The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
What are the new rules on race and performance? In the world of TV, everyone is busy apologising, self-censoring and denouncing their previous work. Ant and Dec have deleted routines in which they imitated Japanese girls and people of colour. The comedian Leigh Francis has expressed contrition for satirising Craig David in Bo’ Selecta! (which was
Central London is becoming a paradise for modernists like me. First there was the extraordinary encasement of Big Ben in sci-fi scaffolding, transforming this dinky clock tower into a NASA launchpad, a witchy Cape Canaveral. Then came the austere grey shell that sat over the main body of the Palace of Westminster for several years,
In last week’s Spectator magazine, Norman Lebrecht accused the Southbank Centre of being a ‘subsidy guzzler in need of privatisation’. Mr Lebrecht has, as he admits, spent the past 30 years complaining about it. Nothing, it seems, will shift his view. I admit I’m biased, as the Southbank Centre’s director of music. Yet I do
Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is about four African-American vets who return to Vietnam to locate the body of their fallen squadron leader, retrieve the gold they buried (hopefully), reflect on fighting for a country that didn’t care about them — ‘we fought an immoral war for rights we didn’t have’ — and avoid descending
The arts are in a state of crisis. How often have you heard that before? Well, this time around it happens to be true. In the age of coronavirus, it’s clear that the old way of doing things won’t work any more. Theatres, in particular, have been quick to grasp the bleeding obvious: cramming lots
Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals; and if you weren’t actively promoting old Ludwig Van there was money to be made whinging about overkill. So was Stephen Hough’s decision to end his Wigmore Hall recital last Monday with Schumann’s Fantasie in
Let’s say you have a diagnosis of autism, depression or anxiety. You sleep too much or too little. You masturbate too often. You play computer games and don’t open the curtains. You have no money and you are often profoundly lonely and frequently bored. From this unedifying starting point, can you, let’s say, weightlift your
Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music can be. Its potency, however, is not innate. Amanda Prynne, from Coward’s Private Lives, would not have been especially struck by ‘Some day I’ll Find You’ had it been playing on a wireless in a
Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix series — Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich — about his secretive, sordid life, I care very much. Sure, his squalid death in jail, apparently from suicide while awaiting trial for numerous sex crimes, was thoroughly deserved.
The National Theatre’s programme of livestreamed shows continues with the Donmar’s 2014 production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston. The play is not a favourite. The story concerns a victorious Roman general who accepts the role of consul but when his political career falters he takes revenge by befriending his defeated enemy, Aufidius, and marching on
Before his marriage John Constable returned regularly in early summer to his native village of East Bergholt. When he wrote from there to his wife-to-be, Maria Bicknell, he almost always exclaimed that Suffolk was ‘in great beauty’. His enthusiasm was never more eloquent than on 22 June 1812, when he declared: ‘Nothing can exceed the
A Rainy Day in New York is Woody Allen’s 49th film and it’s not been without its troubles. When accusations of sexual abuse made by his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, resurfaced, Amazon Studios ditched it. Then its star, Timothée Chalamet, apologised for being in it and donated his earnings to charity. We may never know
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg. Followed by a hugely unconvincing stab at tuneless industrial metal on a song called ‘People’, in which the aforementioned — me and you, not them, of course — are cautioned to ‘WAKE UP!!’ Leafy Wilmslow’s
On the face of it, a French-language drama about a Parisian symphony orchestra mightn’t sound like the most action-packed of TV watches. In fact, though, Philharmonia (Sundays) is pretty much Dallas with violins. The first episode began with the eponymous orchestra blasting out a spot of what Shazam assured me was Dvorak, before its elderly
‘I don’t want to do my work. I want to go for a walk. I want to eat all the cakes… to shout at everybody!’ Which of us hasn’t felt like this at some point during the past ten weeks? The small child at the centre of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges speaks for us
Sea Wall, by Simon Stephens, is a half-hour monologue about grief performed by Andrew Scott. The YouTube clip has been viewed more than 250,000 times. The habitual quirks and irritants of Stephens’s writing are all here: the inept jokes, the laddish swearing, the fascination with 1970s pop, the preference for males over females and the
I must have written about this subject 100 times in 30 years and I’m still having to restate the bloody obvious. London’s South Bank Centre, which has just gone bleating to the government for more money, is the biggest subsidy guzzler in the country and the despair of the rest of British arts. The South
Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact,
Only two of the Beatles’ pop contemporaries are depicted on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. One is Bob Dylan. The other is Dion DiMucci. In a pleasing third-act twist, Dylan contributes the liner notes to Dion’s new album Blues With Friends — an act of deference that the recipient is still
At the outset of lockdown I gave you my list of top mustn’t-watch films — that is, the ones that aren’t worth the bother — with the rider that when Cats is released digitally it will, however, likely be a must-watch mustn’t-watch. ‘I absolutely must watch this mustn’t-watch,’ you may even have said to yourself,
At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam breaking, the music surges forward in wave upon wave of golden sound. ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ writes Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of the score, and you won’t hear that spirit
If I could live my life over again my plan used to be that I’d make my fortune very early, spend my winters fox hunting through the season and my summers taking loads of ecstasy in Ibiza and having meaningless sex with beautiful strangers. But having seen the first two episodes of White Lines I’m
Hats off to the Lawrence Batley Theatre for producing a brand-new full-length show on-line. Stephen Fry, with avuncular fruitiness, narrates a dramatisation of David Nicholls’s novel The Understudy, published in 2005. It’s a back-stage comedy about a newly written sex romp inspired by the life of Lord Byron. The show, predictably enough, is entitled, Mad,
One of the stranger things that happened in the period just before lockdown was the sudden disappearance of audiences from TV and radio shows. Late-night hosts told jokes to silent rooms in front of a white background, dutifully pausing for a laugh that never came; panel shows were broadcast without so much as the sound
If eight weeks in lockdown have brought out my baser impulses (biscuits by the sleeve, total renunciation of waistbands), it’s also deepened my appetite for culture at its plushest, liveliest heights. It’s not just beaches and brunches I’m craving as spring turns to summer and I round off my second month of working supine on
Theatre stands on the brink of ruin, says Sonia Friedman. And if you believe Twitter, so is my career. I’m apparently ‘a disgrace to my profession’. ‘Not fit to do my job’. I wear ‘grubby’ oversized T-shirts, dare to have ‘an anagram for a name‘ (sorry for being foreign) and possess the face of an ‘etiolated ferret’ and,
‘Festival?’ said Nathan Milstein. ‘What is festival?’ I had naively asked the most immaculate of violinists where he used to play in the summer and he looked at me as if I had proposed an unnatural act. ‘Before the war,’ said Nathan, offering a glimpse of paradise lost, ‘Volodya and I would stay at Senar
You may be asking yourself: have I reached that point in lockdown where I’m watching Icelandic dramas about the price of milk? Yes, you have, is the short answer. But let me qualify that with: if you are going to watch Icelandic dramas about the price of milk, The County is a good choice. And
Everyone knows a Lord Emsworth. Mine lives south of the river and wears caterpillars in his hair and wine on his shirt and has just occasionally written for this magazine. That doesn’t much narrow it down. When you look at him, you understand a little better why P. G. Wodehouse is topping the lists of