The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent trying to out-badass each other, the guitars getting louder, the lyrics either more obtuse or (in the case of David Allan Coe) more obscene. This takes it all one stage further. I don’t think Sound
Podcasts will soon be like porn. Every interest, desire or idle flicker of curiosity will have been anticipated and catered for. Whatever you’re into there’ll be a podcast devoted to it, waiting to make itself heard. That’s easy for me to say because I’ve already found my perfect match: Is It Rolling, Bob? in which
It’s Act Three of Emma Rice’s new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Eurydice (Mary Bevan) is trapped in the backroom of a Soho peep show. But that doesn’t really matter because Jupiter (Willard White), a cigar-toking love walrus in a silk bathrobe, has transformed himself into a fly and is about to
Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy, Noises Off, is the theatre’s answer to Trooping the Colour. Everyone agrees that it’s an amazing display of synchronised choreography but does anyone actually want to see it? Yes, to judge by the press-night crowd at the Garrick. The joint was packed. The show opens at the dress rehearsal of a
Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only flounder in antiquity for appropriate descriptions. We see a black and white photograph that shows a swarm of tiny figures, ant-like in their relentless pursuit of some mysterious purpose around the edges of a dark,
While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security
Caryl Churchill is back at the Royal Court with a weird collection of sketches. The first is set on a mantelpiece where a clock, a vase, a statuette and a plastic dog discuss their lives. These ornaments morph into human teenagers. One is a lad who wants to die after being raped by his father.
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with a suggested script change. What, said François Girard, if one of the two protagonists was perhaps, er, not Jewish? My reply cannot be repeated. I was, for a minute or so, completely speechless. My novel,
Judy is in cinemas this week and so is Joker and if you have to choose between the two, then it’s Judy every time. I would even add: step away from Joker. Step away, and step away now, if you know what’s good for you. It may be a masterpiece or it may be irresponsible
It’s possibly not a great sign of a Britain at ease with itself that the historical character most likely to show up in a TV drama now seems to be Oswald Mosley. But the week after his starring role in Peaky Blinders ended, there he was again, right at the beginning of BBC1’s next Sunday-night
This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories,
‘Laws bow down before the desire to rule…’ Centuries before ‘proroguing’ had entered British breakfast-table vocabulary there was Handel’s Agrippina, and centuries before that there was the woman herself. Sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius (who she may or may not have poisoned) and mother of Nero (by whom she was eventually executed), Agrippina was
‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us rises Abbey Mills Pumping Station in all its grade II*-listed glory. It arose on east London’s marshes in 1868, giving Victorians a fecally fixated premonition of postmodernism’s fetish for mashing up architectural styles. Observe, urges
The title of the television review and discussion programme Late Night Line-Up is a curious one. I’d be interested if anyone knows how it was chosen. After the throaty sax notes of Gerry Mulligan’s Blue Boy, Joan Bakewell would leggily engage earnest folk in chatter long after the pubs had closed. Did the guests smoke?
Grade: D+ Pleasant memories — of hearing ‘Raw Power’ for the first time and later the amiably shambolic chug of ‘The Passenger’. And of watching my daughter, aged ten, dragged along to some open-air concert where she danced, an ingenue, to ‘Cock In My Pocket’. At least I hope she was an ingenue. All gone.
Tony Hawks’s musical, Midlife Cowboy, has transferred from Edinburgh to the Pleasance, Islington. At press night, the comedy elite showed up (Andy Hamilton, Angus Deayton, Caroline Quentin, Alistair McGowan) to see Hawks playing a songwriter, Stuart, whose marriage is on the rocks. To revive his love life, Stuart puts his wife in charge of the
The Goldfinch is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt that centres on a great work of art, unlike this film, which isn’t. A great work of art, that is. This is more a flat, forgettable, colour-by-numbers job, plus it is long (150 minutes, for the love of God) and drags so
How do you take your Carmen? Sun-drenched exotic fantasy with a side order of castanets, or cool and gritty, sour with violence and politics? Jo Davies’s new production for Welsh National Opera seems unable to make up its mind. Sternly rejecting colour and fantasy, it then fails to commit to an alternative, leaving both its
Sir Lenny Henry, the former comedian, is wont to complain to anyone who’ll listen that there isn’t enough ‘diversity’ on TV. Really, he should watch Top Boy (Netflix). Apart from the odd token walk-on whitey — skanky crack addicts, nasty immigration officers — it’s wall-to-wall BAME casting opportunities. The protagonist, Dushane (Ashley Walters), is black.
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power and privilege. But the one culture war we don’t have any more is over culture. Yes, we fight about the ideological messages of literary texts, but not about matters of personal taste. We scrutinise and
Radio 4, how do I love thee? Rather as one loves the flocked wallpaper that came with the house. It isn’t what one would have chosen — but it is home. Yes, even when plangent piano music indicates a meaningful drama is about to begin. Yes, even when said drama is a woefully wooden effort
Judy Garland is now a myth, a paradigm and a warning: don’t let your daughter on the stage! It’s the cognitive dissonance that is thrilling and awful, like a child that dies: Dorothy kicked off her ruby slippers and turned to Benzedrine. It is a narrative that erases Garland as surely as the drugs ever
‘My basic intention,’ the late Patrick Caulfield once told me, ‘is to create some attractive place to be, maybe even on the edge of fantasy — warm, glowing, but often, by use, rather seedy.’ He frequently succeeded, as you can see from a beautifully mounted little exhibition at the Waddington Custot Gallery. It is a
The Farewell is a quiet film that builds and builds and builds into a wonderful exploration of belonging, loss, family love, crab vs lobster, and hiding feelings, even though it may be tough to hide yours and you’ll shed a tear or two. I know I did. It is written and directed by Lulu Wang,
Pub quiz question: what do John Osborne, Brian Friel and Patrick Marber have in common? The answer is they’ve all written their own versions of Hedda Gabler. Although none of them, it should be noted, to any particular critical acclaim. Is it time to give up on the Hedda adaptations altogether and just stick to
‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ by Muse was on heavy rotation on MTV at a time, 15 years ago, when my infant son could be magically coaxed away from tears and back to sleep by pop videos. The only lasting effect of this proved to be my developing a deep and lasting aversion to Muse, because I
As a lifelong Catholic, I’ve often thought that two of the Church’s chief characteristics are a) how weird it is when you think about it; and b) how weird it is that so few people in it think how weird it is when you think about it. Happily, if a little smugly, I have to