The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph
Provincial repertory theatre, in which a semi-permanent company of actors performed a varied diet of plays for their community, week-in, week-out, has all but died out in Britain. Local theatres have become venues for visiting productions, one-off events and numerous outreach schemes, but the old continuity – a kind of magic – has gone. I
I once knew a monster who said she could not read Proust because there were no figures in Proust with whom she could identify… Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Aesthetics’ (1958-59) Getting an audience to identify themselves in a work – ‘being seen’ – is one of the only reasons why art is commissioned, celebrated or even
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set to tunes from the West Side Story guy: what’s not to like? And what can be so wrong with its twinkle-toed score that the combined rewriting efforts (and this is not remotely the full list)
We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music fans treated so abysmally? The afternoon of Spektor’s second sold-out show at the Royal Festival Hall, the venue tweeted that she would be on stage at 7.30 p.m. She actually took to the stage a
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who was later haunted by what he’d created. Starring Cillian Murphy, and his cheekbones, the film is dense, ambitious, complex, so very long (three hours) and impressive, even if it does drag by the end. (When
The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge to try an unusual experiment. Can she entertain the punters and make them feel happy rather than forcing them to confront various forms of gloom, misery and despair? The answer is yes. Featherstone can tickle
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021 at the age of 89, knew it too. Her sinuous, characterful cat pictures, watercolours mostly but also oils and prints, helped cement her place as the nation’s favourite painter. She was an establishment favourite too,
I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University Challenge. But unfortunately, I understand from people who knew the Eton, Cambridge, Yale and Grenadier Guards historian, playwright, critic, polymath millionaire and scion of the upper classes that he chose to compensate for his privilege
At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes… swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop’. The Silver Swan has been
In central Budapest a crew from Hungary’s state TV is filming the unveiling of a new street sign. In honour of his centenary year composer Gyorgy Ligeti now has a road named after him. Contemporary classical music is deemed newsworthy in Hungary. Even more astonishingly – and anyone working in British classical music might want
Finally, the Barbie film is here, for which we must be thankful, as the tsunami of pre-publicity meant you probably felt obliged to lock your bathroom door so the trailers didn’t follow you in there. They should have called this Ken but I guess that’s not going to help bring down the patriarchy It’s a
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?’ argued Picasso. The inventor of cubism took advantage of his liberty in ‘Buste
There were times during last Friday’s First Night of the Proms when it felt as if we’d been transported back to Ohio during the Eisenhower administration. We could have been in Severance Hall, Cleveland, listening to its orchestra under George Szell – and there’s no higher compliment I can pay the BBC Symphony Orchestra, because
In the 1990s, the BBC had a popular flat-share comedy, Men Behaving Badly, about a pair of giggling bachelors who were scolded and dominated by their mummy-substitute girl-friends. The author, Simon Nye, has written a historical crime caper about the theft of the crown jewels in 1671, as Charles II prepared to celebrate his tenth
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was the subtle message of Eldorado, a documentary that pretended to inform us about the real-life background sexual milieu to Cabaret and Babylon Berlin, but was really much more interested in promoting its political view that
It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in a top-rated US clinic. The aim is ‘egg retrieval’, a process which collects eggs from the ovaries for use in IVF. It involves nerves and hope, long needles and pain – except the patient has
Bands that have hung around, or gone away and come back again, occupy an increasingly sizeable percentage of pop’s bandwidth. When it comes to making new music, many are happy not to rock the boat, scraping by on the goodwill accumulated from past endeavours. Others strive to present a moving target, enjoying a more evolved,
Through several phases of the culture wars, ballet has served as a canary in the coal mine, its intense and exposed physicality highlighting all the issues surrounding sexuality, gender and power that have currently become our unhealthily narcissistic preoccupation. Perhaps the warnings started with the phenomenon of Vaslav Nijinsky. Against the defined masculinity and femininity
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The programme managed to shed new light on a familiar but still irresistible story by concentrating on Philby’s relationship with his old chum – and fellow Cambridge man – Nicholas Elliott. Elliott was
Seven years ago, I asked Bruce Springsteen what he meant when he talked of the covenant between himself and his audience. It was a long, thoughtful and thorough answer, and when I transcribed it, I realised he would have won Just a Minute, so clear was his reply. Part of what he said was this:
Blockbuster action movies are designed to stun the audience into submissive acceptance. Complexity, humanity, emotion and beauty are reduced to a few flickering lights in the swirling darkness of death and destruction. This is not a criticism. Great art has sometimes been like that and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly art,
Beneatha’s Place, set in the 1950s, follows a black couple who encounter racial prejudice when they move to a predominately white suburb. The location is Nigeria but it might as well be the USA because most of the characters, both black and white, are American. (The Young Vic has strong links with America, and a
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection were fakes. The caller intimated that he was an associate of the notorious forger Eric Hebborn, who had claimed in his 1991 memoir, Drawn to Trouble, to have sold the institute a fake Rowlandson. The
‘Ring out your bells for me, ivory keys! Weave out your spell for me, orchestra please!’ It’s lush stuff, the music of Ivor Novello, and when the Buxton International Festival announced a new musical ‘built around’ his songs, the heart took flight. Novello is one of those fringe passions that are, one suspects, a lot
A few months ago, a clip from a podcast went mildly viral online. A lightly dressed woman sits in front of a microphone, explaining her sex life in pedantic detail to an offscreen interviewer. It was strange and unpleasant, which was why people couldn’t stop looking at it. What kind of podcast is this, exactly?
Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond. Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he was played by wry, capable Sean Connery or playful, tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore. But he definitely ought to have been a shoo-in for the horror show that the Bond franchise has become: dour, humourless, pumped up,
Nothing demonstrates the inanity of profanity like an undercooked comedy. The famous Spitting Image puppets have returned in a political musical that’s more cuddly than cutting. Writers Matt Forde and Al Murray add a lot of swearing to their punchlines without understanding why. The temptation to use the F-bomb is a warning sign from the
Most artists begin an arena show with a bang: emerging from the floor, the gods, on a hoist, everything short of being sprung headfirst from a cannon. Touring for the first time in seven years, Peter Gabriel shrugged off such rote conventions. At 8 p.m. on the dot, he shuffled on alone in a flat