The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Hurrah for Radio 3 and its (long-overdue) efforts to give us music not just performed by women but composed, and conducted, by them too. Last year’s innovative day of programming for International Women’s Day introduced us to composers many of us had never heard of, such as Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Barbara Strozzi,
Anomalisa is an animated film written by Charlie Kaufman, and while the temptation is to label it a midlife crisis movie, because labels make life so much easier, it is not that clear-cut, just as it never is with Kaufman, who has always refused to explain himself. (Asked what his films are about, his stock
Jonathan Lynn, co-author of Yes Minister, has excavated the history of France during the two world wars and discovered dramatic gold. He presents us with pen portraits of eminent Frenchmen we think we know. Marshal Pétain (Tom Conti) is a humane pragmatist who refuses to risk speculative assaults on the Western Front. He evolved his
A mixed year so far for new opera. A few really dismal things have appeared from people who should know better. Did the world really need an operatic treatment of Dante’s Divine Comedy for orchestra and chorus? Louis Andriessen thought so; his La Commedia (2004–8) luckily only reared its drab head for one night at
In 1896, a group of five young Swedish women artists began to meet regularly in order to access mystical zones beyond the confines of mundane everyday reality. Every Friday, they would gather in order to contact the incorporeal beings they called ‘spirit world leaders’ or ‘High Masters’; among these were five named Ananda, Clemens, Esther,
Aldous Huxley observed that ‘Where music is concerned, infant prodigies are almost the rule. In the world of literature, on the other hand, they remain the rarest exceptions.’ This, he believed, was because good literature could not be written without experience of the outside world, while music was the art least connected with reality. ‘Like
It was six months ago this week when Nicola Sturgeon heroically admitted she’d be ‘happy’ to have a refugee move into her detached Glasgow home. That same rousing week last September, we were treated to the vision of Yvette Cooper ‘bravely’ holding up a piece of A4 paper with #refugeeswelcome scrawled on it. As he’s wont
Manon Lescaut Met Opera Live Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is his first opera worth seeing and hearing, and marks an astonishing progress from what preceded it. But Puccini had yet to learn how to bully his librettists into producing the well-constructed dramas of his later operas, and for all its delights Manon Lescaut is a shambles.
The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens
Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the show’s creators but I’m firmly with the exiteers. This is barely a play and more a thin, vicious pantomime with an Isis-video aesthetic. The minuscule plot follows Grace (Michelle Terry) as she visits a prison
Near the end of Elena Langer’s new opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, as the Almaviva household — now emigrés in an unnamed 1930s police state — prepares to flee, the Countess announces that she intends to leave her trunk behind. It’s not the subtlest moment in David Pountney’s libretto. Any opera that sets itself up
The latest film from the Coen brothers is a comedy set during the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood and in some respects it is utterly delicious. George Clooney wears what is effectively a leather miniskirt throughout, which may not be ‘age-appropriate’, as they say, but is wholly pleasing. (I was personally delighted, I must confess.) And
When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it is to a vision: the vicar’s wife Alice Keach in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a rose tucked into the ribbon. ‘Her neck was uncovered to the bosom and, immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli —
That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run and get one of them,’ and the old one replies, ‘Let’s walk and we can have the lot,’ is of course far too politically incorrect to tell these days. But it did creep into my
Some things I have learned about Iceland after watching six episodes of Trapped (BBC4, Saturdays). 1. They seem to feel much the same way towards the Danes as the Irish or the Scots do towards the English. 2. Some typical Icelandic first names: Andri, Ásgeir, Dagný, Hjörtur, Hrafn, Þórhildur. But even if you did Anglo-Saxon
What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of the English-language service. And how does it justify the additional £289 million funding (spread over the next five years) which the Treasury granted it at the end of last year? Will that money, which could
Religion remains a surprisingly popular subject for plays. It’s partly because there’s already a core of theatricality there, in the rituals, the dressing-up and the little shibboleths of piety. In one way or another, religion involves performing. And religion plays the role of Hogwarts in Harry Potter — an enclosed world, a game with rules.
The American comic Toby Muresianu put it best: last night’s Oscars felt like ‘three hours of being told to eat your vegetables’. If there has ever been a more grating gathering of smug, self-important asses keen to educate the TV-watching blob about Serious Stuff, then I’m struggling to remember it. Hollywood has clearly forgotten what
Music never dies, but if Adele makes another record, there is going to be a murder. Probably of me, by me, because I can’t take it any longer. Right now, there is no escaping her. In 2015, 25 was the fastest-selling album, ever, on both sides of the Atlantic. Her single ‘Hello’ was downloaded a
‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at St John, the Smithfield restaurant. Parr is Britain’s best-known photographer, but he is no acolyte of celebrity. Like the Italian anti-designers, his Seventies contemporaries who wanted to dull the sheen of modernism by elevating the
The 20th-century painter who called himself Balthus once proposed that a monograph about him should begin with the words ‘Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures.’ But while Balthus may have felt that far too much was known about his private life, Hieronymus Bosch is an
It’s tempting to believe that somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House in London the voice of Kenneth Williams is still roaming, rich, ribald and ever-so-fruity, ready to jump out and surprise us. He was just so unmistakable on air, both fantastically intimate with the microphone and very aloof, but never better than playing someone
The Night Manager (BBC1, Sunday) announced its intentions immediately, when the opening credits lovingly combined weapons and luxury items. ‘Blimey,’ we were clearly intended to think, ‘it’s a bit like James Bond.’ True, the main character works — at this stage, anyway — in the hotel trade rather than as a secret agent. Yet, when
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes decent talents — Richard Gere and Dakota Fanning, most notably — for no discernible purpose and has you thinking throughout that whatever they were paid it wasn’t enough, and even if they’d been offered more,
The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre — partly, no doubt, a matter of operatic convention and fashion, but also recalling opera to its duty as a rite of purification. Berlioz’s Didon in Les Troyens, like her creator, is so relentless in her
Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the Arts Council’s total investment in our arts organisations, which amounts to many millions of pounds. Yet it accounts for ‘between 3 and 4 per cent of live audiences in theatres’. How can these figures possibly
Director Robert Icke has this to say of Chekhov’s greatest masterpiece: ‘Let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function.’ He uproots ‘the old thing’ from its natural setting and drops it down in no-man’s land. It all feels modern. Aircraft buzz in the heavy summer air. A thunderstorm sets
Finding St Peter’s is not straightforward. I approach the wrong way, driving up a pot-holed farm track between a golf club and a wood until a fly-tipped sofa blocks my way. Beyond the sofa, behind padlocked security fencing, stands an old stone bridge. Someone has sprayed ‘Go Home’ on the pillar. I prowl through the
Piero della Francesca is today acknowledged as one of the foundational artists of the Renaissance. Aldous Huxley thought his ‘Resurrection’ ‘the best painting in the world’. His compositions marry art and science with cool precision and a sophisticated grasp of perspective — he was, after all, a mathematician. But he was only rediscovered in the