Arts Reviews

Sylvia, the Old Vic’s musical about the Pankhurst clan, has had a troubled nativity. Illness struck the cast during rehearsals. Press night was postponed by a week. On the evening of the delayed performance, the show was cancelled just before curtain-up. We were told that a ‘concert version’ would be presented with understudies filling certain roles and with scripts on stage to prompt imperfect memories. I saw no scripts. And the absence of key performers made no discernible difference. This looked to me like the A-team. The director, Kate Prince, has a terrific show on her hands and although the introductory run has ended, the material can only get stronger

At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it on his chest. The tableau is a messy, bloody one, but the message is clear: here the politics of religion and the religion of politics are one and the same. A pietà or the body of a thug? A murderer or a Madonna? It’s all just a matter of spin. In a year of embattled

The Wife is an adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel (2003) and stars Glenn Close. Her performance is better than the film, but it’s such a magnificent performance that it more than carries the day. She is stunning. Close plays Joan Castleman, wife of Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), a literary giant who has always been lionised, and for reasons we’ll discover she is simmering with rage. We’ve seen Close do rage before, but this time the rage is multilayered, nuanced, subtly restrained. No bunnies are boiled, in other words, although having said that, if I were Joan, I’d have boiled Joe’s bunny and whatever else was to hand, like his

I was delighted to see Claire Foy win an Emmy award for her portrayal of the Queen in the fine Netflix series The Crown. It may have helped assuage her annoyance at initially being paid £200,000 less than her co-star, Matt Smith, who did a fairly good impersonation of a young, brooding Duke of Edinburgh. Foy had more lines than Smith, is as capable an actor as Smith, was the leading role and, importantly, is at least as fit as Smith. This last point is vital because television often casts people on account of their attractiveness, because viewers like looking at attractive people rather than at hideous fat munters. Whatever,

After the all-conquering success of Fleabag — her brilliant dark comedy about a smart but rudderless young woman in London — Phoebe Waller-Bridge could presumably have done whatever she wanted for her next TV project. And what she wanted to do next, it now turns out, is very odd indeed. Killing Eve (BBC1, Saturday) — which Waller-Bridge has adapted from a novel by Luke Jennings but doesn’t appear in — has its moments of recognisably ordinary life. But not many. Near the beginning, for example, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) woke with a Saturday-morning hangover and unwelcome memories of her karaoke performance the night before. Yet within minutes she’d been called

Faces Places is a documentary directed by Agnès Varda in collaboration with JR, the famous Parisian photographer and muralist (although, if you’re as shallow as I am, your first thought may also have been: how is this possible now that Larry Hagman is dead?). The pair visit small towns in France, meeting ordinary people, taking their photograph, blowing the photographs up huge, and pasting them outdoors on buildings and barns and trains. It sounds arty-farty, and I suppose it is, but it is also a mesmerising meditation on lives lived, friendship, ageing and mortality. Plus it throws in this fact for good measure: Jean-Luc Godard can be a total bastard.