The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog is billed as a ‘dark comedy’ although it is far more dark than comic. If pressed to put a number on it, I’d say that, despite the film’s poster, which shows a cute dachshund’s butt, and leads you into thinking cute dachshund thoughts, this is 98 per cent dark, and the sort
Parsifal Bayreuth Festival, until 28 August In the days leading up to this year’s Bayreuth Festival, Bavaria was rocked by a spate of violent attacks. Security measures ran high for the premiere of a new Parsifal rumoured to be awash in Islamic symbolism. Such reports proved true, with the production set in a contemporary Middle Eastern
My ancient Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary of 1849 defines choreia as ‘a dancing, especially with joy’. The word choros has a more technical definition: a round dance, or a dance accompanied with song (hence the word chorus). From whichever word ‘choreographer’ is declared to derive, the British dancemaker Rosemary Butcher, who died last month
Michael Heath, The Spectator’s brilliant cartoon editor, has been on Desert Island Discs – which is like a knighthood, but without the cronyism. He’s been talking through his illustrious career and his decades-long association with The Spectator. Subscribers know how well he draws; but his wit is a secret hitherto shared with those of us lucky
Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety and reaches out in speculative attempts to do something new; exists on the outer edges of lives, looking inwards with hopes, some day, to be more essential. Art, literature and music are, in short, suburbs
In 1965 William Eggleston took the first colour photograph that, he felt, really succeeded. The location was outside a supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee; the time — to judge from the rich golden light and long shadows — late afternoon. Eggleston’s subject — a young man with a heavily slicked, early Elvis hairstyle stacking trolleys outside
The unacknowledged subtitle of Channel 4’s new reality series Eden (Mondays) is Die, Hippies! Die! Obviously they’re not going to admit this because that wouldn’t be right. But I’m sure Channel 4 is hoping that a terrible Lord of the Flies-type scenario will unfold for the 23 victims who’ve volunteered to get back to nature
It’s a brave dramatist who would seek to adapt for radio the hit novels of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. As soon as her quartet of novels set in Naples from the 1950s onwards began appearing in English translation a few years ago they created a bestselling stir because of the unusually bold flavour of
For almost 60 years, whatever the political weather, Russia and Britain have maintained mutually assured respect as far as ballet is concerned. In October 1956, the Soviet Union finally allowed its Bolshoi troupe to appear in the west, in London, a state cultural exchange that should have entailed the debut of the comparatively green Sadler’s
Consider it commercially. So powerful is the pull of the Potter franchise that the characters could simply re-enact the plot of ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and the fans would swoon with joy. The stage show has been written by a two-man committee, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, with the help of billionaire equality campaigner J.K. Rowling. Harry
In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, the ‘exterminating angel’ of the title is a mystery illness. A debilitating virus — much worse even than man flu — that attacks the social immune system and shuts down your ability to act, to think, to be. It prevents you from remembering how to behave at middle-class dinner parties.
The Carer is a Hungarian-British co-production about a cantankerous old thesp (Brian Cox) and the young Hungarian woman (Coco König) who is dispatched to look after him, much against his wishes, and whom he’ll eventually throw out on her ear. I’m joshing you. She wins him over, naturally, and mutual respect develops, naturally, and a
Die Fledermaus Opera Holland Park, until 5 August Johann Strauss’s opera Die Fledermaus is a masterpiece that I have had a lifelong passion for, a passion which productions, whether in England or abroad, are obstinately determined should remain unrequited. I hadn’t seen it, until Opera Holland Park’s new production, since the 2003 production at Glyndebourne,
One could honour God with prayer, of course, and build cathedrals, amass treasuries, turn choirs into stained-glass jewel boxes, carve portals with saints and sinners. But for the medieval monks bent over vellum in chilly scriptoria colour, too, was devotion: offertories of lapis lazuli, azurite, cinnabar, silver and gold, gold and more gold. Silver tarnished
It takes a particularly wilful wit to alight on Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict as the perfect operatic nod to a Shakespeare anniversary. To walk past Verdi’s Otello, Falstaff and Macbeth, to pass over Purcell’s Fairy Queen, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and instead opt for this curiously and idiomatically
Electronic Dance Music is dying. You may not have noticed. It may not affect you directly. But it’s a really big thing and, unless your teenage children have already told you, then you heard it here first. In fact, your teenage children are probably still in denial about it, so go and tell them. Get
An inspired decision to stage Jesus Christ Superstar in a summer theatre in Regent’s Park. The action takes place outdoors, in balmy climes, so the atmosphere is ideal for Rice and Lloyd Webber’s finest show. The songbook bursts with melodic inventiveness, and the score blithely rips apart the conventions of musical theatre and remakes them
Initially it must have been a nasty surprise. On 16 August 1972 an amateur scuba diver named Stefano Mariottini was fishing in shallow waters just off the coast of Calabria. At about noon he was poking around some rocks when he saw part of an arm protruding from the sand. His first thought, a natural
JT LeRoy was a teenage hustler who emerged from a childhood of abuse, drug addiction and homelessness to write about his harrowing experiences and become a literary sensation as taken up by Madonna, Bono, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Lou Reed and Gus Van Sant, among many others. His back story was shocking —
In the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, David Bowie gamely tried to reassure the youth of the Seventies that, despite what their Sixties elders were always telling them, they hadn’t been born too late after all. On the contrary: it was the ‘brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’ who was missing
It cost just £4/10s for 19-year-old Alan Dryland to buy a season ticket that would take him inside the stadium for all ten of the World Cup matches held in London in that magical summer of 1966. The pound was falling, the Vietnam war raging, but England made it through to the final and the
Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with the ‘least spiritually advanced’ in the worst seats. Unsurprisingly it didn’t happen. But perhaps the Southbank Centre should take up the challenge. For its 2016–17 season, the centre has devised a series of concerts and
The last boat I saw in the galleries on the Mound was a canoe that the Scottish painter Jock McFadyen had been using to explore viewpoints around the waterways of London. Now another vessel has sailed in, a full-scale recreation of the studio boat built in 1857 by the French painter Charles-François Daubigny, from the
It was hard to believe that Monday morning’s introduction to the Italian writer Primo Levi on Radio 4 lasted for only 15 minutes. It was so rich, multi-layered, filled with meaning. Presented by Janet Suzman, it was intended as a fanfare for the 11-part adaptation of Levi’s most original book, The Periodic Table, in which
Before I set about reviewing Ross Kemp: The Fight Against Isis (Sky 1), I thought I’d have a glance to see whether other critics had been as impressed as I was. Clearly the flip groovester from the Guardian — who opened, inevitably, with a jaunty quip about Grant from EastEnders — had seen a very
Nobody who witnessed it can have forgotten Mark Rylance summoning giants to his aid in Jerusalem. As Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, drug-dealing roustabout threatened with expulsion from his little patch of Eden, Rylance roared and drummed until the theatre shuddered with the sound of gigantic stomps approaching. That colossal performance brought him to international — as
Fracking is a British tradition. Since 1969 more than 200 sites have used hydraulic fracturing ‘without environmental catastrophes’ according to Dick Selley, an emeritus professor of geology, writing in the programme notes to Fracked! by Alistair Beaton. The satire takes the opposite view and regards fracking as a wicked novelty inflicted on rustic innocents by
What’s the best first opera for a sceptical adult first timer? It’s a favourite topic among opera buffs, and once you get past the assumption that novices need to be spoon-fed familiar tunes, the consensus — slightly surprisingly — often settles on Jenufa. Surprisingly? Well, yes: Janacek still isn’t guaranteed box office (maybe people conflate
Mark Morris, the most musically communicative and naturally lyrical of choreographers of the past 30 years (and an absentee from London theatres for too long), made L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, a dance masterpiece of a Handel oratorio using John Milton’s words. It was a miracle of pastoral sweetness, in rustic, human, amorous dancing,