Futurism Tate Modern, until 20 September The centenary of Marinetti’s ‘First Manifesto of Futurism’ is a wonderful excuse, if excuse be needed, for a celebration and perhaps re-assessment of a movement that attacked the past in the name of all that was modern. Today, Futurists would be execrating any movement as old and as passé
Roderick Conway Morris on how the city is trying new ways to overcome its economic crisis When the Venice Biennale was founded in 1895 it was in many ways a response to the crisis facing the city. No longer an independent republic and marginalised in the newly re-unified Kingdom of Italy, Venice was seeking ways
Peter Hoskin marks the 50th anniversary of the death of George Reeves, TV’s original Superman Uncork the champagne, put on your best frock, and grin like the good times are never going to end. After all, it’s 1959, and Hollywood is the place to be. Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot has just left movie
Andrew Lambirth talks to Douglas Dunn and Norman Ackroyd about their latest collaboration Illustrated books are one of the glories of a library. Looking over my own shelves I find assorted delights ranging from The Story of My Heart, the unorthodox vision of the naturalist Richard Jefferies fittingly partnered with woodcuts by Ethelbert White, to
Stephen Pettitt on how Sir Roger Norrington and others started the debate about ‘authenticity’ In the late 1970s, the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, at the time in charge of the late and lamented Kent Opera, created the London Classical Players. With this act Norrington, who has just turned 75, joined a small group of musicians
Dan Jones on how the Armada tapestries, destroyed by fire, are being recreated Anthony Oakshett points to a palette and shows me a colour called ‘sea-monster grey’. The tall and genial artist is guiding me around his cool, airy temporary studio in an outhouse at Wrest Park, the Bedfordshire country house. Around us stand six
Henrietta Bredin finds out what it is that draws actors to the gruelling one-man show Judi Dench says she’d never do it, Roy Dotrice didn’t do it for 40 years but started again in 2008, Joanna Lumley says that managing to do it while looking at her own reflection in a mirror made her feel
Lloyd Evans charts the death of political satire and looks to where comedy is heading next Live comedy ought to be extinct. For five years the internet has been waving an eviction order in its face, but despite the YouTube menace, and its threat of death-by-a-thousand-clips, live stand-up is blossoming. You’ll have noticed this if
Michael Bullivant tells Petroc Trelawny how he became Bulawayo’s chief musical impresario For an extraordinary month in 1953, Bulawayo became the epicentre of culture in the southern hemisphere. In celebration of the centenary of the colonialist and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, the Royal Opera House and Sadlers Wells Ballet took up residence. Sir John Gielgud
Lloyd Evans wanders round Inner Temple and discovers another world in the tangle of squares Where’s the best place to eat lunch in London? First let’s strike restaurants off the list. At a restaurant your plate of recently throttled livestock will have been executed by a pimply sadist, cooked by a cursing psychopath and delivered
Katie Mitchell explains to Henrietta Bredin how she is creating a parallel film world with Purcell’s opera It is 350 years since Henry Purcell was born and his music is, gloriously, being played and sung all around the country. And there are a lot of different Didos about: Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage at
Andrew Lambirth talks to Paula Rego about the new museum dedicated to her and the politics behind her work Paula Rego is an artist working at the height of her powers, internationally celebrated and with a museum dedicated to her about to open in her native Portugal. It’s been a long climb to this pinnacle
Henrietta Bredin talks to Jonathan Pryce about the difficulties he found with Athol Fugard’s Dimetos It is the end of a long day of rehearsal and Jonathan Pryce is sitting patiently at a scrubbed wooden table strewn with water glasses and roughly carved dishes, behind him a tangle of ropes and pulleys slung from an
Lloyd Evans visits the NoFit State Circus in Wales and watches an unusual rehearsal T here are lots of things you can’t do any more. Smoke in a pub. Buy a video recorder. Trust the bloke who runs your bank. And you can’t run away to the circus either. These days the wannabe stilt-walker or
It’s 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. William Cook on the city’s changing face On the west bank of the River Spree, beside the old route of the Berlin Wall, there is a building which sums up the strange renaissance of this wonderful, awful city. The Hamburger Bahnhof used to be a train
Mary Wakefield meets Niamh Cusack and finds an actress full of contradictions It’s oddly exciting, upstairs at the Old Vic: there are actresses rushing to rehearsal; the burble of PR ladies schmoozing the press; the sense of a curtain about to rise. A bright new play. I smile, look around hopefully for my interviewee-to-be, the
Henrietta Bredin talks to the baritone Gerald Finley about how he portrays ‘the destroyer of worlds’ At precisely 5.30 a.m. on Monday 16 July 1945 the world entered the nuclear age. The first atomic bomb exploded in a searing flash of light and a vast mushroom cloud unfurled in the skies above New Mexico. ‘Now
Steven Berkoff admits to Lloyd Evans that, despite his reputation, he’s not tough at all On the waterfront. This, literally, is where I meet Steven Berkoff to discuss his stage adaptation of the classic Fifties movie. Berkoff’s east London office is a sumptuous, spotlessly clean apartment with wraparound views of the grey-green Thames. He strolls
A new arts centre with no public subsidy? Henrietta Bredin talks to its founder Peter Millican Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately — King’s (with an apostrophe) Cross in London is the location for the new and very splendid mixed-use office building and performance space, Kings Place, which has no business letting
Director Lindsay Posner finds something primal and truly disturbing in Arthur Miller’s play The day’s rehearsal is about to commence. The actors sit or stand around chatting, telling anecdotes, prevaricating, pouring one last cup of coffee — anything to avoid the moment when they have to begin committing emotionally and psychologically to Arthur Miller’s text.