The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The season of Advent, for most children, means anticipation, gleeful waiting, the counting down of days. But after a certain age the build-up to Christmas changes its nature, becomes more like anxious preparation. It can, though, be thought of as a time of reflection. Radio 3’s Christmas Around Europe has for years nourished that feeling
This has not been an appalling year for pop music — it was better than 1984, for example, and 1961. Simply put, it was a year in search of a direction, one foot planted in 1980s cheese or bombast, the other still dipping its toe into the now mind-sapping boredom of EDM, with the occasional
It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB, with the young man, with the writer, the fighter, the lover. After the great walk of his in 1705 that we would follow, and after his return trek in February 1706, he would be caught
You can pay homage to a ballet classic or you can tear it up and reinvent it. Both approaches were on offer in London a fortnight ago: a revival of Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, set to Léo Delibes’s 1876 score, and a Swan Lake from Michael Keegan-Dolan that ditches Tchaikovsky, tutus and toe shoes and relocates
One of the members of the government’s HS2 Growth Taskforce is remembering the first time he went to a gay club. ‘There was a club in Coventry that was only open on a Sunday night, at the Quadrant, and a mate of mine said, “There’s a DJ there who plays some fantastic music that I
A new play at the Bush with a catchy political title. Parliament Square introduces us to Kat, a young Scots mum, who abandons her baby girl and her devoted husband and commutes to London to kill herself. She doesn’t want to die but shrill voices in her head are urging her to turn her body
Molly’s Game marks the directorial debut of Hollywood’s most celebrated screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, and is based on his adaptation of the memoir by Molly Bloom. Nope, me neither, but she’s the one-time Olympic skier who, at the age of 26, started a high-stakes poker game for ‘the richest, the most powerful men in the world’
‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ That was the P.T. Barnum battle cry. It has come to have a ring of contempt, but no one loved a sucker more than Barnum. Entertain them, he said. Thrill them, shock them. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Give ’em the old razzle-dazzle. And if, in the course
Here we go again. Partridges in pear trees. Lovely big Christmas turkey. The Queen’s speech. And then, at some point during the Yuletide season, some version or other of Dickens’s ghost story A Christmas Carol. This year’s glut of Scrooge stories includes the Old Vic’s major production starring Rhys Ifans (reviewed by Lloyd Evans in
If cinema is propaganda, Elizabeth II can be grateful to it. Film is a conservative art form, and almost nothing has attempted to thwart or mock her. (The Daily Star once printed that Princess Margaret would appear in Crossroads, but Crossroads was not cinema, and it was not true. Instead the award for tabloid lie
The thing about Winnie-the-Pooh, 91 years old this year, is that he’s the creature of E.H. Shepard, who drew him, quite as much as he is of A.A. Milne, who created him. The words and the pictures came together for anyone who encountered Pooh Bear in the books rather than the film. Any exhibition about
Menashe is a drama set amid Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Hasidic community. It is performed entirely in the Yiddish language. It is peopled exclusively by Hasidic non-actors. (Real-life grocer Menashe Lustig plays the title character.) It is small and specific, admittedly, but it also tells a universal story about a father’s struggle to hold on to the
Maximum Victoriana at the Old Vic for Matthew Warchus’s A Christmas Carol. Even before we reach our seats we’re accosted by bonneted wenches handing out mince pies. Merchants in top hats roam the aisles proffering satsumas, which they call, with accurate Victorian incorrectness, ‘oranges’. The guts of the theatre have been ripped out for this
Boy came to me the other night in a state of dismay. ‘Dad, I just turned on Match of the Day to watch England vs Kazakhstan and guess what: they never mentioned this, but it’s the women’s game.’ What bothered him was not so much being forced to watch a slower, less athletic, duller version
It’s been heart week on Radio 4, celebrating the anniversary of the first ‘successful’ heart transplant in 1967, which was performed, controversially, by Dr Christiaan Barnard in South Africa on a patient called Louis Washkansky (who survived the operation and lived for 18 days). The heart, that mysterious, almost mystical organ, is freighted with such
To get a flavour of Joseph Marx’s An Autumn Symphony, picture the confectionery counter in a grand Viennese café. Beneath the glass lies sweetness beyond imagining: towers of sponge cake, billows of whipped cream, and icing that shines red and orange. You wander down the display: there are Sachertortes, petits fours, candied angelica and glacé
There are times when our national passion for cutting people down to size is a little tiring. I left Brett Morgen’s new documentary about Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert, in a rare flush of excited enthusiasm. ‘You’ve got to see it!’ I said to everyone. Most replied along these lines: ‘Goodall, didn’t she turn out
‘It’s odd,’ Picasso once mused, ‘but you never see Modigliani drunk anywhere but at the corners of the boulevard Montmartre and the boulevard Raspail.’ He obviously suspected his friend of being a stage bohemian. There is, indeed, a touch of Puccini about Modigliani’s life — the poverty, his film-star good looks, the drink and drugs
The musicians of Ensemble Grizzana are arranged in the usual way for their concert at St Paul’s Hall in Huddersfield. Another player, the percussionist Dmitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, sits among them. The table beside her holds a small and rather beaten-up zither and a tray of the kind of objects you might find at the back
The films of Michael Haneke wear a long face. Psychological terror, domestic horror, sick sex, genital self-harm — these are the joyless tags of his considerable oeuvre. Such an auteur is not the obvious sort for sequels: The Piano Teacher 2 or Hidden — Again! aren’t destined for your nearest multiplex. And yet his new
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie opened at the Sheffield Crucible in February for a standard three-week run. The show is based on a BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, about a working-class lad who attended his school prom in a scarlet frock. Director Jonathan Butterell saw the potential to create a replica Billy Elliot and
This week on Channel 4, we watched a cheery 58-year-old American engineer called James going on a first date. He was meeting Harmony, an extravagantly shapely blonde who was obliging enough to be wearing a low-cut crop top and tiny shorts, and who greeted him with a charming smile. After a spot of small talk
At the launch of the Christmas radio schedules last week, James Purnell, director of radio (and much more) at the BBC, stressed repeatedly the need for radio to be ‘reinvented’ for this new digital age. But what did he mean by reinvent? Was he hinting at the need for a new, leaner radio, the sound-only
Grade: A A dimbo pop reviewer for one of our national newspapers suggested that on this album, her ninth, Björk was ‘continuing her exploration of structurelessness’. It doesn’t sound wildly enticing, does it? Do go on, etc. It is true that on Utopia there is nothing that has the glorious, simple, pop sheen, and hook,
Imagine if we had access to over a hundred Shakespeare plays in which the Bard was at or near the top of his game – but we didn’t bother to watch them and couldn’t even remember their names. Bach has as good a claim as any composer to be the Shakespeare of music, yet a
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Mariss Jansons Barbican NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover / Andrew Manze Symphony Hall At the end of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony Mariss Jansons asked the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to stand up, and they refused. That’s not something that occurs in every concert; in fact, you might never see it happen. But this
Battle of the Sexes recreates the famed, culture-changing 1973 tennis match between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, a self-proclaimed chauvinist, and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, the world’s top female player who was out to liberate women and herself. (She was just discovering her true sexuality at that time.) Unless you happen to identify with Bobby — ‘Don’t
The late arch-Rossinian Philip Gossett regarded Semiramide as a neoclassical work, vaguely and alarmingly suggesting to me a musical equivalent of Canova, a sculptor I detest. Actually, I don’t think the terminology is helpful. Nor is Semiramide monumental in the way that the programme book suggests. There is a notable lack of ensembles and of