‘We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us,’ Winston Churchill said in 1924 in a speech to the Architectural Association. This was flattery of the highest order, designed to butter up the audience of budding architects and inflate their sense of how much power they had to shape society. It’s remarkable then, 100 years
Grade: B- There was much to hope for with this game. Its developer is Rocksteady – the studio which gave us the superb Batman: Arkham series. A lot of money was poured into it, and a lot of time (the release date was much delayed). The premise is a winner, too: the Suicide Squad –
Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a
A bloke was working the queue outside the Theatre Royal, selling a newspaper called the Communist. ‘Marxist ideas, alive today!’ he shouted into the Glasgow drizzle. Was he part of the show; a Graham Vick-style touch of Total Theatre? In any case, he didn’t seem to be shifting many units. He might have been even
‘The British don’t revolt, they grumble,’ said someone in the first episode of The Way. But what if we ever reversed this policy? That was the question posed by a drama that’s clearly a passion project for its director, Michael Sheen – and therefore set in Wales. More specifically, The Way takes place in Port
The first I heard of Yoko Ono was when my sister’s boyfriend brought home a little book of hers called Grapefruit. It was 1970, four years after John Lennon took the bite out of an apple that led to the break-up of the Beatles. The apple had been on a plinth in Ono’s 1966 exhibition
Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is a film about a Tokyo public toilet cleaner and if the gentle, meditative narrative doesn’t grab you, the toilets almost certainly will. (Trust me. They’re incredible.) It stars Koji Yakusho and, as much as it is set in Tokyo, it is also set on Yakusho’s face, which is so expressive
Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of
What does a chubby, bearded American feller wearing a plaid shirt and singing about his dog and truck have in common with a chic, sonically adventurous Irish art-pop star? Both, last year, were inadvertently parachuted into the battlefields of the culture wars. Oliver Anthony recorded a song called ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ – Virginia,
