Let’s get the ‘was-it-good?’ stuff out of the way first. Yes, it was good. It was better than good. It was incredible, fabulous, dazzling. It was whatever adjective you want to throw at it. I can’t recall seeing a more engrossing pop production, ever. You don’t just get great songs — come on, you’re not
Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last of the living avant-gardists is about to present his first opera at La Scala Milan this month and, if past form is anything to go by, he’s unlikely to utter much about it beyond a
A cascade of poppies falls from ‘weeping windows’ across Britain. A 50-metre drawing of Wilfred Owen appears in the sand, and is washed away by the sea in which he swam. A silhouetted soldier stands on the white cliffs of Dover. A thousand pumpkins ‘recall’ an antisubmarine airship. You can pretend you are in no-man’s-land
So there I was in Soho Square on a cold and rainy morning, nibbling my complimentary almond croissant and eagerly looking forward to the advance preview of Mike Leigh’s new historical epic Peterloo. This People’s Uprising of 1819, and its brutal suppression by a wealthy, uncaring and out-of-touch metropolitan elite, took place precisely 200 years
Lauren Gunderson’s play I and You opens in the scruffy bedroom of 17-year-old Caroline. Lonely, beautiful and furious, she’s unable to participate in school life owing to a chronic liver problem. Into her hideaway barges Anthony, a handsome geek, who wants her to help with a Walt Whitman project. Caroline tries to chase him off
I wonder if Wisconsin has any idea what an international embarrassment it has become? By rights it ought to be an unexceptionable place, little more than the quirky answer to the occasional trivia question: ‘Where is the Badger State?’; ‘Whose state governor shares a name with the singer of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)?”’;
‘I want big things to do and vast spaces,’ Edward Burne-Jones wrote to his wife Georgiana in the 1870s. ‘And for common people to see them and say, “Oh! — only Oh!”’ That, however, was only the first part of my own reaction to the exhibition at Tate Britain of Burne-Jones’s works. Perhaps I’ve got
Wildlife is an adaptation of the 1990 novel by Richard Ford about a family coming apart at the seams, and while cinema is full of families coming apart at the seams this one is a cut above. It is exquisite and riveting. It pays proper attention to its characters. And it is brilliantly acted. According
‘It was so unreal,’ said one of the first world war veterans about the long-awaited Armistice. It was the most striking thought I heard all week, and the most shocking. The sense that when the guns finally fell silent at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918 (and both sides had continued to barrage each other
