The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Bruce Norris is a firefighter among dramatists. He runs towards danger while others sprint in the other direction. His Pulitzer-winning hit Clybourne Park studied ethnic bigotry among American yuppies and it culminated in a gruesomely funny scene in which smug liberals exchange racist jokes in public. The play was morally complex, dramatically satisfying and an
As the ravens circle around Broadcasting House in London’s West End, presaging difficult times ahead for BBC Radio, with less money to play with at a time of increased competition from its commercial rivals, a very different kind of listening experience was on offer last week in an upstairs room above a café in Canterbury.
The ethics of the private patronage of arts institutions has never been straightforward issue. But as the preoccupation with transparency and corporate responsibility has grown, wealthy benefactors can nowadays turn from pillars of respectable society to moral pariahs in the blink of an eye. Such is the fate of the fabulously rich Sackler family, major
In March 1968, Frank Zappa released an album called We’re Only in it for the Money. Presumably, then, Zappa — who died a little over a quarter of a century ago — would be delighted to discover that he begins his latest tour next month, with a series of shows in the US followed by
Early in the 16th century, Fra Bartolomeo painted an altarpiece of St Sebastian for the church of San Marco in Florence. Though stuck full of arrows, the martyr was, according to Vasari, distinctly good-looking in this picture: ‘sweet in countenance, and likewise executed with corresponding beauty of person’. By and by the friars of San
Us is a second feature from Jordan Peele after his marvellous debut Get Out, which was more brilliantly satirical than scary and may well be the best ever horror film for non-horror people (i.e. me). Us has also garnered five stars everywhere, as well as, at the time of writing, a 100 per cent rating
A few years ago, I hooked up with a BBC team in Berlin to record a programme with Daniel Barenboim. We were shown in to his spartan offices at the Staatsoper and, without preliminaries, I conducted an interview with him across a low table for 45 minutes. When our time was up, Barenboim rose and
You can see Graham Vick’s work at La Scala or the New York Met. But if you want to be directed by him, you need to go to Birmingham. The Tower Ballroom is a sticky-floored former nightspot out by Edgbaston Reservoir, artfully trashed by Block9, the people behind Banksy’s Dismaland. You crunch across the tarmac,
OK, Archers fans out there. All five million of you. Ask yourselves a straightforward question. Why on earth do you — do we — listen to this show full of completely awful people? Why do we subject ourselves to this 13 minutes of daily torment, not to mention the Sunday omnibus, wallowing in the lives
‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent Bush Theatre revival for Radio 3 (and produced by Pauline Harris). ‘They don’t know where they come from.’ Miss Mai continues: ‘These girls got Caribbean souls,’ but they’re living in south London. Viv and Del
What can parents do about the avalanche of pornography available to their children on tablet, phone and laptop? This question was the starting point for a documentary series that began on Wednesday — and the answer proved unexpected. Having gathered five mothers together and shown them a hair-raising selection of online filth, the programme blithely
No menace, no Venice. This new production of Pinter’s Betrayal is set on a bare stage with scant regard for the play’s physical requirements. The script specifies a handful of furnished locations: a pub, a study, a flat, a hotel bedroom, a living room. But instead we get an off-white void where three youngish actors
Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s scientific observation that the stuff of dreams will out, artists were painting it. The English have never been much cop at surrealism — too buttoned up; the Celts are better. The Scottish painters Alan Davie
Toby Jones shuffles into the café in Clapham where we are meeting. He’s wearing a duffle coat and a hat and carrying a rucksack. He looks just like one of those unsung characters that he specialises in, the kind of person you don’t take much notice of unless you have to. Today we are talking
I was hooked once too. I also used to gun down civilians, do battle with the LAPD and win the Premier League before I’d even had my breakfast, a small pyjamed boy sat breathless in the front room, smarting behind the eyes from three hours of close-range televisual retina damage. I knew it was killing
Halfway through the first part of Channel 4’s extraordinary documentary Leaving Neverland (Thursdays), I flicked through the comments on social media in order to gauge the global reaction. Surely, I thought, Michael Jackson’s reputation will never recover from these bombshell revelations. If you sat, squirming, though Dan Reed’s excruciatingly prurient documentary you’ll know what I
Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead. A well-educated journalist, Frances, becomes entangled with the wealthy Kyte family (the closeness to ‘Flyte’ is doubtless intentional), and she befriends the silly daughter, Polly, before setting her sights on the enigmatic father, Laurence, a
Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following
Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could and should extend its reach beyond boy meets sylph and began wrestling with heavyweight essay subjects such as the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Mayerling) or the last of the Romanovs (Anastasia). And now look:
Choreographer Richard Alston is now 70 and his latest outing at Sadler’s Wells is a greatest hits medley. As with all clip shows, some of it is super, some soporific and some merely meh. We begin with Martin Lawrance’s Detour, first performed last year. The piece is a powerful hybrid of fluid dance and martial
It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human contact wherever possible, that podcasting (or what might be called aural blogging) has taken off in such a big way, anything from Griefcast to Love + Radio via The Breakup Monologues and To the Woman.
It’s something of an understatement to say that Brexit has incited passions in the past two years, even on live TV. But today Mr S thinks we came the closest we’ve seen yet to a full on fight breaking out in the studio, between the author Will Self and the Brexiteer MP Mark Francois on Politics
Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able to draw like a master but he can see better and more intensely. The light of Valencia was burnt into Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s mental retina and he could not get it out of his
Russian Doll is a brilliant new Netflix drama in which a woman relives the same night over and over again. It is particularly enjoyable for me to watch because I feel like that is exactly what I am going through. The same problems present and re-present themselves, quite as though I never come to grips
If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving the EU. As someone on the left, I’ve always argued a left-wing case for leaving. It is, to say the least, an unfashionable position, usually met with anxious looks, sullen silence or overt hostility from
Captain Marvel is the 654th film in the Marvel franchise — the figure is something like that, I think — and as the first one to be female-led it was mercilessly trolled before its release by the fan boys. ‘This movie is gonna bomb like no other and they only have themselves to blame,’ was