The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in. He ordered us out of the choirstalls and positioned us at random all over the chapel. It was sadistic but effective. With nowhere to hide, there could be no quiet fudging of that awkward leap
The Painted Bird opens with a young boy (Jewish) running through a forest and clutching his pet ferret. He is being chased by some other boys (not Jewish) who beat him to the ground, douse his ferret in petrol and set it on fire. The boy watches as his pet burns alive and I don’t
For nearly six months our subsidised playhouses, notably the National Theatre, have been dark. What have we missed? Not much. Some would say nothing at all. And this has come as a surprise to those of us who were led to believe that the subsidised theatre is critical to ‘the national conversation’. It turns out
It sometimes rains in Cookham. It rained all day when I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery to see the exhibition Love, Art, Loss: The Wives of Stanley Spencer. But it rarely rained for Spencer, or at least never in his pictures of his hallowed birthplace, where even when skies are grey the red brick of
Mulan is Disney’s latest live-action remake, coming in at 120 minutes, compared with the 1998 animation, which ran to 80. So it’s a third longer, and very much seemed it — and half the fun, if that. No songs. No jokes. No crazy grandma. No Eddie Murphy. Instead, this is a workaday action-adventure that is
The one thing everyone agrees is that the Southbank Centre is in deep trouble. In May, the institution made an unusually public plea for government help. Management predicted the best-case scenario was ending the financial year with a £5 million loss, having exhausted all reserves, used the £4 million received from the furlough scheme and
The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Which is great if you want a colossal audience; less great as a venue for classical music. True, sound engineers have brought us a long way from the 19th century, when
Few things better capture the crazed cognitive dissonance of our age than this: that while we cower behind masks for fear of a virus so harmless in most cases that you don’t even know you’ve got it, we watch shows like World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji and think: ‘That looks fun. Wouldn’t mind having a
It was possible to stand in the middle of the road during the lockdown without being run over. In Willow Place, near Victoria Station, I crouched over a narrow grating of stout grey iron, and caught a glimpse of light reflected from moving water deep below, as though at the bottom of a well. This
Q: ‘How would you define transcendence?’ A: ‘Well, how would you define it?’ I interviewed Van Morrison last year. (I’m fine now, thanks.) While the exercise wasn’t quite the near-death experience of industry legend — he was polite and accommodating, if not always exactly forthcoming — it got sticky at times, as the above exchange
Tenet is the latest high-concept, time-bending blockbuster from Christopher Nolan and it’s the film that (unofficially) reopens cinemas in the UK. It has everything that fans of Inception or Interstellar might want. There are spectacular set pieces. There’s time going forwards and then reversing, so it’s bullets flying back into the gun as crashed cars
There wasn’t going to be a Lucerne Festival this year. The annual month-long squillion-dollar international beano got cancelled, along with the rest of Europe’s musical life, round about the time that we were all starting to get bored of banana bread. Then suddenly, in late July, it was on again. The Swiss government authorised distanced
While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy an exquisite meal, a bottle of wine and then settle down for a four- or five-hour orgy. Food, drink, sex: these things are better shared. But if, as dawn approached, someone cracked open Chaucer’s ‘Parliament
The virus has broken Edinburgh. The shattered remnants of the festival are visible on the internet. Here’s what happened. The international festival has been reduced to one filmed theatre commission and a handful of videoed musical offerings. The Fringe has survived but in a horribly mutilated form. Two of its most prestigious brands, the Pleasance
Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her country cottage for Esquire magazine. ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for right now,’ the photographer told her. ‘We’re just going to cycle through some feelings and see where we are.’ What he didn’t know,
Edinburgh, 3 November 1815. The university courtyard is buzzing. A band is playing. Surrounding streets are filled with thousands of excited spectators, many waiting since 10 a.m. From the Castle, from windows and rooftops, from Calton Hill, Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags, all strain to get a glimpse. Then finally at 3 p.m., above the
One Sunday evening in the autumn of 1888 Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin went for a walk. They headed out of Arles into the countryside and when they looked back towards town they saw a sunset so splendid that each was inspired to paint a masterpiece. One of these, Gauguin’s painting bearing the timely
Okay, I admit it. I have a girl crush on Juliet Stevenson. Ever since I first saw her in the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply with Alan Rickman, I have loved her sexy, round and intelligent tones. Imagine how excited I was to discover, therefore, that you can have Juliet in your ear for a
There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in which the young Frédéric Chopin (Cornel Wilde) provides background music for a banquet hosted by Count Wyszynska in his Warsaw palace, plates of rubbery pig and candy-coloured vegetables in heady supply. Chopin plays his own
I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a real audience, and the real sound of Waitrose cava bottles popping open in the late afternoon. In some ways, this open-air gala from Opera Holland Park made it feel as if the summer season were
Back in March, I made a long-odds bet that Michelle Obama would be the Democratic party’s vice-presidential nominee. I knew that in her memoir, Becoming, she had said that she wasn’t interested in high office. But political candidates always claim they aren’t running — until suddenly they are. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had
‘By the way, my name is Max. I take care of them, which ain’t easy, because their hobby is murder.’ Back in the early 1980s, when everything was lovelier, we were all so innocent that our idea of a brilliant and original new detective formula went like this: they’re sleuths — but they’re also rich
Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear with a jacket by Barnett Freedman. You only need to see a corner of the cover — a stippled trompe-l’oeil scroll — to recognise the artist. Freedman, a Stepney Cockney born
The first time Alpesh Chauhan conducted Birmingham Opera Company, he was surrounded by rats: six-foot tall rats, singing Shostakovich at the top of their voices. There were singing cops, too, and a marching band wearing bloodstained wedding dresses, and this was all happening in a derelict Edgbaston dance hall best known as a location for
I spent half an hour this week listening to a woman make a plaster cast of her vulva. Kat Harbourne, co-host of The Naked Podcast on BBC Sounds, opened a recent episode by buzzing her bikini trimmer over the microphone before squatting over a British Airways peanut dish. Jenny Eells, her partner in crime, stood
Matteo Garrone’s live-action version of Pinocchio is visually sumptuous and there are some enchanting characters (my favourite: Snail). And unlike Disney’s version (1940) this is, apparently, far more faithful to the darker, original 1883 tale by Carlo Collodi, even if the Disney version was quite dark enough for some of us. (I screamed so much
If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world, then Inside Missguided: Made in Manchester passes with flying colours — especially for the more middle-aged viewer. Missguided, it turns out, is a fast-fashion company, which means that it spots what celebrities are wearing online
Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished Fireball and ‘Highway Star’. But by the same token they may be relieved that there are no six-minute drum solos, songs about the devil, or Jon Lord demonstrating that he can hammer the organ fairly
So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first press night since March took place at a monumental Victorian building in Wandsworth where concerts are staged in an open-air courtyard. The entry process was less fussy than I’d expected. I didn’t need my phone