Here comes Jane Asher. She swings through the doors of a small Chelsea hotel, chucks her bag on the floor, and sits down with an expectant look. Her voluminous red hair has attractive hints of something blonder on top. Her eyes are pale blue, and extraordinarily intense, and she has a fulsome rack of plump
A display of drawings by 20th-century sculptors is a welcome event, and the multi-levelled, multi-functional Kings Place provides just the right ambience, the building echoing the concept and providing a satisfying mix of enjoyment, surprise and irritation. To stage Sculptors’ Drawings (until 12 October) has been a long-held ambition of Pangolin’s Rungwe Kingdon and he
Tragically, the number of ballet directors who can orchestrate good programmes and good openings is dwindling these days. Helgi Tómasson, of San Francisco Ballet, is one of the few who are still in the know, judging by the terrific bang with which his company opened last week in London. Divertimento No.15 might not be one
The tone is the thing. Ibsen is among the heaviest of the heavy-going playwrights and his masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, is an unbearably tense psychological thriller that ends with one of the biggest shocks in the theatrical repertoire. The play takes us into a doomed marriage between Hedda, a brilliant and eccentric depressive, and George Tesman,
As any regular opera-goer knows, next year is uniquely one for three major operatic centenaries, two of them, Verdi’s and Wagner’s, bicentenaries, while Britten was born only 100 years ago, but seems to have been dead for a very long time. So we can expect numerous series — of performances, recordings, broadcast radio and TV
You won’t believe me when I tell you this but I swear it’s the truth: until this week, I had never watched Downton Abbey(Sunday, ITV). Some old-fashioned notion about not respecting myself the morning after? A curious primness preventing me from just gritting my teeth and getting it over with? Yes to both — and
John Berger (born 1926) is one of the most intriguing and richly controversial figures in British arts and letters. Actually, since he lives full-time in France, he can scarcely be considered English in any meaningful way, and is indeed an international figure, widely regarded outside this country as one of Europe’s greatest intellectuals and quite
I don’t care much for fashion — ask anyone; I’ve even lately surrendered to the fleece — and don’t care for fashion magazines at all. They have nothing to say to my life. They’ve never even featured ‘top ten fleeces of the season’, as far as I know. But this isn’t to say I don’t
