The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name of an artist and a comprehensive history of their live performances will appear, spanning decades long gone to the hour just past. Setlist.fm is both a useful resource and a massive spoiler-fest; the music equivalent
‘What will it take to make Richard Ayoade laugh?’ If you find this question about as enticing as ‘Whose turn is it to deworm the cat?’ or ‘What is Keir Starmer’s favourite plant-based ready meal?’ I really don’t blame you. But still if you watch Last One Laughing (Amazon Prime), I think you might change
Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about a dancing teapot. But when he was rejected for military service in the first world war (he was 39 and 5ft) he practically forced his way to the front line as a lorry driver –
Robert Icke’s new play examines one of the least appetising characters in British criminal history. Raoul Moat went on a shooting spree in July 2010 that left his wife injured, a cop blinded and an innocent man dead. This superb piece of reportage offers us a glimpse into the mind of a damaged brute. Moat
‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too
Uberto Pasolini’s The Return stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in a retelling of the last section of Homer’s Odyssey. He is Odysseus and she is Penelope in a stripped-back tale that presents the pair as psychologically plausible human beings rather than characters from Greek myth. Fiennes and Binoche are, of course, spellbinding. I could
In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you can simply buy a customisable 3D avatar from Turbosquid.com, animate it with your own movements by wearing a sensor-filled motion-capture bodysuit, and presto! Lifelike but eerily soulless, Ed Atkins’s video portraits occupy a strange visual
Once Igor Levit starts playing Erik Satie at 10 a.m. on 24 April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he can expect to be there for a long time. Satie’s Vexations is a piece that looks innocent enough, like butter wouldn’t melt in its composer’s ears. A doleful 18-note theme in the bass is filled in
Tribe with Bruce Parry ran for three fondly remembered series in the mid-2000s. Now, upgraded to Tribe with Bruce Parry, it’s back, still championing traditional ways of life – including that of a TV presenter who lives among remote peoples, takes loads of drugs with them and marvels at their closeness to nature. Sunday’s episode
Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter an office to find a man with a ‘large intelligent head’ seated behind a desk and absorbed in paperwork. Everything would appear normal until he picked up a penknife and stabbed his own leg. A
Amanda Abbington’s new show is heavily indebted to Noël Coward’s Hay Fever.Coward’s early play follows the tribulations of the superficial Bliss family and at first it was rejected by producers because it lacked action or incident. The oddly titled show, (This is not a) Happy Room, opens on the eve of a family wedding. Disaster
Any evening devoted to the multifaceted genius of George Balanchine is something to be grateful for, manna in the wilderness indeed, but the Royal Ballet’s current offering left me hungry for more. Three works were on the programme, all created in the early stage of the great man’s career, two of them widely familiar, none
Mr Burton is a biopic of Richard Burton’s early years and an origins story, if you like. It stars Harry Lawtey as young Richard and Toby Jones as Philip Burton, the inspirational teacher whose name he would take. It’s a fascinating story. In essence, Richard’s drunkard father sold him for £50. But the film is
Midway through their thoroughly entertaining show at Wembley Arena, the Darkness played a song from a decade ago called ‘Barbarian’, about Ivar the Boneless and the Viking conquest of Britain. ‘Barbarian’ exists in a long tradition of men with long hair, tight trousers and loud guitars singing about our Danish friends. Led Zeppelin did it
You feel so close to Victor Hugo in this exhibition. It’s as if you are at his elbow while he sighs at his standing desk at the top of his house on Guernsey, where he held France constantly in view as he worked. Here, frustrated by Les Misères (working title), he has thrown down his
It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of
Grade: B+ Satan’s devoted groupies Cradle of Filth are back with their shrieking, howling, portentous, Exorcist-style incantations, 30 years after effectively inventing the loser-boy goth-metal offshoot, black metal. They’ve got quite good at it. Rapid-paced minor-chord hard rawk, much as AC/DC might have churned out if someone had shown them some Edgar Allan Poe and
In April 2015, a fire raged through Clandon Park, destroying much of the 18th-century Palladian mansion’s prized interiors. Contrary to all expectations, the National Trust, its custodian, announced plans to keep the Grade I-listed building ‘as a ruin’. Architects Allies and Morrison would ‘creatively curate’ the celebrated property as ‘a country house laid bare’, adding
The Starland Vocal Band were on to something. In their 1976 hit ‘Afternoon Delight’ they sang, in gruesomely twee harmony: ‘Gonna grab some afternoon delight/ My motto’s always been when it’s right it’s right/ Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night?’ Granted, they were singing about rumpy-pumpy, not theatre-going, but for many
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a ‘post-apocalyptic musical’ starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon that is being sold as a ‘bold vision’. And as you know I’m all for bold visions – except perhaps ones that go on for two and a half hours (I genuinely feared The End would never end) and give the
I was talking recently to a rock guitarist about the amount of music an audience hears during a typical concert that is ‘on track’ – in other words, not played live in the moment but instead stored, supplied and sequenced via computer. They suggested that nowadays every artist, from pop starlets to indie rebels, relies
Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just want to sink into some thumping AAA franchise that’s thrown all the time, design talent and VC megabucks in the world at the screen. The new Assassin’s Creed has you covered there. Irresistibly, it’s set
How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the abstract tendency in post-war American culture, the lover and collaborator of John Cage, Cunningham emptied barefoot dance of ideology, symbolism, plot, personality, pretension: instead it became purely an exploration of bodies in movement, responsive to
I really had no interest in watching Dope Thief. It’s another of those crime dramas set in a bleak-looking city – possibly there are some pretty parts of Philadelphia but we only get to see the bad bits – where everyone seems to be on welfare or a drug dealer, or both, everything looks washed
Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian
My Neighbour Totoro is a hugely successful show based on a Japanese movie made in 1988. The setting is a haunted house occupied by two little girls who encounter various creatures rendered on stage by puppets. The story has no action, danger or jeopardy so it’s likely to bore small boys and their dads. Perhaps
Rembrandt was ‘largely self-taught as a printmaker’, according to Epco Runia, head of collections at Rembrandt House Museum. ‘[He] learned by looking at examples and simply trying things out,’ Runia writes in the guide that accompanies this fine show (which will travel to Charleston in October and Cincinnati next winter). Etching had only been around
Think of a Mexican painting, and chances are you’ll conjure up an image of an eyebrow-knitted Frida Kahlo, or a riot of exotic figures by her husband Diego Rivera, or a brightly coloured guitarist by Rufino Tamayo. What you’re unlikely to have in mind is an earthy landscape with a dusty road leading to a
Cher Horowitz, the central character in Clueless, is one of the most irritating heroines in the history of movies. She’s a rich, slim, beautiful Beverly Hills princess obsessed with parties, boys and clothing brands. According to her, the world’s problems can easily be settled by using the solutions she applied to the seating plan at