What is Christmas for, exactly? For me, it’s a time of reflection and of sudden dawning realisation. Reflection on the year’s new music, and the sudden dawning realisation that I have hardly heard any of it. Not that I think it matters. Newness isn’t everything, or even very much, and there’s no reason why anyone
In early new year, we play-goers hunker down at home. We shiver and fast, we murmur and groan. We sweat off the excesses of the Christmas wassail. No impresario will launch a West End opening with the audience in recess. And into this brief void surges the Finborough Theatre in Earls Court. Fog is a
As I’m not the first person to have pointed out, the Royal Opera has indulged in a truly phenomenal number of performances of La Traviata this season, in the largely traditional production by Richard Eyre, which opened in 1994 with Angela Gheorghiu making her name. The three main roles have been cast differently for these
Nobody is going to be excused Dickens in his bicentennial year. This is good news for television people, since Dickens wrote his novels in the form of screenplays. He worked closely with his illustrators, making sure the scene they drew was exactly what he had in mind. He even acted out the roles as he
As cuts in government funding begin to bite, the innovative Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn finds itself short of £350,000 a year, and its long-serving artistic director, Nicolas Kent, is standing down as a result. Into the breach has stepped 89-year-old philanthropist and Tricycle devotee Al Weil. He is donating 37 paintings (including ‘The Gulf of
When R.B. Kitaj put together The Human Clay, his ground-breaking 1976 exhibition of figurative art at the Hayward Gallery, he wrote: ‘If you have a great subject, say, a person or people or a face or some complex theme, you have no right to be negligent about form or colour. Great themes demand the highest
The latest film by the Turner Prize-winning artist and now acclaimed film-maker Steve McQueen is an electrifying snapshot of the life of Brandon, a sex addict, played by Michael Fassbender. Shame (released this week) is McQueen’s second feature and follows his 2008 debut Hunger, about the Irish Republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands, which also stars Fassbender.
Steven Spielberg’s version of War Horse is like an extended Sunday afternoon episode of Black Beauty gone mad via the first world war, just so you know, and although it made me cry this is no endorsement. I rarely cry in real life but have been known to howl in the cinema, even when I’m
The trouble with Dickens is that there’s just far too much plot. How do you make sense of his incredibly complex stories in just three hours as the BBC tried to do at Christmas with its TV version of Great Expectations? It looked fabulous but the storyline made no sense because there was no depth
