The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. We first meet the future prime minister at a nursery school in Paisley where she orders the teachers to call her Elizabeth and not to use her first name, Mary. This establishes her combative, self-righteous
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Most subsidised theatres hanker for political relevance. Even so, when the Royal Shakespeare Company planned its new production of Twelfth Night, they can hardly have expected that by Christmas 2024 we’d have Malvolio as prime minister. The curious thing is
If your heart sinks at the prospect of a thriller series starring Keira Knightley as a highly trained undercover agent with unfeasible martial skills, join the club. The reason I was drawn to Black Doves was when I realised it had been written by that master of tongue-in-cheek, ultraviolent, popcorn TV, Joe Barton (Giri/Haji). However
We Live in Time is a rom-com (of sorts), starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. They have terrific chemistry and elevate the material by around 1,000 per cent (a conservative estimate), but it’s still deeply annoying. It’s a weepie – a cancer story as well as a love story; at some screenings tissues were handed
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over machismo, money and majesty, the future keeps crashing in. The Science Museum has now laid its cards on the table with Versailles: Science and Splendour. Think gilt, not guilt. Is there anything in our lives
Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in ‘O come, all ye faithful’ that goes: ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.’ Wasn’t it a bit weird? At last I found the answer
Ruination begins with an ironic prologue in which a choric figure warns the audience that what follows makes unlikely matter for the festive season: look elsewhere if you’re after light entertainment, he says, because this is going to shake you up a bit. And it does. This is genre-defying physical theatre, ‘devised’ by Ben Duke,
John Savournin has been busy. That comes with the territory for a classical singer – things often get a little hectic as the music world barrels towards Christmas. But with Savournin, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of which theatre – which city – he’s in on any given night. ‘This week has been Pirates
More than a thousand musicians took part when Handel’s Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey in May 1791. It wasn’t the only item on the bill, either; it was part of a day-long blow-out that lasted from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and also included the whole of Handel’s Israel in Egypt. The crowd came
The Devil Wears Prada is a fairy tale about an aspiring female novelist, Andy, who receives a job offer from Runway, the nastiest and most influential fashion magazine in America. Miranda, the editor, is a Botoxed uber-bitch who doesn’t really want to hire Andy, but does anyway. And Andy doesn’t really want to work in
Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works. It’s not profound art but it’s
At last, a film about the G7. There have been more movies than you can shake a stick at set in the Oval Office and No. 10 and other citadels. But not once has cinema gathered democracy’s prime septet in the same frame, the way the annual Group of Seven summit does. Until Rumours. ‘Did
Queer, which is based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, is the latest film directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) and stars Daniel Craig as an American expat who is gay, horny, sweaty, drug-addled and becomes infatuated with a younger man. It’s not exactly Christmassy, but it is very Burroughsy,
Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing a starry cast and end with a redeemed protagonist gazing up at some suddenly falling snow. Reviewing Sky’s Bad Tidings this year, I can rather smugly report that there’s no need to revise my theory.
For a press tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the Church of the Resurrection, the Mother of churches, site of the last four stations of the Cross – you must apply to the Patriarch. This being Jerusalem, there are three: the Latin, the Armenian and the Greek Orthodox. The process
Pantomime season is upon us, and unless your taste in colour runs no further than Smarties, there is no more magnificent spectacle on offer than Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker – performed so many hundred times since its première in 1990 that two years ago it disintegrated and required reconstruction. Its scenery and
Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience. Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character
Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears a fair bit of both. The ability to fold silence into a musical line – to create the impression that a conductor is somehow sculpting a sound which doesn’t exist – is an indicator of
Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as a mother who is so full of rage about her loss of identity it makes her feral and she starts turning into a dog. It’s weird and there is nothing I can say to make it sound less weird – she grows a tail! Extra nipples! – but it’s actually
Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance of the ‘high street’. For despite digital merchandising and online delivery, adults as much as children delight in this annual extravaganza, and such windows prove more popular than ever precisely because they cannot be enjoyed
Do you remember that nagging sense of mild disappointment as you sat through Dune 2? You’d been impressed by Dune: bit of a recondite plot if you hadn’t read the book but great to look at, with an austere art-house aesthetic, like Star Wars for people with an IQ. But then the sequel sold out.
Expendable, at the Royal Court, is an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England. The setting is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper. White thugs
The podcasts I’m recommending to everyone at the moment are Nasa’s Curious Universe and the Royal Astronomical Society’s The Supermassive Podcast. Both have me convinced there’s no topic better suited to the oral medium than space. Not even history. Unless you happen to be an astronaut, you’ll find much of what is described so alien,
Among the many destructive after-effects of the pandemic, the impact of two years of lockdowns has had serious consequences for public museums and galleries, particularly so for our national museums and galleries. More than two-and-a-half years since the last restrictions were lifted, visitor numbers to many of the big London institutions have yet to return
Conclave is a papal thriller based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris and it stars a magnificent Ralph Fiennes. If he doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my hat and also yours. Luckily, the film is also well written, smart, taut and visually stunning. You’d think the costume designer (Lisy Christl) wouldn’t find too
It was Irish week in London, with one group from the north and one from the south. Guinness was sold in unusual amounts; green football shirts were plentiful; and so, at both shows, was a genuinesense of joyful triumph – these were the biggest London venues either group had headlined. The Irishness was much more
Grade: A- There’s a very faint echo of Jeff VanderMeer’s unheimlich Southern Reach Series in the new indie side-scroller Neva. You’re plonked at the start of the game into a pleasant dreamlike landscape of pastel foliage, benign fauna and the gentle twitter of birds. But as you progress you start to encounter something darker –
A slice of the ghetto arrives at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. The Purists is set on the stoop of a crumbling block in Queens, New York, and the show declares its urban credentials as a boombox slams out a hip-hop rhythm and Mr Bugz, a DJ, enters, mike in hand. He urges the audience
‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? He was, of course, quoting John Lennon from the 1969 Beatles rooftop concert: an appropriate reference in the circumstances – because this documentary was a kind of Get Back for the