The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over a bowl; a young girl threading a needle; a peasant lugging pails of milk to sell on the doorstep. His paintings are sensitive, not showy, and, as you would expect from a pupil of Rembrandt,
I meet Miriam Margolyes in her large Victorian house in Clapham. She is very small and round, with a shock of grey hair, and the clear and open gaze of a curious child. There is an innocence to her, like someone who has not quite grown up. She has a wonderful voice, which bought this
‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ There were groans of dismay as an official walked out before the start of the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio: Jonas Kaufmann was not feeling on top form, but he was going to perform the
For 500 years the State Oracle of Tibet has worked as a kind of angry immortal advisor to the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan hybrid of Dominic Cummings and John Dee. The current incumbent, like all previous ones, alternates between his human incarnation and his spirit version. ‘In Tibetan Buddhism, the unseen parallel world of spirits
Grade: B+ It is an eternal mystery to me why Britain has never had much time for power pop, seeing as we gave this often charming genre to the world through the Beatles and, to a lesser extent, Badfinger. But we never really swung for it, post-Abbey Road. When power pop had its mild renaissance
The Prince of Egypt is a musical adapted from a 1998 Dreamworks cartoon based on the Book of Exodus. So the original writer is God. The show opens with a troupe of fit young athletes working on Pharaoh’s latest tomb. And they look like the best-fed slaves in history. A meat-rich diet and round-the-clock access
Military Wives is a British comedy drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan. It is based on the true story of the service spouses who formed a choir (and were the subject of a BBC documentary series in 2011) and it’s wholly in the style of Calendar Girls, The Full Monty, Brassed off, Kinky
One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to be total rubbish, meaning I’ll for ever have thousands of viewers’ wasted lives and disappointment on my conscience. But my even greater fear is that I’ll peremptorily condemn something after one or two episodes which
The horse beats me to the stage door by a short nose. Known as Tiz, it’s an opera specialist who comes up from Norfolk for 10 a.m. rehearsal and is driven back home each night. Tiz is on call right through the Fidelio rehearsals — unlike, as Sir Antonio Pappano points out, the star tenor
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to those of many writers, Edgar Allan Poe among them. But as I walked round the Spilliaert exhibition at the Royal Academy, it was not any of these that came to my mind. It was the
Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re busy people. They probably never had time to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the 100 million people worldwide who watched Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them
Grade: B The old axiom no longer applies. In modern popular music, it is possible not only to gild a turd, but to gild it so copiously that consumers scarcely catch a whiff of the ordure underneath. The studio is everything: you no longer need to be able to sing, write a tune or play
When will the definitive history of the modern Middle East be written? For 20 years and more, a continent has been torn apart by invasion, upheaval and civil war. It took hundreds of years for balanced histories to be written of the Reformation, European history’s most obviously comparable period. If you want the whole story
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is set on a remote, windswept Brittany island in the late 18th century. It’s about two women falling in love and it’s rapturous, scorching, ravishing and will lock your eyes to the screen. I’ve seen it three times and on each occasion my eyes were locked to
Pina Bausch’s best work always hovered between the familiar and the unknown. The late choreographer revelled in borders and thresholds, the hinterlands where fantasies collide with reality. The gulf between men and women — their conflicting desires, instincts, clout — was one of her favourite trenches to plumb, so it’s no wonder she was drawn
As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in a fierce competition as to which of them we could trust the least. The early front runner was Mark (Stephen Rea), a retired surgeon whom the not-long widowed Viv (Francesca Annis) introduced to her three
A Moorish princess shipwrecked on the English coast disguises herself as a boy to protect her virtue. Arriving in London, she’s hired by William Shakespeare as an assistant to his maidservant Kate, who instantly falls in love with the exotic cross-dressing newcomer. This absurdity, familiar to fans of Twelfth Night, is the opening move in
‘The really tricky thing,’ says Clive Anderson as we discuss the topic of being recognised in public, ‘is when they say, “I love your programmes —that thing you did with Margarita Pracatan…” Do I say now that that wasn’t me? Because if you let them carry on about how they loved your Postcards From…, and
Steve McQueen’s ‘Static’ (2009) impresses through its sheer directness — and it’s very far from static. A succession of helicopter-tracking shots around the Statue of Liberty, it’s the first film you encounter in this quasi-retrospective from the Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist-turned-Oscar-winning film director. Shot shortly after the monument reopened after the 9/11 attacks, it offers
It’s a sweltering night in Manhattan, circa 1947, and on the doorstep of a brownstone tenement three women are waiting for their menfolk to return. There’s plenty to gossip about. The Hildebrands upstairs are being evicted tomorrow, and the Buchanans are expecting a baby. And what’s the deal with Mrs Maurrant and Steve the milkman?
An office worker stands on the ledge of an open window about to leap. Two colleagues enter, ignoring him completely. They sit at symmetrical desks and read reports about the man’s background while he clings to the window frame, poised between life and death. This is the opening of Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II,
Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to any living person is purely intentional. (Hello, Sir Philip Green.) Plenty to work with, you would think. Low-hanging fruit and all that. But as the characters are so feebly sketched and the ‘jokes’ — ‘jokes’
Ever since the end of Gomorrah season four (Sky Atlantic) I have been bereft. I eked it out for as long as I could, going whole weeks without watching an episode — rationing it and savouring it as you do when you’re down to your last Rolo. But eventually I could put off the climax
Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of crap over your heads. This is the fifth album from Canada’s androgynous, tattooed bratlette — purveyor of corporate trap dross to the world’s pre-pubescent thots, skanks and wannabe hos. Trouble is, even for the dumbest
The new Emma film by Autumn de Wilde is the latest in a very long line of Austen adaptations, but by no means the strangest. Even in Austen’s lifetime there were pirated editions and translations of her books that took liberties with the originals, and the first illustrated editions raised howls of objection, too, at
British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still, we had a go and the evidence is assembled in British Baroque: Power and Illusion, Tate Britain’s survey of the art of the Stuart court from the restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the
Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur of the century — the director who opened Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera with a row of men defecating on stage, and who presented Mozart with a side order of torture porn. Veterans of his
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.