Lloyd Evans goes in search of culture on the rain-soaked streets of Edinburgh The crunch. That damn credit crunch. It hurt Scotland hardest of all. A worldwide reputation as a financial powerhouse? Gone. Dreams of independence? Severely truncated. Last year the Edinburgh Festival bore prophetic signs of imminent poverty, of homelessness, of doom. Free shows
Janet Boulton: Remembering Little Sparta Edinburgh College of Art, until 30 August Janet Boulton (born 1936) is an artist of integrity and dedication, whose principal subject is still-life. She paints in watercolour, that most demanding of media, and eschews drama of subject or treatment. She has chosen a difficult path, and one which attracts little
Tristan und Isolde Glyndebourne Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is a work of stark oppositions, which are overcome, or seem to be, in the final bars, as Isolde sinks lifeless over Tristan’s body, in a state of (her last words) ‘unconsciousness, highest bliss’. Well, which? you might ask. If you’re unconscious you can’t be in a
The Girlfriend Experience Young Vic Helen Globe Who exploits prostitutes? Men, of course. And women, too. In particular those feminist politicians, always at panic stations, always posing as moral redeemers, who promote the myth that there’s only one type of hooker in this country — the crackhead Albanian rape-slave living in an airing cupboard —
Was it a shock, Joan Bakewell was asked, when Harold Pinter showed you the script of his latest play? Bakewell was hardly going to reveal live on air to ten million listeners what she really felt about Pinter’s use of their affair as a plot device in Betrayal. She’s far too smart for that. All
I do hope you’ll forgive me for writing about rivers twice in two columns. I do hope you’ll forgive me for writing about rivers twice in two columns. It’s just that when I got back from Wales, turned on a TV for the first time in a fortnight, and saw Griff Rhys Jones voyaging down
I knew I was in for a treat when I drove up to the newly opened Butterfly World along Miriam Lane. An affectionate homage to Dame Miriam Lane (Rothschild), the great conservationist and butterfly enthusiast, was a good start, but so was the fact that the banks on the side of the road to the
