I had quite high expectations when the curtain went up on The President of an Empty Room. The writer, Steven Knight, produced the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things and the director, Howard Davies, was responsible for Mourning Becomes Electra, one of my favourite productions of 2003. Nor was I the only one who thought
It’s a good thing that the Royal Opera keeps its revivals of standard Italian repertoire in good shape, considering the many acute disappointments we have had this season from new productions, Italian, German, French. John Copley’s La Bohème was first staged in 1974, but the latest revival, with a fair number of fresh touches added
For the first time since 1990 I decided not to go to Glastonbury this year. It was a purely practical decision: the drug intake needed to get you through those three days is so vast that it wipes you out for the rest of summer and, for a change, I thought it would be interesting
As a landscape painter, Graham Sutherland (1903–80) enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame through the 1930s and 40s, culminating in the Venice Biennale in 1952, a prestigious Tate retrospective in 1953 and the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest award, in 1960. His later years saw success as a portrait-painter to the rich and famous, and
