The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac (Baron Victor Frankenstein) and Jacob Elordi (‘the creature’) and retells the basics of Mary Shelley’s story – man creates monster, man rejects monster, monster goes off on one – with high-camp sumptuousness. Del Toro’s spin is to include a redemptive arc, plus he throws in some invented characters.
In the early 1970s my father moved offices and I was plucked out of my cosy prep school in Surrey to land in the eccentric surroundings of Presentation College. My new school’s modern block was surrounded by decaying Edwardian villas occupied by Irish teaching brothers with impenetrable accents. There was a broken aeroplane on one
Grade: B+ The 20th century, eh? What a lark that was. Vladimir Dukelsky studied in Kiev under Glière and looked set to be one of the smarter Russian composers of his generation. He even wrote a ballet for Diaghilev. Then communism happened and Dukelsky ended up in the USA where to the bemusement of his
The winter nights may be drawing in and everyone is down with stinking colds as the civilised world inexorably disintegrates, but in La Fille mal gardée, it’s sunlit springtime and young love is busting out all over. Frederick Ashton’s bucolic masterpiece, revived by the Royal Ballet, manages to be both child-like in its innocence and
I once came up with a brilliant idea for a children’s Sunday-evening TV series. It would follow the adventures of young Jesus in Britain, circa AD 16, and his rich, tin-trading great uncle Joseph of Arimathea. There’d be dragons and giants and lots demonic figures, all trying to kill the boy Messiah before He achieved
Ravel’s L’heure espagnole is set in a clockmaker’s shop and the first thing you hear is ticking and chiming. It’s not just a sound effect; with Ravel, it never is. He was an inventor’s son, half-Swiss, half-Basque, and timepieces, toys and Dresden figurines were in his soul. For Ravel, they seem to have possessed souls
Bugonia is the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster, Poor Things) and it’s about a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a pharmaceutical boss. It’s extremely wacky – possibly in a good way, still not sure. You certainly get value for money; it smashes together several genres (absurdist comedy, sci-fi, thriller, body horror) and
I can’t watch films anymore without looking at my phone. If I watch a film on my laptop, I’ll be scrolling throughout – reading Wikipedia, checking group chats, looking up filming locations on IMDb. To properly watch a film, I have to take myself to the cinema. Luckily, and perhaps as a direct result of
Let’s face it, The Sleeping Beauty runs the high risk of being a bit of a bore. A wonderfully inventive score by Tchaikovsky fires it up of course, but precious little drama emerges after nasty Carabosse gatecrashes the royal christening, and there’s too much imperial parading and courtly kowtowing throughout. Connoisseurs may relish what survives
The last time Gillian Welch and David Rawlings played in London it was a different world: the world of David Cameron and Barack Obama and a Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. Welch and Rawlings have changed, too: Welch is silver rather than red, and Rawlings as grizzled as a bear. Welch
The Assembled Parties, by Richard Greenberg, is a rich, warm family comedy that received three Tony nominations in 2013 following its New York première. Hampstead has taken a slight risk with this revival. The cryptic title doesn’t suggest an easygoing drama full of excellent jokes. The Yiddish slang may be unfamiliar to English ears, and
Da Vinci’s Laundry is based on an art world rumour. In 2017, Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold at Christie’s for $450 million but some experts claimed that the attribution was inaccurate. Could the world’s costliest artwork be a fake? Writer, Keelan Kember, considers the provenance of a fictional Leonardo owned by a thuggish oligarch, Boris, who
English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a biopic of ‘the boss’ starring Jeremy Allen White. It is not cradle to grave and do not expect the usual crowd-pleasing beats. There isn’t a single montage. Instead, it focuses on 1981, the making of his sixth album, Nebraska, and his mental troubles at that time. This will
Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the
I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and
Grade: B+ War, as we all know, is hell. But if it involves small squeaky annelids blowing each-other up with bazookas, it is also hella fun. And so to the newest installment in the long-running turn-based strategy series Worms. Can it be a coincidence that Worms Across Worlds arrives on Apple Arcade just in time
Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young Mick Hucknall being interviewed. What he wanted, he said, was to be a great singer. Usually, that’s the cue for a gag about fate having other plans. Not this time. He’s 65 now, and he
Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling
Here’s a patriotic thought for you: baroque opera, as we now know it, was made in Britain. Sure, there are your Vivaldis and Cavallis; there’s always someone (usually French) trying to make Rameau stick and a few years back Opera North – bless them – even tried to exhume an opera by Reinhard Keiser. But
R:Evolution is a pun, presumably intended to suggest that tradition is not static and the obvious truth that change always grows out of what has come before. A useful idea, of course, even if it’s one that the four short works selected under this title by English National Ballet doesn’t smoothly illustrate. The management is,
I have my routine down to a science. At 6.59, I’m sitting in the stairwell, typing on my laptop or scribbling in a book. At 7.01, I’m speeding down the hall to Dressing Room 18, where the rest of the girls are semi-apparelled, laughing, blasting out Tyla; or some days, silent, headphones in, munching pre-show
Hamlet at the National opens like a John Lewis Christmas advert. Elegant celebrations are in progress. The stage is full of dining tables draped in white linen and adorned with flowers and beautiful glassware sparkling in the candlelight. Elsinore is reimagined as the home of a multicultural royal family. Claudius, resplendent in a dark dinner
The French lutenist Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, is one of those unfortunate historical figures who are chiefly remembered because of how they died. He was climbing the stairs to his apartment near the Louvre after a court dinner in November 1652 when he slipped, fell head over heels and was dead a few hours
The Last Dinner Party received quite the critical backlash when they arrived amid much fanfare in 2023. Posh, precocious and theatrical, armed with lofty ideas that matched their station as four young women who had benefited from very expensive educations, the band encountered widespread suspicion that they were industry ‘plants’, or had somehow bought their
First the surprising news: not a single one of the four Guinness siblings in 1868 Dublin is black; and only 25 per cent of them – surely a record for Netflix – is gay. Now the bad: despite these oversights, House of Guinness remains very recognisably the work of Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders screenwriter
Grade: A Bohuslav Martinu was a patchy composer; worse, he was also a prolific one, meaning that if you dip into his music at random you never quite know if you’re going to have your day made, or just half an hour wasted. Ideally, you need someone to do the choosing for you, and praise
Clarkston is an American-backed production featuring a Netflix star, Joe Locke. He plays a young graduate with a terminal illness, Jake, who works at a Costco warehouse in a failing midwest town. Jake is a brainbox with an IQ of 140 who takes a scholarly interest in early American history. On his first day at
‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the alternative title of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he meant it. Possibly my reaction was coloured by last week’s experience with the weapons-grade cynicism of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, but honestly – it’s just so sweet. A gentle, put-upon girl gets her fairy-tale ending in the face of stepsisters and