The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Plaza Suite is a sketch show by Neil Simon set in a luxury New York hotel in 1968. The play is rarely revived and it’s never been staged in the West End before. Simon’s idea (which Noël Coward accused him of stealing from his play Suite in Three Keys) is to place a trio of
Sometimes I think, in the end, only the voice truly matters. Dress it however you wish, zhuzh it up with textural condiments: cool electronics, warm strings, harsh noise, romantic rhythm, ambient atmospherics. It’s all decoration. The human voice is what we respond to most fervently and instinctively in popular music. This – far from infallible
As a young music critic, Bernard Shaw poked fun at anyone who thought Mendelssohn was a genius. Shaw conceded that Mendelssohn was capable of touching tenderness and refinement and sometimes ‘nobility and pure fire’, but his music was marred by kid-glove gentility, conventional sentimentality and – worst of all – ‘despicable oratorio-mongering’. Shaw’s pet hate
I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing, but I’m certainly always bracing myself for the latest Holocaust film. There have been some horribly dim ones, such as The Reader or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, both of which invite you to sympathise with the perpetrators and you know what? I won’t if it’s
Some years ago I did a short series of interviews for The Spectator with war veterans about their combat experiences. Most had found them exciting, fulfilling, even enjoyable: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!’ said infantryman Mike Peyton, who likened it to doing the black ski run at Tortin in Verbier. But the
Ballet has always suffered from a shortage of stories that can communicate without the medium of the spoken word or a lengthy synopsis in the programme. Recourse has often been made to familiar fairy tale and legend, but recently popular films and novels have also become a favoured source – Matthew Bourne, for instance, has
It’s awards season in the movie industry and the film Poor Things, based on the novel by the late Scottish writer and painter Alasdair Gray, is flying high. To date, it has received more than 180 nominations in various award categories, including 11 Oscars and 11 BAFTAs, and has chalked up 51 wins. What Alasdair
On 10 June 1940, a riot erupted in Edinburgh as a 2,000-strong mob swarmed the streets, hell-bent on revenge. Their targets were barbers, delis and ice cream parlours; anything or anyone Italian. Mussolini had just entered the war and the mob scented blood. The police eventually quelled the violence and the city’s more sympathetic locals
‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The Essex Way’ (2021), a monumental collage commissioned from local boy Michael Landy to mark the 10th anniversary of the Colchester gallery’s opening. With its discombobulating mix of illustrations of native birdlife and views of
The whole world might have been different had Alasdair MacLean, singer and guitarist of the delicate, pastoral, slightly psychedelic band the Clientele, had his way. In 2006 he told music website Pitchfork about the time he was working for a publisher and strongly recommended they turn down a children’s fantasy novel that had been submitted.
Don’t Destroy Me is the rather breathless title of Michael Hastings’s first play which he wrote when he was just 18. The material draws on his adolescent years in a south London boarding house and the action opens with an elderly husband, Leo, and his unfaithful young wife, Shani, preparing for a visit from their
Opera North has launched its spring season with Giles Havergal’s 2013 production of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring, performed (as conceived) in the Howard Assembly Room – the company’s studio space next door to the Grand Theatre. The economics of opera are a dark and dismal science, but one of the few constants is that ticket
Grade: A- Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it. Moira sets off to meet
With its tales of close relatives reuniting after years of separation, ITV’s Long Lost Family has been reliably jerking tears since 2011. Now, from the same production company, comes Born from the Same Stranger: another thumping slice of highly effective old-school human-interest storytelling, this time served with a side order of ethical dilemmas. In the
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is an aching tale of grief, loss and loneliness starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, so I probably don’t need to tell you the acting is off the scale but I will anyway: the acting is off the scale. Scott, in particular, infuses his character with such vulnerability that
Two archetypal ballet heroines have been facing each other across WC2: at the Coliseum, Giselle the blameless virgin, wronged in the first act, disembodied in the second; at Covent Garden, Manon the seductive, manipulative courtesan who can’t choose between love and money. Both in different ways are victims of a cruel world, and both must
The first European translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Lord Krishna, appeared in English in 1785. Strangely, this classic of Indian spirituality, which is much concerned with liberation, was prefaced with talk of conquest, rightful dominion and chains of subjection. The translation had been produced under the auspices of the
Of their many cultural quirks, Americans retain a slightly ridiculous and yet rather touching belief in the power of ‘punk rock’ (nobody in the UK ever calls it that, of course: it’s just ‘punk’). Despite laying claim to the progenitors of the whole punk thing – the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ramones –
In February 1929, an exhibition by a young unknown female painter opened at the Arlington Gallery on Bond Street. This was not surprising in itself, given that the gallery specialised in lesser-known artists. More surprising was the fact that this artist was a woman – and Italian. As the critic Emilio Cecchi noted in the
The Enfield Haunting is a good old-fashioned horror show that wants to be a documentary as well. It’s based on a hocus-pocus yarn that made the front page of the Daily Mirror in 1977 and was swiftly forgotten. The play opens in an Enfield terrace that resembles a bomb site, complete with charred plasterwork, missing
In the dog days of winter, when venturing out under darkened, sleety skies is to be avoided if at all possible, an online book club often seems the most appealing kind there is. Here in the UK, on territory in which the daytime TV hosts Richard and Judy once held undisputed reign, a bookish royal
Aristotle wrote that classical tragedy should evoke pity and awe. With Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the awe can be taken as read: a certain irreducible level of epicness is written into the score, even if – like Sir Antonio Pappano on the first night of this new production at the Royal Opera – a conductor takes
I’m sure there’s a Portuguese word which describes ‘enforced nostalgia for a thing you never enjoyed in the first place’. Whatever it is, it applies in spades to BBC1’s reboot of Gladiators, which we’re now told was one of the landmarks of 1990s Saturday TV entertainment but which I don’t recall fondly one bit, despite
The first thing to say about Alexander Payne’s latest, The Holdovers, is that it’s not so much an inspirational teacher film as an uninspirational teacher film. You should know that before attending the cinema otherwise you might sit throughout in the brace position, fearing it could go all Dead Poets Society at any moment. It
About 30 minutes before the end of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the universe splits open. Elektra, daughter of the murdered king Agamemnon, lives for the day when her brother Orest will return to avenge her father by slaughtering her mother. Now Orest is here and his sister no longer recognises him. Until suddenly, shatteringly, she does,
‘I hope the day will never come when I shall neither be the subject of calumny or ridicule, for then I shall be neglected and forgotten’, is how Samuel Johnson greeted the news that James Gillray had caricatured him as Dr Pomposo. In Georgian London, a caricature was a fast-track to celebrity. And, as described
The big finish to Streets of Gold: Mumbai, an excited look at the city’s ‘wealthiest one-percenters’, was an extravagant party hosted by ‘two of India’s most coveted fashion designers’. As the programme made clear, all the guests were rich and/or famous, and all were dressed to prove it. ‘If you’re basic, you’re not invited,’ said
Shall we get the pop predictions for this year out of the way first? Taylor Swift will continue to conquer the world; the charts will continue their descent into meaninglessness; some long-forgotten group or style will become inexplicably popular because kids use it to soundtrack their TikTok videos. There. That’s the coming year taken care
I’ve heard a few people say that, based on the trailer, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Poor Things, looks too weird for their tastes. To be honest, the trailer made me think this ‘gender-bending Frankenstein’, as it’s being sold, looked too weird for my tastes. But let’s be brave. It is Lanthimos after all (The Lobster,