The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nicholas Hytner’s Richard II is a high-calibre version of a fascinating story. A king reluctantly yields his crown to a usurper who wants his violent revolt to seem like a peaceful transfer of authority. This delicate, complex narrative is presented as a boardroom power struggle in corporate Britain. Snappy suits for the dukes and princes.
There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically if anyone gets too near her nest – not that her eggs are about to hatch, let alone run. The recent threat of the British Council to ‘deaccession’ – to put it more bluntly, sell
The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will part to reveal two rows of yellow grimacing teeth. Then its clockwork arms will wheel up and down, banging a little drum as fairground music plays. And then someone nearby dies in an extremely gory
Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful
The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the
Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-grand-daughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch
I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way
Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at
There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly cold Monday night in Philadelphia, Lauren Mayberry – over from Glasgow, and halfway through a month of criss-crossing the USA – took to the stage to survey a crowd of maybe 500 people, in a
My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers
Among my many fake and useless skills, I’m a reasonably decent tarot reader. I can do one for you now if you like. A very simple three-card spread: your cards are the Seven of Wands, the Hierophant and the Six of Pentacles. There are lots of vaguely drippy ways of interpreting a three-card spread: past-present-future,
Arts Council England may be successfully clobbering the poor old genre of opera into the ground, but its sister art dance continues to be nurtured ever more generously, and the London scene is as ebulliently youthful and healthily various as it’s ever been. At the top end there’s the Royal Ballet, currently a match for
Tracey Thorn released an album in 2010 titled Love and Its Opposite. When it comes to songwriting, it’s the ‘opposite’ that tends to throw up the more compelling discourse. The anti-love song has been a staple in popular music since Elvis’s baby left him and he wandered off to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Presley is a useful
Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic 25-year project to record all the composer’s vocal works – passions, masses, motets and more than 200-odd cantatas – in electrifying performances supplemented by lectures and workshops. At the helm is a Swiss choral conductor
Wouldn’t it be marvellous if instead of going to work every day we could contract out the tedium to avatars of whose daytime activities we could remain blissfully unaware? This, in essence, is the premise of the dystopian drama Severance, but I’m not sure it’s a fantasy many of us actually nurture. Noël Coward once
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the fourth outing for our heroine as played by Renée Zellweger and I was not especially hopeful. Who can still be bothered? Particularly after that silly Thai jail business (second film) and then all that flailing about in the mud at a music festival (third). But this takes
The Years is a monologue spoken by a handful of actresses, some young, some old enough to carry bus passes. They stand in black costumes on a white stage explaining to us the significance of memory, history and feelings. Then the story begins. The narrator is a precocious chatterbox born in France during the war
Grade: B When a music-lover is tired of Haydn’s London symphonies, they’re tired of life. It’s not just the sheer creative verve of these 12 symphonies by a composer in his sixties. It’s the generosity of spirit. Beethoven demands a battle of wills; Mozart a near-impossible grace. But a conductor can run straight at a
On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a
Next week, after the première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen, the cast and conductor will take their bow. All being well, there’ll be applause; and then a brief lull as the creative team takes the stage. There’s often a ripple of curiosity in the audience at this point, because it’s rare that we get
If you were a frequent viewer of Top Gear in its Clarkson/Hammond/May era, there is a particular laugh you will be very familiar with: the combined hoot and exclamation that the three of them, and Clarkson especially, would engage in when driving a fast car around a bend. It was a sort of ‘WOOOOwraghhhahahaha’, designed
It is a truth universally acknowledged that lazy journalists begin every piece about Jane Austen with the words ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, so I’ll fight the temptation. In any case, the Miss Austen at the centre of BBC1’s new Sunday-night drama isn’t Jane, but her beloved sister Cassandra, best known for destroying most
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is by the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and all you need to know is that it is extraordinary. What you don’t need to know, but may like to know, is that Rasoulof, who has already been imprisoned multiple times by the authorities, filmed it clandestinely while directing remotely from
The overture to The Flying Dutchman opens at gale force. There’s nothing like it; Mendelssohn and Berlioz both painted orchestral seascapes but no one before Wagner had flung open the sluices and let the ocean roar into the opera house with quite such elemental power. Garry Walker and the orchestra of Opera North dived into
Grade: A Hell, there’s a lot not to like, or even to be a little suspicious of, with this young woman. Her politics are, as you might have guessed, banal and stupid. She has been in a relationship with the ghastly Matty Healy of the 1975. But she has huge talent and is probably a
Oliver! directed by Matthew Bourne is billed as a ‘fully reconceived’ version of Lionel Bart’s musical. Very little seems to have been reconceived. This stylish and dynamic show develops like an unblemished copy of Carol Reed’s film. Fair enough. Punters want comfort, not novelty when they go to see a 65-year-old musical. Billy Jenkins, as
Intoxicating History is the perfect title for drinks expert Henry Jeffreys and food critic Tom Parker Bowles’s new podcast. Its theme is alcohol, but its contents are predominantly historical, which is good news if, like me, you are quick to apply the word ‘bore’ to any man who talks about wine for more than eight
Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful