The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of a black actress, Adele James, in the title role. After all, one of the few things that seems certain about Cleopatra’s early life is that she was a Macedonian Greek. Luckily, though, the show had
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is an adaptation of Judy Blume’s seminal young adult novel (1970) about an 11-year-old girl who talks to God about her friends and boys and who she wants to kiss and whether she’ll ever get breasts or menstruate. (This could also be called Are You There, Margaret? It’s
Normally, when you look at portraits you feel obliged to focus on the sitter. But quite often you’re thinking, ‘Ooh, what a lovely frock.’ Or, ‘Fabulous breeches!’ Here it’s the costumes that take centre stage. The point that this exhibition makes is that costume spoke volumes about society, particularly in the long 18th century, over
In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the Whitechapel Gallery rounded up 80 women abstract expressionists for its recent Action, Gesture, Paint show. But imbalances can’t be corrected retrospectively. Rather than elevating women artists who didn’t make it in a male-dominated world –
I was listening the other week to a solo album by an ageing rock guitarist, once terrifically famous. It was really very good, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about it because it clearly didn’t matter: this man’s career is static and it is likely to remain so. The album will make no impact
A new play, The Misandrist, looks at modern dating habits. Rachel is a smart, self-confident woman whose partner is a timid desperado named Nick. Both accept that Rachel must make all the important decisions in their lives and she orders Nick to submit to ‘pegging’. After some perfunctory resistance, Nick obeys. ‘Lube me up,’ he
Lightning sometimes strikes twice. English Touring Opera hit topical gold last spring when, wholly by coincidence, they found themselves touring with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian anti-war satire The Golden Cockerel. Now the company’s general director Robin Norton-Hale insists that their current tour of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims – written in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of
A documentary by Nick Broomfield is always to some extent about Nick Broomfield. He has cultivated an image as a gonzo filmmaker, striding into shot holding a boom microphone, headphones clamped over his ears, and in the politest possible way provoking chaos. ‘Unfortunately it comes very easily to me, to be slightly out of control,’
Fulfilling its sacred duty to serve regions that higher culture tends to avoid, Birmingham Royal Ballet made a midweek visit to the troubled city of Peterborough. Its New Theatre holds about 1,200 and is normally focused on tribute bands and stand-ups; I would guess that for Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection only about 60 per cent
Hermitage, where the heel of Roxburghshire kicks into the once-lawless Debatable Lands, seems an unlikely place to find a botanical artist. It’s hard to make anything grow here, let alone an exhibition-load of rare and sometimes exotic plants. Lorded over by Hermitage Castle, a menacing hulk of medieval brutalism described by George MacDonald Fraser as
The Motive and the Cue breaches the inviolable sanctity of the rehearsal room. The play, set in New York in 1964, follows John Gielgud’s efforts to direct the world’s biggest film star, Richard Burton, in Shakespeare’s most demanding play, Hamlet. A member of Gielgud’s company, Richard L. Sterne, recorded the process and his notes form
Sir Hubert Parry was upgraded from knight bachelor to baronet by King Edward VII in 1902, and my goodness he earned it. His anthem for Edward’s coronation, I was Glad when they Said Unto Me, begins with a thrilling brass fanfare – or it has done since George V’s coronation in 1911: Parry’s original introit
Plan 75 is a dystopian Japanese drama about a government-sponsored euthanasia programme introduced to address Japan’s ageing society. Aged 75 or over? Agree to die and we’ll give you $1,000 to spend as you like in your last days! With a collective funeral thrown in for free! Actually, it’s not sold aggressively like that, as
As the owner of a radio alarm clock, I could theoretically start listening to the Today programme before I’m even awake, but I rarely do. I tell myself it’s too much for first thing; that it’s bound to put me in a bad mood with some interview or other; that Today can wait until tomorrow
Whether by accident or design, the mathematical theme of Ed Sheeran’s previous album titles (+, ×, ÷ and = respectively) resolves rather neatly with – (Subtract). I interviewed Sheeran around the time of × and found him likeable enough but a bit out of reach. Multiplication did indeed seem to be foremost on his mind.
As stage directions go, the The Magic Flute opens with a zinger. ‘Tamino enters from the right wearing a splendid Japanese hunting costume.’ That’s right, a Japanese hunting costume. What does that even look like? More to the point, what would a Viennese theatrical costume designer in 1791 have thought it looked like? Surviving evidence
‘A small, black, repulsive picture’ is not how most people today would describe Zurbaran’s haunting painting of ‘Saint Francis in Meditation’ (1635-9) in the National Gallery. But that was how one Protestant critic of its acquisition in 1853 described this image of an Italian saint satirised three centuries earlier by the German Lutheran cleric Erasmus
With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for TV intimacy co-ordinators. Just two weeks ago, we had Netflix’s Obsession. Now Paramount+ has come to the slightly weird party, turning the daddy of them all, Fatal Attraction, into an eight-part series. In the original
A user’s guide to how pop music works in the 21st century. Step one: you see a great new band. Step two: you tweet about them being very good. Step three: you get told by people that they are clearly nepo babies, denying crucial exposure to other bands. Step four: you discover that newspaper articles
David Starkey’s commentary on the Queen’s funeral on GB News was generally agreed to be the best of all the TV coverage, and now he is covering the coronation, and has made a three-part documentary about it for GB News called The Crown. Of course he knows the history, going back to King Edgar’s coronation
Grade: B– Chugga-chugga, grawch, chugga-chugga. Never mind 72 seasons, it’s actually been a little over 500 seasons since Metallica first started bestowing their peculiarly Los Angeles brand of heavy metal – shiny, taut and smooth – on a grateful audience of dispossessed lower-middle-class white incels. And nothing very much has changed. They have got better,
If being asked to write music for the coronation of a king is an honour, then doing it for an emperor is even more so, you might think. That was certainly the view of Jean-François Le Sueur (1760-1837), an opera composer who was made director of music at Notre-Dame by Napoleon. At the self-coronation of
Peter Pan & Wendy is Disney’s latest live-action remake (the animated version was in 1953) and it’s quite the sombre affair. It takes itself and its story so seriously that I kept waiting for it to be fun and it never was. There is an underlying sadness to J.M. Barrie’s original story, but it is
The Swan Theatre has reopened after an overhaul and praise god: they’ve replaced the seats. The Swan is a likeable theatre; the only space in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s portfolio that still conveys a real sense of history, though until 2020 that came at the price of acute posterior discomfort. No more: and we can
Deborah Bruce’s new play Dixon and Daughters is a family drama that opens on a note of sour mistrust. We’re in a working-class home in Yorkshire where a vituperative old crosspatch, Mary, has just returned from prison. Rather than accepting her daughters’ friendly welcome she treats them all with open hostility. Had Ibsen been in
In 1937, the Parisian communist newspaper Ce soir sent a 28-year-old would-be filmmaker on an unpromising first assignment. Henri Cartier-Bresson was to take photographs of the British coronation, an event of limited appeal either to Ce soir’s readers or to Cartier-Bresson himself. But on the streets of London, he discovered what would become his signature
I was making my way slowly through one of my dismally prosaic little to-do lists – ‘pay the water bill’ ‘wash hair’, etc. – when the voice of the journalist Helen Lewis came on Radio 4 talking about productivity. It’s the Holy Grail of modern life, apparently, and we are now constantly looking for ‘charismatic
Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what would become the world’s bestselling video game. The question you’re going to be asking yourself time and again – especially during the Lada-ZiL chase scene through the streets of Moscow in which our heroes try
Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and present danger to your children. Though a few true believers still hold to this honourable creed, nowadays most groups are comprised of the kind of people one might expect to be grading your offspring’s dissertation