The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is slow, churchy, cerebral, bleak, difficult, tormented and puzzling, which is always a blow. So exhausting when a film’s meaning isn’t laid out clearly and neatly before you. But it is, at least, powerfully puzzling and grippingly puzzling. You may not understand it (completely), but you will come away with the
Rafael Kubelik is watching Wimbledon when I enter his suite at the Savoy. ‘Tennis fan?’ I ask, slightly surprised. He shakes his head. ‘No. Just her.’ It is 1983, the high summer of Martina Navratilova. ‘She will win,’ says Kubelik in the decisive tone that conductors use to save rehearsal time. ‘And one day my
When Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni was first staged at the Royal Opera in 2014, I disliked it intensely, even more than I have disliked most of his other productions, or for that matter most productions of Don Giovanni. I missed the first revival, but when I saw it this time round my reactions
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of
According to the opening captions in Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC2, Wednesday), ‘the infamous events’ it depicts ‘began whena mysterious widow purchased a mansion out in the Australian bush’. The first few scenes, set in the late 19th century, were then dedicated to proving quite how mysterious she was: Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) wasn’t merely
When did you last take the bus? If you don’t live in London, probably not for ages. In her two-part series for Radio 4, Mind the Gap, Lynsey Hanley set out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to access public transport outside the capital. In Skelmersdale, billed in the 1960s as a place of
You remember slow TV? Pioneered by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, with its classic Bergensbanen — minutt for minutt (2009), which simply stuck a camera on the front of a train and recorded the seven-hour journey from Bergen to Oslo, slow TV is a nice idea, unless you’re in a hurry, or you have an actual
In G.F. Watts’s former sculpture studio in the Surrey village of Compton, a monstrous presence has interposed itself between the dusty plaster models of ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson’ and ‘Physical Energy’. Standing 14ft tall, the brightly painted soldier with fez and sabre is a replica of a colossal puppet made by James Henry Pullen (1835–1916) while
It’s not a wrap. This is the first thing to note about the huge trapezoid thing that has appeared, apparently floating, on the Serpentine Lake. Many of the projects by the artists who conceived it, Christo and his late wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, have involved bundling something up in a temporary mantle. The items thus
To no one’s surprise, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian in Oxford, where J.R.R. spent so much of his time, has been a huge success. Were tickets on sale, it would be a sell-out, but the Bodleian has made it free. The visitors book is peppered with observations such as: ‘It made
There was a standing ovation from the audience at The King and I at the London Palladium on Tuesday night, but then, audiences at musicals are invariably rather a sweet crowd, way less critical than opera goers. The musical’s heroine, Kelli O Hara, who plays the feisty feminist British governess, was in the papers yesterday declaring
190 years of The Spectator 14 December 1996 The Spice Girls were at the time the biggest girl group in the world, their debut album selling 23 million copies. The interview brought the magazine its highest sales figure for a generation Interview the Spice Girls, I thought. But the Spice Girls are interviewed
Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual overproduced r&b pop schlock. What used to be called ‘indie’ singer-songwriters are always moaning about how utterly useless they are, taking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ as a kind of self-flagellating worldview. Chart
‘Can one person really grasp the significance of what another person has been through?’ asks Dr Rita Charon in this week’s essay on Radio 3. She’s a physician in New York (isn’t it somehow telling that in Britain we’ve long since forgotten what GP actually stands for?) and as a result of her experiences as
The femme fatale was invented in France. A giddy, greedy child in her first incarnation, as the antiheroine of Abbé Prévost’s L’Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), she had no voice of her own. Reshaped as a sphinx by Alfred de Musset, made over as a gypsy by Prosper Mérimée, plumped
Even though I don’t watch much football I love the World Cup because it’s my passport to total freedom. I can nip off to the pub, slob indoors on a sunny Sunday afternoon, leave supper before we’ve finished eating, let alone before the dishes are done. And where normally that kind of behaviour would at
Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is especially true of plays that appeal primarily to women. Genesis Inc. by Jemma Kennedy presents us with two infertile mums. Serena is a clingy worrier whose aloof boyfriend, Jeff, resents forking out thousands for IVF.
Swimming with Men is a British drama-comedy starring Rob Brydon as a disaffected middle-aged accountant who joins his local male synchronised-swimming team, doesn’t bond with any of his teammates, doesn’t learn about what matters in life, catches athlete’s foot plus several verrucas, then throws himself from a bridge. Of course, that isn’t this film, but
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute that boasts two highly original features; it’s five hours long and must be performed by a badger. Though it took me only five minutes to write, my opus one is guaranteed to get through to
My earliest memory of a mosque is being with my father in London’s Brick Lane Mosque. He was a member of its management committee and that gave me, an infant, the right to roam freely the four floors — including its vast basement — as I waited for him to finish meetings. I remember seeing
In 2004 Mexican art historians made a sensational discovery in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom. Inside this space, sealed since the 1950s, was an enormous archive of documents, photographs and personal possessions. This hoard forms the basis of Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up, an exhibition at the V&A. Oscar Wilde once remarked that ‘one should either be
Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment in her entire adulthood (she’s now 28) has she been able to do any of the everyday things the rest of us take for granted. No wonder, then, that so much of what surrounds her
Antony Gormley has replicated again. Every year or so a new army of his other selves — cast, or these days 3-D fabricated, in bronze, iron, steel — emerge from his workshop. Some lucky clones find themselves in wild and beautiful places; others are trapped in private collections. The latest clutch, generation 2018, find themselves
Debra Granik, the writer-director who made quite a splash with Winter’s Bone (which launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence in 2010), has returned with Leave No Trace, which is also powerfully compelling. By rights, it shouldn’t be. By rights, this tale of a father and daughter who wish to keep themselves to themselves (essentially) should
Back when his country was controlled by the USSR, the Czech writer Milan Kundera pointed out that ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ was ‘four words, four lies’. It’s a strike rate that even the current US president has yet to match. Nonetheless, at one stage in Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate (BBC2, Sunday)
Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black. New Yorker Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wants to explore this factoid in his farce An Octoroon, which opens with an angry African-American playwright delivering a comic monologue. He tells us a story about ‘my shrink’. Then he
It’s been a heavyweight week on Radio 4 with the start of the annual series of Reith Lectures and a talk on empire by Jan Morris, and thank heavens for that. We need serious, we need facts, we need to think in these trying times, beset as they are by Love Island and persistent presidential
Patrick Mason’s new production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette reminded me of something, but it took a while to work out what. We saw shiny black walls with chrome Bauhaus details, and a swirl of mist through which beautiful people moved in black formal wear. Then Olena Tokar made her entrance as Juliette, and as