Ben West on the decline in quality of regional theatre; he fears it can only get worse We may have been languishing for months in the worst recession for decades, but theatre appears to be booming. West End theatres enjoyed a record £500 million in ticket sales in 2009, with audience figures exceeding 14 million
Albert Herring Royal Academy of Music La bohème The Cock Tavern, Kilburn Whenever there is a new production of Britten’s great comedy Albert Herring I go to it and then carry on at some length about how wonderful the opera is, and this particular production, whichever it may be. And it is always true. For
Love Never Dies Adelphi, booking to October The Fever Chart Trafalgar Studio 2, booking to 3 April Love Never Dies has been bugging Andrew Lloyd Webber since 1990. He felt that the Phantom of the Opera needed a sequel and he’s been working on it for roughly three times as long as it took Tolstoy
The Scouting Book for Boys 15, Key Cities This week, I should probably have seen Old Dogs starring John Travolta and Robin Williams as ‘two best friends who have their lives turned upside down when they’re unexpectedly charged with the care of six-year-old twins’ but I saw the trailer on TV and couldn’t do it.
News that the archivist of the Booker Prize, Peter Straus, has discovered that in 1970 the prize was not awarded for technical reasons set me thinking about annual music prizes. This thinking was in no way discouraged by an aside, made by Matt Damon at the recent Oscar ceremony, to the effect that it would
Many years ago, when I decided to ‘become’ a novelist, I shipped myself off to a village in south-west France called St Jean de Fos for three months, banned myself from reading any novels in English (lest they corrupt my style) and became an obsessive maker of French dishes like cassoulet because my first book
It’s such an important book, the first great psychological novel, yet few people can with honesty claim to have read it, and even fewer to have read it all the way through, past the violent rape scene that takes place halfway through volume five. It’s such an important book, the first great psychological novel, yet
By the time you read this, I will either be taking Mrs Oakley out for a well-deserved dinner at Le Caprice or I will be carrying a sack of stones and a pair of leg-irons, looking for a deep river. The Cheltenham Festival will have come and gone, probably taking with it most of my
Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey National Gallery, until 23 May Just up the road from where I write is the dramatic ruin of Framlingham Castle, the historical seat of the Howard family and the Dukes of Norfolk. The castle was granted to Princess Mary by her half-brother King Edward VI, and she took
