It’s a good month for the Great War. At the National Theatre this week a new play by Michael Morpurgo tells the story of the war seen through the eyes of a horse. Staged with huge puppet nags, War Horse sounds on paper like the theatrical lovechild of Equus and Birdsong. Up in Bolton, with
For once a major blockbuster exhibition at the Tate justifies its size: the imaginative world of Louise Bourgeois is so potent and all-encompassing that a show of more than 200 works, from small experimental objects to large installations, seems not a fraction too extensive. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, is famous — in this
Paula Rego had a retrospective at Tate Liverpool a decade ago and a big show in her native Portugal, where she is properly regarded as the country’s greatest living artist, but both exhibitions seem niggardly in comparison with the more than 200 works shown in some 14 rooms at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Even
Theatre: Shadowlands; Cat’s-Paw; Glengarry Glen Ross Repressed Brits are on parade in Shadowlands. Author C.S. Lewis is portrayed as an emotional cripple who can’t bring himself to articulate his love for Joy Gresham, a sassy, super-intelligent American poet. Charles Dance is perfectly cast in the weird role of Lewis. With his stately, ruminative face and
OK, here we have a fantasy film and I absolutely hate fantasy films. They bore me to hell and back, plus what if one day I don’t actually make it back? What if I end up stuck for all eternity in some place where, for example, everyone insists on speaking Elvish and having three-day message-board
It isn’t often that we get the chance to see a semi-opera, of which Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur is a paradigm. And after seeing a competent production in Bury St Edmunds last week, I can’t say that I regret the infrequency of performances. This one was in the enchanting setting of the Theatre Royal,
Dance: Giselle — on love and other difficulties; Shaker As the blurb at the back of the programme says, it is well known that ‘Dance Umbrella celebrates and champions contemporary dance’. Yet the notion of ‘contemporary’ dance, once an artistically neat classification, has long lost its transparency. The vibrant and provocative combination of diverse performing
Amid all the fuss about cuts at the BBC and how this will affect programme output, I can’t help thinking, why the outrage? For years, there have been dark rumblings among writers that there’s no longer a drama department to nurture young talent and commission new work — the Birtian revolution of the 1990s saw
The thing I want to talk about this week is random and unnecessary tension-generation because it ruins almost every TV programme I watch and, once I’ve explained it, I like to think it will ruin all your TV viewing too. I’ll give you a classic example from Heroes (BBC2, Wednesday), a series to which I’m
