A heavily made-up Iranian woman in bra and knickers is dancing seductively before me. We’re in some vast warehouse, and she’s swaying barefoot. But then I look around. All the other men here are in military uniforms and leaning against walls or sitting at desks, smoking and looking at her impassively. I slowly realise we
Grade: A+ In 2018, the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson released a solo Bach album. It bounced along unforgettably. Olafsson’s subsequent albums for Deutsche Grammophon were all lovely, but like many ‘intellectual’ pianists blessed with a pearly touch he could sound a bit precious. I missed the playfulness of his Bach, and so when he announced
The unlovely Rose Theatre in Kingston is a modest three-storey eyesore. The concrete foyer looks like an exercise area on a North Sea oil platform, and the auditorium itself is a whitewashed rotunda that resembles the chapel in a newly built prison. Yet this cheerless, functional space is perfect for a mischievous new satire, Shooting
Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from being terrified and brainwashed into submission by Big Brother, the populace would embrace the all-seeing eye as their route to fame, prosperity and freedom. Some of the populace, at any rate. We met 16 of
‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these people… I think that if Her Highness could govern in her own way, everything would turn out very happily.’ The ‘princess’ in question was Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain and regent of the Spanish
The Miracle Club, which is about a group of Irish women who travel to Lourdes, has a magnificent cast – Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Laura Linney – and it inspired me to pray. ‘Dear God,’ I found myself praying mid-way through, ‘let this be over soon.’ The film’s stars make it just about watchable but
‘What advice would you give to your younger self?’ has become a popular question in interviews in recent years. It’s meant to generate something profound but, musing privately, I always find it a puzzler. Sometimes I think that maybe I shouldn’t have wasted so much of my twenties talking nonsense in pubs, but on the
The intimate acoustic show can denote many things for an established artist. One is that, in the infamous euphemism coined by Spinal Tap, their audience has become more ‘selective’. Attempting to make the best of a bad job, the artist shifts down a gear while aiming upmarket, much in the manner of a balding man
