simple theme that you
The Cambridge Illuminations, the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition of mediaeval manuscripts, wasn’t very crowded when I visited last Sunday. The show comprises principally images of devotion, damnation and prayer, conceived and produced by men devoted to poverty, chastity and obedience. That background seems to put a lot of people off. Poverty, chastity and obedience …how much
Some years ago, just before the Shah went into exile, I was touring the archaeological sites of Iran as a guest of the then Imperial Ministry of Culture. I wanted to see the extent to which archaeology was now acting as a means of establishing national identities. Near Hamadan there was a modern bridge over
Although marginalised or ignored for much of her long life, the designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878–1976) is now a hugely admired and influential figure, celebrated in the same breath as Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames. I was first aware of her as the aunt of the
I’ll be honest. I’ve watched less than bugger-all TV this week. The three bridge evenings (one of them, get this, tutored by the legendary Susanna Gross) didn’t help, nor yet did the parents’ barbecue evening at our kids’ new school, and Wednesday night is Pilates night so obviously that’s no good, and you wouldn’t seriously
News of England’s Ashes victory spread rapidly though Cortona’s ancient streets last Monday evening, as those with satellite TV rang the mobile phones of friends and families to pass on the momentous news. It was not, of course, Italians calling; Tuscans observed uncomprehendingly as the holidaying English roared at the result; and one resident Englishwoman
The Royal Opera’s new season began with a nice big surprise: Donizetti’s last opera, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal, written for Paris in 1843, shortly before his fatal syphilitic illness set in. Far from there being any traces of failing powers, it strikes me as the strongest serious opera he wrote, even though it has
A publisher has just reprinted, in time for its centenary, H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (Galore Park, £19.99), which in its day was the immensely successful ‘History of Britain for Boys and Girls, from the Romans to Queen Victoria’. I’m old enough to remember this from first time round — it went through many editions
Much trumpeted as the first exhibition to explore together the lives of Horatio Nelson and Napoleon Bonaparte, Nelson & Napoleon at once raises the double question of was it a good idea and does it work? This crowded display is a qualified success, with an audiovisual presentation which re-enacts the Battle of Trafalgar every five