The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I loved music before I could walk. It seemed I could harmonise anything my sisters were singing. I had perfect pitch, a mixed blessing since wrong notes made me cry. I hated music when I first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. I was nine years old. My mother had died when I was two and my
Todd Field’s Tár stars an insanely glorious Cate Blanchett – if she doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my hat – as a world-famous orchestral conductor about to record Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. There is also Elgar’s Cello Concerto in this film, and a bit of Bach, but it’s not about music. To say it’s about
The National’s new comedy by April De Angelis is a clever and amusing attempt to deliver that most elusive artefact, the state-of-the-nation play. It’s easy to pan this production because the plot lacks surprises and the script is overly indebted to Abigail’s Party. The two lead characters are formulaic creations who reflect political polarities: left
There are various staples of still life painting, some symbolic, some not. Skulls and musical instruments suggest the transience of human pleasure; crocks and bottles are usually just vehicles for displays of technical virtuosity. Crocks and bottles are what Giorgio Morandi painted, not because he wanted to show off but because he liked their lack
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told them. ‘I think my boss killed somebody.’ This was the inevitable yet still extraordinary starting point for Spector – a new four-part documentary on a man who, in the face of fierce competition, might well
Grade: A– James Newell Osterberg Jnr’s unexpected and unwarranted longevity on this planet has conferred upon him the status of irascible, but very loveable, grandfather of punk: it suits him just fine. A delightful contrarian in a profession otherwise staffed by vapid, guileless, liberals – Iggy actually meant it when he sang ‘I’m a Conservative’
Penwith isn’t an island, but it feels like one. The heathland above the cliffs is filled with mine workings and Iron and Bronze Age relics: menhirs, fogous and quoits. To most visitors Cornwall is as simple as the GWR posters: gaudy pastels, happy children, ice cream. This Cornwall exists for six weeks in the summer
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’ although, alas, in this instance cinema does not appear to love him back. The magic of film-going is the theme but there is almost no film-going in it and what there is isn’t magic. Peculiarly
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems
I’m generally not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but one occurred to me recently as the younger members of my family were blasting out a patchy David Bowie playlist: Stand Up Against Revisionism. It’s harder than ever these days not to succumb to printing the myth – reality can be so so-so – but
A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities. I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot
Trivia question: name a famous Lithuanian. Google came up with four I’d never heard of and one I had: Hannibal Lecter. It seems that Lithuanians are famous only in Lithuania unless they’re the monstrous inventions of non-Lithuanians – an injustice Dulwich Picture Gallery is helping to correct with its M.K. Ciurlionis exhibition. Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis
Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s
They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they
The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management. ‘There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,’ this bizarre, horribly ill-judged
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy
Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may have been, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say, the Princess Diana of her day. But then disaster strikes: she turns 40. I know, but in 1877 that is old. That
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing special – certainly not spectacular. Your neighbour is struggling to stay awake. The reception, however, is tumultuous. The audience is on its feet, squealing, whistling and whooping as though someone has just found the cure
Grade: B+ By the time the 1970s had come along – post Altamont and post hope – the Beach Boys were tired of being beach boys and thus became, for a while, just another rather mediocre rawk band. The two albums they released in the first three years of the decade, Carl and the Passions
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop. It’s
A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s work. I’ve mulled over this in print elsewhere several times, and I feel conscious that if Bourne reads reviews – perhaps he doesn’t – he might be groaning into his Corn Flakes. But his reputation
The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram account to the Sun. Rebekah denied the charge and sued Coleen. The case reached the High Court last summer and has now arrived in the West End in a verbatim script by Liv Hennessy. The
It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’ in 1937. ‘I can’t remember a worse December, just watch those icicles form,’ he wrote, a sentiment many of us can surely relate to right now – but wait! ‘What
Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Cahn suggested going to
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog dancer and music-hall performer, not much taller than Ronnie Corbett. He was preceded by others, notably James Rogers, who in 1861, in Aladdin,played a character called Widow Twankey, named after a cheap and revolting tea.
Tourists who queue for hours outside the Uffizi to see Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and ‘Birth of Venus’ are sometimes surprised to find his world-famous paintings upstaged by the work of a non-Italian they’ve never heard of. At three metres tall and five metres wide, Hugo van der Goes’s ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ – known as the
The late Sir Roger Scruton often pronounced in a harsh manner on modern architecture and modern music, perceiving in various work an assault on bourgeois culture and a break with tradition. Back in the 1950s, music critic and CIA agent Henry Pleasants (a station chief in Bonn) delivered if anything a more scathing view of
In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory
Fiasco is a podcast series on Audible that dives deeply into episodes in recent American history. It takes listeners through the smaller moments. Often those that, within the larger epoch-defining events, have been lost to history. In the first season, for example, which centred on the Bush v. Gore election, the opening episode is devoted