Author Matthew Vaughan spent much of his life in the church – and even preached the gospel in Pakistan – but never considered himself a fan of Christian media. ‘To be honest, most of the films I saw were pretty corny,’ he tells me over the phone from his home in Birmingham. For Vaughan, that
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about William Morris, where he spends most of his time in Paris inside the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant because ‘that is the only place where you can’t see the damned thing’. Aviva Studios risks a similar fate. Designed by architects OMA as the permanent performance venue for the Manchester International
Grade: A The last song the Beatles ever recorded was called, appropriately enough, ‘The End’, on the Abbey Road album. As a consequence of digital sorcery, however, ‘Now and Then’ is the last song we will ever hear from them – a demo passed from John to Paul, dubbed over in the early 1990s by
Branagh vs Lear. The big fixture in theatreland ends in a win for Shakespeare’s knotty and intractable script which usually defeats any attempt to make it coherent or dramatically pleasing. This truncated version is a two-hour slug-fest set in the stone age – and it sort of works. The warriors fight with sharpened walking sticks
Bodies is another of those ‘ingenious’ time-travel apocalypse mash-ups so tricksy and convoluted that by the time the ending comes you’re praying fervently that the nuclear bomb will go off and everyone will die as punishment for the hours of life you’ve wasted on this angsty, politically correct, humourless tosh. The premise is initially intriguing:
In 1633, British merchants travelling east were issued with a royal command from Charles I: ‘As the king has considered that there is a great deal of learning fit to be known written in Arabic, and great scarcity of Arabic and Persian books in this country… every ship… at every voyage shall bring home an
Dream Scenario is a high-concept dark comedy about celebrity and cancel culture. It stars our old pal Nicolas Cage who, blame it on what you will – tax bills, divorce bills, the price of butter – has appeared in some abominable dreck down the years but has never turned in a boring performance. Mad, yes.
There’s always been something at once girlish and steely about Joni Mitchell, the stellar Canadian whom Rolling Stone called ‘one of the greatest songwriters ever’. As Radio 4’s Verbatim programme in honour of her 80th birthday reminds us, a stubborn hopefulness has carried her through turbulent times. Perhaps growing up in Saskatchewan, where winter temperatures
Ben Duke belongs to a class of younger choreographers who have decided to flout the convention that dancers should remain silent on stage. Liberating their voices is by no means a new phenomenon (in 1961 Frederick Ashton had Svetlana Beriosova speak verse by Gide in his sadly forgotten Persephone), but it’s one that particularly suits
In May 1966, Bob Dylan toured the UK with The Band, minus drummer Levon Helm, and abrasively pulled the plug on any lingering notions of his being a mere folk singer. Playing two sets every night – the first acoustic, the second electric – even the solo numbers were wild, lysergic, unravelled. The electric ones
A violinist friend in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra used to talk about an orchestra’s ‘muscle memory’; a collective instinct that transmits itself, unspoken and unconscious, among the members of the ensemble. The occasion was a return visit from Sir Simon Rattle, a good decade and a half after he’d left Birmingham. At that
