Arts feature

Contrasting characters

Mary Wakefield talks to Roger Allam and discovers that he thinks acting is only a game As I meet Roger Allam’s eye, in the bar area of Shakespeare’s Globe, I feel a lurch of dread. I love Roger Allam. I’ve held a torch for him since the mid-Eighties, when he starred in Les Mis as

Hollywood’s introspective icon

As Clint Eastwood celebrates his 80th birthday, Peter Hoskin salutes his artistic legacy My life at the movies began with Clint Eastwood about a decade ago. Channel 4 was screening A Fistful of Dollars (1964) one night, and my brother insisted that we stay up and tune in. I didn’t know beforehand that it was

Comic timing

New Labour inspired a golden age of political comedy. William Cook looks to satire’s future Although few will mourn Gordon Brown’s departure, his drawn-out demise should be a source of sadness for comedy aficionados, be they red, yellow or blue. For New Labour’s most unlikely legacy was to inspire a renaissance in political comedy. It

A great individualist

Andrew Lambirth talks to Jeffery Camp about the primacy of drawing in an artist’s practice More than 20 years ago, when I first interviewed Jeffery Camp, he forbade me to bring a tape recorder as he would find it off-putting. ‘I speak slowly enough for you to write it all down,’ he drawled in measured

Two men in a boat

Robert Gore-Langton on a stage adaptation of the Erskine Childers classic Riddle of the Sands The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. It was an instant bestseller and has never been out of print since. It’s the story of two young Englishmen who, while sailing off the German coast, unearth a fiendish plot

The great communicator

Conductor Marin Alsop talks to Henrietta Bredin about sharing a concert platform with Bernstein Last September there was a Mass Rally at the Southbank Centre in London. For an entire day the concert halls and foyers overflowed with shoals of people — children lugging instruments, parents rushing after them, singers clutching scores — all gathered

Brutal beauty

William Cook takes us on a tour of 2010’s unlikely European Capital of Culture ‘And the European Capital of Culture in 2010 will be …the Ruhr.’ When I first heard the announcement, it sounded like a particularly unfunny German joke. The Ruhr, after all, is Europe’s biggest rust belt — a vast swathe of mines

In the firing line

Henrietta Bredin goes backstage at the Royal Opera House and finds a stash of weaponry I am standing outside a heavily reinforced metal door somewhere in the furthest flung recesses of the labyrinthine corridor-tangle backstage at the Royal Opera House. A painted shield has the word Armoury picked out on it in gold lettering and

Alive and kicking | 10 April 2010

Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era Debbie Reynolds is the first to admit she’s no longer Tammy. At 78, she’s more like the Unsinkable Molly Brown as she tours Britain this month in her one-woman show, Alive and Fabulous. ‘You people in England probably think I died

Time for thought

Andrew Lambirth on how a powerful Easter message can be found in images of the Crucifixion Easter is not just a time for bonnets and bunnies, but also for reexamining the fundamentals of life and faith. In the self-denial of Lent, whether we’ve given up chocolate or alcohol, or something even more difficult, we are

Round the galleries

I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned

A diet of unrelenting mush

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

A woman of substance

Felicity Kendal tells a surprised Mary Wakefield of her admiration for Mrs Warren From the moment Mrs Warren bustles in halfway through Act I of Mrs Warren’s Profession, she’s clearly an excellent sort. ‘A genial and presentable old blackguard of a woman,’ says George Bernard Shaw fondly of his heroine. And she is a heroine,

A view from the pit

Henrietta Bredin talks to the leader of ENO’s orchestra about working ‘in the trenches’ ‘Working in the trenches’ is how some people describe their lives in the orchestra pit, playing for opera performances. The traditional opera house has a horseshoe-shaped auditorium and the musicians are accommodated below stage level so that, ideally, the sound they

Rare magic

Paul Nash: The Elements Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 9 May Paul Nash (1889–1946) is one of those rare artists whose work manages to be British, Modernist and popular at the same time without imploding. It is thus curious that there are not more exhibitions of his beautiful and poignant work. The last general Nash survey

The Russian connection

Marianne Gray talks to Helen Mirren about her latest film, for which she’s had an Oscar nomination The first time I met Helen Mirren was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985 when she was playing a Russian cosmonaut called Tanya Kirbuk in Peter Hyams’s space epic 2010. She laughed about having to learn Russian

‘If he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live’

Ariane Bankes talks to the widow of Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective is about to open at Tate Mougouch Fielding opens the door to me looking a little gaunt but as beautiful as ever, though I have not seen her for a couple of years. She is in her late eighties, but no less stylish now

The first Romantic

Peter Phillips on the life and times of Chopin, who was born 200 years ago The year 1810 may seem a little late to look for the beginning of the Romantic movement in music, but with the births of Chopin, Schumann and S.S. Wesley one could make a case. Think of the difference in the

Do the locomotion

On the Move: Visualising Action Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, until 18 April The Estorick Collection, which specialises in modern Italian art, has mounted a series of rewarding exhibitions in recent years, all of which bear some essential relationship to its permanent holdings. Futurism remains the best known and most widely celebrated modern

Mahler’s mass following

It is 150 years since the composer’s birth. Michael Kennedy on his remarkable popularity Approaching 60 years of writing music criticism, I have been wondering what I would nominate as the most remarkable changes on the British musical scene since I started. I decided there were three: the emergence of Mahler as a popular composer