Arts

Arts feature

A tough act to follow

Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of them in movies and 28 on television. He is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice.

Theatre

Lost in space | 11 January 2018

The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space exploration. Director Richard Jones has collaborated with Anne Washburn to turn several TV episodes into a single play. Eight episodes in all. Way too many. The structure is designed to bamboozle us from the start.

Opera

Sonic youth

Everyone knows — don’t they? — that the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is the UK’s youngest world-class symphony orchestra — an ensemble of musicians aged 18 and under that’s the equal of any professional band (and better than some). But it’s also the largest, and we don’t hear enough about the sheer sonic

Television

Thinking outside the box

These days a genuinely controversial TV drama series would surely be one with an all-white, male-led cast that examined the problems of a bunch of middle-class people. (Just imagine the Twitter outrage!) But while we await that — possibly for a while yet — we’ve now got two highly promising new shows of the more

Exhibitions

Living sculptures

Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was ever more Baroque than Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the supreme maestro of the idiom. But I love his work, which is why, on a spare afternoon in Rome before Christmas, I strolled over to the Borghese

Cinema

All the rage | 11 January 2018

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri does, indeed, feature three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. They have been placed at the roadside on the outskirts of town by Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), a middle-aged woman whose teenage daughter had been raped and murdered seven months earlier. The billboards read: ‘Raped While Dying’; ‘And Still No Arrests’; ‘How

Radio

Lessons from Rwanda

What an incredible statement we heard on My Perfect Country. ‘I can walk into a boardroom and forget I am a woman,’ pronounced Isabelle Masozera, a PR executive, on the World Service programme, which this week visited Rwanda to find out what is happening there to make it qualify for ‘my perfect country’ status. Her