Culture

Culture

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

Lloyd Evans

Do we really need this unsubtle and irrelevant play about Covid?

Theatre

Pandemonium is a new satire about the Covid nightmare that uses the quaint style of the Elizabethan masque. Armando Iannucci’s play opens with Paul Chahidi as Shakespeare introducing a troupe of players who all speak in rhyming couplets. A golden wig descends like a signal from on high and Shakespeare transforms himself into the ‘World

Sam Leith

Video games aren’t a total waste of time

Arts feature

My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video games. It is a total nightmare – and it’s one that in various versions will be replicated in houses with young

The best British Nutcracker

Dance

The Nutcracker is one of those Christmas traditions that turns out to be not very traditional at all. First performed in St Petersburg in 1892, it didn’t catch on outside Russia until the late 1950s, when Balanchine’s version for New York City Ballet was repeatedly screened on network television in the USA and Festival Ballet’s

The art of walking

More from Arts

My pilgrim companion William Parsons and I did not call our first journey a pilgrimage. Rather, it was a song walk: a walk with a purpose of taking a song, ‘The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy’, back to where it came from. It was also an attempt to reclaim my place in the world, after too much

A short history of stained glass

More from Arts

On 13 December 1643, a Puritan minister called Richard Culmer borrowed the Canterbury town ladder and carefully leaned it against the Cathedral’s Royal Window. He then ascended the ladder’s 60-odd rungs, holding a pike; according to his account, modestly written in the third person, ‘Some people wished he might break his neck.’ Culmer had in

Rod Liddle

Pleasant, underwhelming: Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach reviewed

The Listener

Grade: C+ Maximum points for self-awareness, you have to say. The title track of this pleasant, if largely underwhelming, album include the lines: ‘These recycled riffs aren’t going anywhere, any time.’ Never a truer word spoken. Here, this fitfully engaging singer-songwriter shuffles through predictable chord changes pinioned by forgettable piano riffs and intones – deploying

David Starkey on the inventor of the portrait

Exhibitions

On 12 November 1549, the 12-year-old Edward VI, newly liberated from the tutelage of his overweening uncle, Lord Protector Somerset, was at last able to enter his father Henry VIII’s private apartments in the Palace of Whitehall. From the extraordinary mixture of treasures and bric-à-brac he found there, he chose one thing: ‘a book of

A Nativity that sends shivers down the spine

Arts feature

Hieronymus Bosch was not a natural painter of religious images. His terrifying visions of Hell may have helped to keep congregations on the path of righteousness, but they did not inspire feelings of devotion – which could explain why none of the large altarpieces he painted remained over their altars after his death. In the

Why I love the Hold Steady

Live music is thriving right now. According to the US trade magazine Billboard, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has so far grossed an estimated $838m, and that’s just from 66 shows in the Americas. It’s already the second highest-grossing tour in pop history, and she hasn’t had to cross an ocean yet. At the top end,

Damian Thompson

A marvel – how did Bradley Cooper pull it off? Maestro reviewed

Cinema

As the overture to Candide blazed away during the ovation for Maestro at the Venice Film Festival, three members of the audience flung their arms around in an imitation of Leonard Bernstein’s conducting style. They were his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, and their reaction said it all. Bradley Cooper, the film’s star and director,

James Delingpole

Still the best thing on TV: Apple TV+’s Slow Horses reviewed

Television

Slow Horses is the best thing on television. And it’s now so successful and popular it can afford to launch series three with a sequence worthy of James Bond: Istanbul location budget; spectacular chase sequences involving cars and speedboats with some thrillingly dangerous manoeuvres round a huge container vessel; a beautiful, immaculately dressed female agent

Small moments vs Big Ideas: Peter Gabriel’s i/o reviewed

Pop

Peter Gabriel is terribly fond of a Big Idea. With Genesis he would sing in character as a lawnmower, a fox and as ‘Slipperman’. His final work with the band, in 1974, was The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double album driven by what we might kindly describe as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ narrative involving a

Jenny McCartney

Fascinating: Radio 4’s Empire of Tea reviewed

Radio

I can scarcely remember a time before tea: I started drinking it at around four, at home in Belfast, as a reward after school. Before long I was as fiercely protective of my right to a brew as the workers of British Leyland’s Birmingham car plant, who were famously spurred to strike action in 1981

The Spectator film critic who transformed cinema

Arts feature

‘Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of,’ insisted the film writer Iris Barry in 1926. But it certainly wasn’t something to be proud of, either. To the cultural cognoscenti of the 1920s, Barry admitted, the cinema was barely an art at all – about as aesthetically significant as ‘passport photography’. And for

Britain’s forgotten female pop artist 

Exhibitions

T o describe Pauline Boty as a ‘pioneer’ is a bit like calling someone a ‘one-off’. It’s not an adequate description of her in any way. Pauline was the only female British pop-art painter of the early 1960s. You may not know of her. She died in 1966, aged 28, and her name has remained

Kaurismaki is the business: Fallen Leaves reviewed

Cinema

Even though Aki Kaurismaki has won every award going and is a household name in his native Finland, where he is treated like a god, it may be that you’ve never heard of him. He is the business. He specialises in understated dramas about deadpan losers whose hopes are often crushed, but who somehow find