Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Lady killer

Opera

‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was not amused by Shostakovich’s bleak black comedy but our culture would be poorer without bored wives like Katerina. Perhaps all that Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Laura Jesson needed

Speech impediment | 1 October 2015

Cinema

Who goes to big-screen Shakespeare? Not theatre-goers much, and with reason. Apart from the odd corker by Kurosawa, arguably Olivier and Orson Welles — and let’s bung in Zeffirelli for those with a sweeter tooth — the Bard is a better scriptwriter when the words are dumped and the plots he nicked from elsewhere are

Incomprehensible genius

Cinema

London’s Goethe-Institut has a two-month season of films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose 70th anniversary it’s celebrating), but only five movies, each one alternating with a film influenced by him from another country. Considering that Fassbinder created about 60 films, it seems rather a slim effort. Still, half of his output is available on DVD,

James Delingpole

Independents’ day

Television

I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along came a TV programme which reminded me: I WAS cool once. It happened after Oxford when I became, almost simultaneously, both an acid-house freak and an indie kid. And BBC4’s three-part special — Music For

Lloyd Evans

Foote fault

Theatre

Samuel Foote (1720–77) was a star of the 18th-century stage who avoided the censors by extemporising his performances. Today we’d call him a stand-up comedian specialising in improv. He served tea to play-goers and claimed that the show was a free accompaniment to the beverages. Dogged by homosexual scandals, he was hounded out of England

Fancy that

Features

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/boris-nickyandthetoryleadership/media.mp3″ startat=1677] Listen [/audioplayer]Stand by your remotes, girls: the second series of Poldark is under way. Filming has started — yes, he’s out there somewhere, wearing those trousers, not wearing that shirt, swinging that scythe. You’ve only got to wait for someone to edit it all together and then Sunday nights can be special

Jenny McCartney

Coming up for air

Arts feature

The thing that the photojournalist Don McCullin likes best of all now, he tells me, is to stand on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland in a blizzard. He made his name in conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Uganda — hot places full of fury, panic and death — but these days he finds his greatest solace

Stars in their eyes | 24 September 2015

Exhibitions

‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared at the moon and saw a promotional opportunity. Nasa’s logo was designed by the flamboyant Raymond Loewy. A PR man wrote Neil Armstrong’s unforgettable lines. Every event at Cape Canaveral (later the Kennedy Space Center)

Indiscreet astronaut

Exhibitions

Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was the man who William Burroughs, the author of Junky and Naked Lunch, said was ‘the only man I ever respected’. Gysin was a modernist novelist, inventor and artist. He and his mathematician friend Ian Sommerville

Melting pot

Exhibitions

‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of languages, a temperament, a style of art and a fringe, once the stronghold of the Liberal Democrats. But who are — and were — the Celts? The curators of the new British Museum exhibition are

Two country-house treasures in the Borders

Picture Gallery Paxton House, Berwick-upon-Tweed Curved Stream Traquair House, Innerleithen, until 31 October In the Regency picture gallery at Paxton House hangs a full-length portrait of a young man in striking yellow breeches. The horse at his side is rubbing its bridle on its knee, the way horses do, while the man looks out at

Tales of the unexpected | 24 September 2015

Radio

Two significant anniversaries, each very different but both reflecting the BBC’s mission and the reasons for its continued success. From Our Own Correspondent has been on air for 60 years, reporting on events across the world not just as news but to fill in the back story to the headlines. Instead of bombs and bullets,

Talk of the devil | 24 September 2015

Television

For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’ he once said. ‘Otherwise I’d wonder, “How could I write such piffle?”’) Towards the end of his life, though, he finally produced an essay in their defence — proudly pointing out, among other things, that

Home is where the heart is | 24 September 2015

Cinema

99 Homes is an American drama about house repossession. Bummer, you might think, but here is what you don’t yet know: films about house repossessions can be electrifying. Or at least this one is. Set in 2008 or thereabouts, against the backdrop of the real-estate bust and ensuing foreclosure crisis, this has much to say

Fossilised Figaro

Opera

Is there a more extraordinary, more heart-stilling moment in all opera than the finale of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro? The Count, suddenly understanding his wife’s fidelity, begs her forgiveness — ‘Contessa perdono!’ Her answer comes like a musical benediction, but not until after the very slightest pause — space to doubt, to hope. It’s

Lloyd Evans

The big chill

Theatre

Michael Grandage’s latest show is about an old snap. Geneticists regard the X-ray of the hydrated ‘B’ form of DNA as one of the loveliest images ever captured. To laymen it looks like some woodlice drowning in yesterday’s porridge. The pic was taken in 1951 by the British biochemist Dr Rosalind Franklin but she failed

Friday

More from Books

I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I am committed; did not say to whom, did not say to my own self in my room. I have places to be where I must go. You want to make arrangements? Sorry, no.

There will be blood | 17 September 2015

Arts feature

If you don’t want to spend hundreds of euros on a good seat, the best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time — decades ago — I arrived early in the apron-shaped Piazza del Campo and sweated out the long afternoon as a tide of tension rose.

Bursting the bubble

Exhibitions

The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For a while, nowhere else did. People wondered, for example, whyever the mercurial Whistler volunteered for the unventilated backwaters of Britain. But London was eventually allowed into the international conversation following successful pop eruptions that began

Eastern airs

Radio

On Private Passions this week the writer Amitav Ghosh gave us a refreshingly different version of what has become a Radio 3 staple. No Mozart, Mendelssohn or Monteverdi for Ghosh, who speaks five languages including Arabic and Bengali, was born in Calcutta and has lived in Delhi, Oxford, Alexandria, Brooklyn and Goa. Instead, his musical

James Delingpole

Socialist Cluedo

Television

What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar till I saw the latest TV adaptation. Now, of course, I see exactly why the luvvies — see, for example, Stephen Daldry’s highly acclaimed early 1990s National Theatre revival — adore it so. It confirms

Rod Liddle

Why emote about migrants during a concert?

Columns

How should we deal with people who sneeze in public places? Stephen Jackson, aged 49, has found himself in court as a consequence of taking direct action against those people who are kind enough to share their nasal mucus with the rest of us. Stephen’s answer is usually to slap the offender across the head

High and mighty

Cinema

‘Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side,’ sang Miley Cyrus. ‘It’s the climb.’ She’s not usually a musician to be turned to for profound insight but in this case pop’s wild child has captured the absolute crux of this year’s Gravity wannabe, the visually spectacular 3D Everest, which kicked off the Venice Film Festival

Lloyd Evans

Double tragedy | 17 September 2015

Theatre

To examine an ancient text requires an understanding of the ancient imagination. The Oresteia is set in a primitive world where people believed that every animal, tree, stone, river, mountain, star, cloud and clap of thunder was inspired by a spirit controlled by the gods. Heaven signalled its wishes through dreams, oracles or chance events

All roads lead to Callas

Opera

Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t seem to be all that popular when they are. But Welsh National Opera’s theme for the season of Madness means that as one of the leading exponents of operatic insanity Bellini is bound to turn

Damian Thompson

Deadlier than the male | 17 September 2015

Music

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for