The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You must look at it for some time,’ he instructed, then ‘you’ll see, I hope, that my physiognomy has grown much calmer, although the gaze may be vaguer than before, so it appears to me.’ Vincent
The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s 1735 carnival opera Bajazet; unsurprisingly, its first appearance at Covent Garden. Upstairs in the big room, they’re doing Handel’s Theodora: premièred at Covent Garden in March 1750 and then ignored by the Royal Opera and
I have heartburn. I probably have heartburn simply because both my parents also had a lot of heartburn, and I have treated it the same way they treated it, with antacids. But lately, with all the sleep disruption and discomfort, I tried to get rid of my heartburn and regretted it. I didn’t talk to
Even leaving aside its origins as prison slang, punk has always meant different things on either side of the Atlantic. Forty-five years ago, in New York, no punk band sounded like the next one: the only thing that linked Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Suicide, Blondie and Television was that they played the same club,
A Number, by Caryl Churchill, is a sci-fi drama of impenetrable complexity. It’s set in a future society where cloning has become possible for those on modest incomes. A Cockney father reveals to his grown-up son that he’s a replica of his older brother who died, aged four, in a car crash that also killed
As there are no stand-out films this week aside from Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile — is that the one where they all did it? Or is that the train one? — I thought I’d alert you to a film that may have slipped under your radar: After Love. It was released
According to the makers, This is Going to Hurt is intended as ‘a love letter to the national health service’. If so, however, it’s certainly not a soppy one. Few non-British people who watch it will, I suspect, find themselves wishing they had an NHS of their own — where the mission statement could easily
I can no longer remember when it was that high streets did not all look the same. The architectural writer James Maude Richards bemoaned the disappearance of local character from our shops as early as 1938, but even so he could include a plumassier, submarine engineer and shop of model transport in his winsome introduction
It’s 1993 and you’re studying at a top agricultural college with a bright future ahead of you, perhaps in farming or land management, when a chance conversation with a barman all but ruins your life. The barman tells you that he is an agent working for MI5, spying on an IRA cell in college, one
To look at a picture of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like contemplating an image of a mountain. Not the elegant, keen-eyed Edwardian intellectual whom we sometimes glimpse on CD sleeves or in concert programmes; I’m thinking of the portraits from the last decade of his long life. By the 1950s ‘RVW’ had been the father
The prestige podcasting era began in 2014, when the true-crime Serial gripped us with the ‘did-he-dunnit’ mystery of whether Adnan Syed had really murdered his high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. With the exception of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, it remains the decade’s most influential piece of narrative storytelling. Without Serial there is no The Jinx,
It’s getting silly now. London’s subsidised theatres aren’t just competing to put on the worst play of the year but to create the worst production of all time. The Young Vic’s new effort, Conundrum, is an impenetrable rant which even the Guardian criticised. The Royal Court enters the fray with Alistair McDowall’s The Glow, directed
The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not Sing 2, for instance. It’s not the exploitation of a franchise. And it’s not as if the industry has run out of original ideas for autobiographical films about becoming a film-maker in London in the
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late 17th-century view of an estate in Belsize Park by the inventor of the country-house portrait, Jan Siberechts. The genre quickly became déclassé. By the 18th century Thomas Gainsborough was painting peasant cottages; by the 20th,
Grade: C+ I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brick from a secondhand shop when I was nearing my 13th birthday. I played it once and then wrote off the £1.85 of my pocket money with buyer’s grave remorse. Sometimes, when the yearning for that much better decade, the 1970s,
The single thing you don’t want when you are beginning a run of four shows in a prestige venue, with reviewers out in force, is for it all to go tits up at the start. Which is precisely what happened to Idles as they opened their Brixton run. On came the band, up started the
Moulin Rouge wins no marks for its storyline. A struggling Parisian theatre is bought out by an evil financier who wants to marry the venue’s star, Satine, whose heart belongs elsewhere. The show opens like a pantomime with a bantering style and cheesy jokes. And there are passages of physical comedy that look weird amid
The second most interesting thing about this digital exhibition is that it is not for art critics like me. I first had to download Fortnite, before bumbling through the introductions and menus for roughly half an hour, accidentally playing a match for a few minutes before figuring out how to access the ‘island’ in the
Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy prepping for Raymonda, Tamara Rojo’s lavish new reboot of Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet. Antony McDonald’s costumes shimmer as vibrantly as his stage design, and Rojo’s choreographic treatment is its own visual feast, packed with pinwheeling
Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of an arse, sure; the kind of TOWIE-adjacent, skinny jean-wearing reality star who’d commission photographic portraits of himself and recruit an entourage of hipsters and B-boy wannabes. But really, his worst crimes are against taste. His
This week marks the beginning of modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4, which means it’s time for some pundit or other to own up to abandoning Ulysses at page seven, or to finding T.S. Eliot a bore, or to infinitely preferring the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner to the repetitive squares of Kazimir Malevich.
Pedro Almodovar’s latest is a film about identity, secrets, lies, buried skeletons, real and metaphorical. But what you mainly need to know is: it is wonderful and delicious and blissfully styled — Almodovar doesn’t do ‘neutrals’ or Uggs — and constantly surprising. With most films you know exactly what you’ll be getting within the first
Older readers may remember a time when people signalled their cultural superiority with the weird boast that they didn’t watch television. These days the same mistaken sense of superiority is more likely to rely on the equally weird one that they don’t watch terrestrial television. So now that the BBC and ITV find themselves in
The superb new exhibition at the Royal Academy, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, is not a retrospective. Nonetheless it is one of the most revealing presentations of this great painter’s work I have ever seen. It follows one of the most important of the chains of thought and feeling that ran through his art —
It has taken me a while to watch Yellowjackets because I found the premise so offputting: in 1996 a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team crashes in the mountain wilderness, stranding the survivors for nearly two years. Through flashbacks, we learn that the girls went through some kind of Lord of the
Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and his first undisputed hit, composed after the failure of Un giorno di regno and the death of his young wife and two children had driven him to abandon music outright. The story (at least, as
Producers are getting jittery again. Large-scale shows look risky when a single infection can postpone an entire show. Hence Poirot and More in the West End. This is a conversation piece in which David Suchet talks about his career as Agatha Christie’s most celebrated nosy parker. Not much technical rehearsal is needed and Suchet relies
Any artist who has habitually written or performed in character — from David Bowie to Lady Gaga — eventually arrives at their Mike Yarwood moment: ‘And this is me!’ With the release of her sixth solo record, Anaïs Mitchell has reached the point of personal revelation. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write
After Artemis Fowl and Murder on the Orient Express you may have had concerns about Kenneth Branagh ever helming a film again — keep away, Ken, keep away! — but Belfast is plainly a different prospect. It is an autobiographical account of his earliest years growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, and it is