The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Sam Shepard was perhaps the gloomiest playwright ever to spill his guts into a typewriter. The popularity of his work must owe itself to some deep grudge nursed by America’s elite against the redneck states. True West is a standard Shepard ordeal: a pair of damaged, inadequate, bitter, loveless white males are cudgelling each other
Not another Nutcracker, I thought on the way to the Opera House. Haven’t we had our fill of Sugar Plums? I took my seat, the Grinch of Covent Garden, wondering if we couldn’t have The Winter’s Tale for a change. The lights went down, the orchestra assembled and within six bars of Tchaikovsky’s irresistibly sparkling
So, Mary Poppins returns, and I was, of course, primed to be spiteful, as is my nature. Not a patch on the original. Why did they bother? Why did they imagine it was necessary? Wasn’t the first film practically perfect in every way? Have someone play her who isn’t Julie Andrews? Are you right in
In this 200th anniversary of the birth of Mrs C.F. Alexander, author of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, all of us for whom Christmas properly begins when we hear the treble solo of verse one on Christmas Eve should remember her and be thankful. She was born Cecil Frances Humphreys, ‘Fanny’, to a successful land
As the old year dies, our thoughts turn to what happens next. What better time, then, to cast a seasonally morbid, deeply philosophical, and curiously uplifting pod with David Saunders of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California? The Getty Villa’s new exhibition, Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife is all about ideas of what happened next
There is very little art about modern poverty, because who wants to know? It is barely acknowledged, unless there is redemption, or salvation, as in A Christmas Carol. Those most suited to make it — those who are actually poor — are usually too busy doing something else, such as surviving. So, it is remarkable
The Spectator is responsible for many coinages. One of the most significant came in 1968, when an article by our 24-year-old music critic, Michael Nyman, appeared with the headline ‘Minimal Music’ (reprinted below). It was a wry joke about music that was more experimental than strictly minimal but it stuck and a musical style that,
Not a bad year for the award. Honourable mentions must go to the landfill abstractions of Oxford’s new Westgate Centre, to the bees that have appeared in Manchester’s streets to promote the ‘unique buzz’ of the city and to Gillian Wearing, a once decent conceptual artist who has taken to sculpture like a cat to
‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives meaning to life and to be able to imagine your own death should make you try harder to be a better person. Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4 (produced by Cecile Wright) is not
Don’t watch The Sinner (originally on Netflix; now on BBC4) because, despite your better judgment, you’ll only get addicted after its irresistibly grabby opening. A pretty if slightly distraite mother called Cora Tannetti — Jessica Biel — is on a lakeside beach with her bearded beta cuck husband and their little boy, surrounded by other
Roma is the latest film from Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity,Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and you’ll probably already have heard that it’s wonderful, a masterpiece, magnificent, Oscar-worthy. But as I know you won’t believe it until you hear it from me (sigh, the responsibility is too much sometimes) I can
It’s December, and while musical theatre is busy celebrating ‘warm woollen mittens’, opera, as usual, is far more interested in the tiny frozen hands inside them. Because nothing says Christmas quite like consumption, and I’m not talking turkey and mince pies. London’s opera companies are serving up a heaped sleighful of heartbreak this year. English
One of the biggest stars of the 1970s was the professional lard-bucket Mick McManus, who plied his trade as an all-in wrestler. The sport was televised to millions. The parents of the playwright Michael McManus must have calculated that by giving their child the same name as ‘The Dulwich Destroyer’ they would subtly galvanise his
This week on the Green Room, I’m talking the blues with Grammy-winning blues artist Chris Thomas King. Earlier this week, King wrote for Spectator USA a scathing criticismof the policies of the Grammys’ Blues category. King is an African American from Louisiana. He is the son of a blues musician, and grew up in his
On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big Biba. It sold the dress designer Barbara Hulanicki’s distinctive look in furniture, paints and wallpaper, sports equipment and food, as well as her familiar fast fashion. If you had to define that aesthetic then, you’d
The Assyrians placed sculptures of winged human-headed bulls (lamassus) at the entrances to their capital at Nineveh, in modern Mosul, to ward off evil. The mighty lamassu to the right of the Nergal Gate had been on guard for some 2,700 years when Isis vandals took a drill to it in 2015 and blew away
Disobedience is an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel about forbidden, lesbian love in orthodox Jewish north London, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams and I so wanted to root for the film and its characters. Go for it, women! Smash the patriarchy that says you must always be the object of sexual desire and never
You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness, that sense that someone is talking to you, and you alone. In fact, if anything, headphones take away from radio’s ability to reach out to the isolated and the lonely, to create that connection between
I know nothing about Patricia Highsmith. The acclaimed American author wrote the kind of Sunday-night crime thrillers that put me to sleep. Her best-known creation, the suave psychopath Thomas Ripley, has spawned a number of films that I’ve carefully avoided. But ignorance is an ideal starting point for Switzerland, by Joanna Murray-Smith, a brilliantly nasty
The Royal Ballet is a company in search of a prince. It has no lack of dancing princesses. You could search the kingdom and find no lovelier dancers than Marianela Nunez, Lauren Cuthbertson, Francesca Hayward, Natalia Osipova, Akane Takada, Sarah Lamb, Laura Morera and Yasmine Naghdi. But a true prince is as rare as a
Shortly before her husband’s funeral, the undertaker told the eponymous main character in Mrs Wilson (BBC1, Tuesday) that, ‘We’re here to make this tragic time as straightforward as possible.’ By then, though, we already knew this remark was the kind that, in a school set book, would soon be underlined with the words ‘Dramatic irony!!’
It’s a strange compliment to pay a composer — that the most profound impression their music makes is of an absence. I can’t claim much prior experience of the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who died in 1996: a vague sense of a Shostakovich-like figure who had a bad time of it under Stalin, and the composer
Grade: C A derided year in pop music, 1975 — and yet a great one. The mainstream was horrible, but we had Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night, Patti Smith’s Horses, Guy Clarke’s Old No. 1 and Television just beginning to break through. It is in the lacunae, before the next big wave, that we hear
Two poets named Shelley have graced the English language. One was Percy, and the other is Pete. Just as an intellectual is someone who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, so a true lover of a three-minute pop song is someone who, hearing the words ‘Shelley’ and ‘Manchester’, thinks
James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for peace, he was an appeaser. Inheriting the English throne after Elizabeth, whose foreign policy was defined by breaking Spanish dominance, James appears to have seen the purpose of his own Whitehall government as being to
It is easy to assume that the contours of art history are unchanging, its major landmarks fixed for ever. Actually, like all histories it is a matter of shifting perspectives. As we move through time, the view backwards constantly alters. The rising and falling critical estimations of the painter Richard Smith are a case in
‘You’re a comical looking geezer. You’ll look funny when you’re fifty,’ Chas the gangster says to Turner the rock star in Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s notorious Sixties movie. ‘A heavy, evil film,’ the reviewer from It magazine wrote when Warner Brothers finally released Performance in 1970. ‘Don’t see it on acid.’ Fifty years
Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and it hasn’t all been unspeakably vile. There were moments when Kevin Ayers held our interest, for example, and even Radiohead. And then there’s that man of the people, Joe Strummer. So let’s excuse Mumford &
