The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Not much was clear in the opening scenes of The Pale Horse (BBC1, Sunday), which even by current TV standards were admirably committed to confusing us with a series of baffling fragments. One thing that did seem apparent, though, was that Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) wasn’t having much luck with the ladies. In one fragment,
Blood Wedding, by the Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, is one of those heavyweight tragedies that risks looking a bit ridiculous when you take it out of its period setting. With rival families, murdered patriarchs and Albanian-style blood feuds — not to mention a talking moon — modern adaptations often come across as implausibly melodramatic.
‘Too pretty,’ blithers Miss Bates in the Highbury haberdasher as she plucks at a silken tassel. ‘Too pretty’ goes for all of Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. If there were an Academy Award for patisserie and passementerie, Emma would win it. The look is Tinkerbell Regency. Emma’s Hartfield is a Barbie Dreamhouse
History will record Leopoldstadt as Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List. His brilliant tragic-comic play opens in the Jewish quarter of Vienna in 1899. We meet a family of intellectuals and businessmen who are celebrating their very first Christmas. The eldest son, Hermann, has married a Catholic and become ‘Christianised’ in order to smooth his path through
We know tantalisingly little about Jan van Eyck, but one thing is sure. He once spent a week in Falmouth. In 1428 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent a formal delegation of nobles and courtiers to negotiate his marriage with Isabella, daughter of the King of Portugal. One of these was Van Eyck. The
My step-grandmother Connie was an inspired needlewoman. For ten years, as a volunteer for the charity Fine Cell Work, she taught embroidery to inmates at HM Prison Wandsworth. She once told me that she was tired of being a ‘committee woman’: ‘I wanted to be down in the arena with the sawdust.’ She believed in
Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that familiar, scowling face. ‘Genius before Elton. Radical before Prince. Iconic before Bowie’ proclaimed the posters for the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender, and apparently there’ve been complaints about them, which probably means that they’ve got the tone
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an involving drama. And satire. And thriller. And comedy. And allegory. And it is fabulous and enthralling on all those counts. It works on every level which is, perhaps, fitting for a film about levels and
The January dance stage can be a site of naked contrition. Like a tippler grasping at green juice after a December of prosecco pukes (#NewYearNewMe), companies slap Swan Lakes and Giselles on the roster, eager to atone for the indulgences of Nutcracker season. It’s back to business at your opera houses and concert halls. Button
You might have thought Madonna was not a singer but a professional footballer judging by the talk before she took to the stage at the Palladium last Wednesday night. She’d missed ten out of 93 appearances, and she’d been picking up the kind of niggling injuries — would her knees stand up to the strains
SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear to watch any more. And I’m only slightly exaggerating. Where else, anywhere from the BBC to Channel 4, would you see a woman being punched in the face and made to cry by an ex-SAS
Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a pencil,’ we cry, before tootling along the tarmac à la Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin or George Sand. BBC Radio likes walking, too, to judge by the number of programmes dedicated to the pursuit this fortnight.
The Gift is three plays in one. It opens in a blindingly white Victorian parlour where a posh lady, Sarah, is teaching her clumsy maid to serve tea correctly. Both characters are black. Sarah’s prosperous husband, also black, arrives home and the scene continues as the gauche skivvy (Donna Berlin, brilliant) makes more and more
‘Plunderers of the air’, Naum Gabo called the Luftwaffe planes. In Cornwall, during the second world war, Gabo kept cuttings of the attacks over London. One newspaper photo, pasted in his diary, was taken from the Golden Gallery of St Paul’s after a night of incendiary bombs. London looks like Pompeii. Enemy planes were a
So, you’ve fallen in love with a piece of classical music and you want to buy a recording. The problems begin when you hit Amazon. Any reasonably established classic will have been recorded numerous times: do you go for the performer you’ve already heard of? The crackly vintage recording with the gushing five-star reviews? Or
Every development in heavy music is derided by mainstream critics. When Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin emerged in the late 1960s, they were sneered at for their lumpen, troglodyte stupidity. A decade on, AC/DC were reviled for precisely the same reasons. When Metallica and Slayer helped lead the thrash metal movement in the mid-1980s, it
Uncle Vanya opens with a puzzle. Is the action set in the early 20th century or right now? The furnishings might be modern purchases or inherited antiques, and the costumes are also styled ambiguously. It soon becomes clear from Conor McPherson’s script, which uses colloquialisms like ‘wanging on’, that this is a contemporary version. It’s
One of the many astonishing things about the BBC2 drama The Windermere Children (Monday) was that the real-life story it told isn’t better known already. In August 1945, 300 Jewish children, who just a short time before had been starving in Nazi concentration camps, arrived at a converted seaplane factory in the Lake District. None,
The Lighthouse stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson (and a very nasty seagull) in a gothic thriller set off the coast of Maine in 1890, and it’s terrific. Mad, but terrific. It is gripping, intense, extraordinarily written — someone is accused of smelling like ‘curdled foreskin’ at one point — and is about two fellas
In 1622, Elizabeth Joscelin wrote a letter to her unborn child. This was fairly common practice in Elizabethan England; pregnant women were encouraged to write ‘mother’s legacy’ texts in case they did not survive the birth. ‘It may… appear strange to thee to receyue theas lines from a mother that dyed when thou weart born,’
Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them — but any scrap that could inspire, support or become part of an image. He jettisoned muses like there were endless tomorrows but clung on to Métro tickets, postcards, restaurant bills, bottle labels. When the thrill
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the official end of slavery in the United States. He grew up among a small, tenacious business- and property-owning black middle class who had their own newspapers, their own schools and universities, their own elected officials. After graduating with a PhD
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011,
Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the universe is the dream of the god Azathoth. Not unreasonably, Azathoth yearns to wake up and visit his creation. In The Whisperer in Darkness (Radio 4), a crusty coven of drug-addled neopagans seek to realise
Sky’s latest bingewatch potboiler Cobra can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be an arch, knowing House of Cards-meets-The Thick Of It satire about parliamentary intrigue. Or a full-on post-apocalyptic thriller in the manner of Survivors or The Walking Dead. It ends up succeeding in neither. The premise is that a powerful
Falling In Love Again features two of the 20th century’s best-known sex athletes. Ron Elisha’s drama covers a long drunken night spent by Marlene Dietrich and Edward VIII at Fort Belvedere, near Windsor, on the eve of Edward’s abdication in December 1936. It sounds like a contrived premise for a play but Elisha, who researches
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a historical drama based on the true story of Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian who refused to fight for the Nazis in the second world war and was later beatified by the Catholic church. It isn’t peak Malick as it’s linear rather than associative — let’s not pretend we aren’t
The Duchess of Malfi is one of those classics that everyone knows by name but not many have witnessed on stage. So a production is likely to attract theatre-goers who feel they ‘ought to’ see it rather than ‘want to’. This may have affected the Almeida’s version which is opaque and almost impossible to follow.