The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘They’ve dined well, they’ve drunk their fill, their brains are dull and slow. They’ll sit snoozing in the dark until they hear some applause, and then, out of courtesy, they’ll wake up’. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words, not mine. I’ve never bought the notion that Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier somehow predicts the first world war.
After just one episode, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV, Wednesday) seems certain to stand out from the crowd. In an age when most television dramas range from the perfectly fine to the extremely good, it already looks like a proper old-fashioned stinker. Admittedly, one of its more obvious problems is bang up-to-date: by adhering
Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, is an NHS drama set in a friendly hospital in rural Yorkshire. Colin, an ambitious local boy turned metropolitan yuppie, has arrived from London to visit his sick father and he takes the opportunity to assess the efficiency of the hospital on behalf of his bosses at the health department
Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric
Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living with Nature on the World Service, or the screaming women and men who we heard letting rip in Garrett Carr’s Radio 4 documentary, The Silence and the Scream. The elephants were recorded by sound engineer
For many years I would chat genially with our local Jehovah, Stephen, who came door-to-door every few months or so, always hopeful that one day I would let Jesus into my life. (Will he babysit, I would always ask. Will he pair socks? Will he interrupt me during dinner LIKE YOU?) Then I actually read
For Americans, Thomas Cole is a household name. He painted America’s wild landscapes and lamented its destruction by the country’s early industrialisation. Yet the Lancaster-born Cole is little known in Britain, living stateside for most of his adult life. The National Gallery has been working with the Met to bring home Cole and his works.
‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden
One area of life in which globalism certainly rules is that of contemporary art. Installation, performance, the doctrine of Marcel Duchamp, conceptualism — nowadays these flourish throughout the world and nowhere more so than in the Far East. Plenty of evidence for this is on view in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery by the
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again aims to do what it says on the can. That is, be Mamma Mia, going again. But while many of the elements are the same as in the original —beautiful Greek island scenery; the actors frolicking among local folk and falling off boats; the knowing cheesiness; Pierce Brosnan singing
Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be
Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year is 1844 and young Henry Lehman has just emigrated from Bavaria to make his fortune. He started modestly with a general store in Montgomery, Alabama, serving local farmers. When wildfires destroyed the cotton crop on
There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed in its latest Annual Report. Who gets too much? Why are women presenters still paid less than their male counterparts? What can be done to create more equality at the BBC? But all this controversy
When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech. But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which
I’ve been trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it became impossible to take Mascagni’s Isabeau seriously. It wasn’t when the scenery jammed, leaving half the cast briefly trapped inside a revolving tower. These things happen, after all: you simply suppress thoughts of Spinal Tap and re-suspend disbelief. I don’t think it was the entry
There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart,
Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Stay too long in the Lee Miller exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield and the metronome might drive you mad. Considerate curators will only set it swinging in stints to spare the gallery guards. Man Ray, who made the metronome ‘Object of Destruction’ (1923), meant it to infuriate. His assembled sculpture came
Unless you have been sleeping under a barricade or a pile of Molotov cocktails it will not have escaped your attention that we — that is, a few broadsheets and BBC4 — have been having a good old think about the events of 1968. When student rioting brought France to its knees and the revolution
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is slow, churchy, cerebral, bleak, difficult, tormented and puzzling, which is always a blow. So exhausting when a film’s meaning isn’t laid out clearly and neatly before you. But it is, at least, powerfully puzzling and grippingly puzzling. You may not understand it (completely), but you will come away with the
Rafael Kubelik is watching Wimbledon when I enter his suite at the Savoy. ‘Tennis fan?’ I ask, slightly surprised. He shakes his head. ‘No. Just her.’ It is 1983, the high summer of Martina Navratilova. ‘She will win,’ says Kubelik in the decisive tone that conductors use to save rehearsal time. ‘And one day my
When Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni was first staged at the Royal Opera in 2014, I disliked it intensely, even more than I have disliked most of his other productions, or for that matter most productions of Don Giovanni. I missed the first revival, but when I saw it this time round my reactions
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of
According to the opening captions in Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC2, Wednesday), ‘the infamous events’ it depicts ‘began whena mysterious widow purchased a mansion out in the Australian bush’. The first few scenes, set in the late 19th century, were then dedicated to proving quite how mysterious she was: Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) wasn’t merely
When did you last take the bus? If you don’t live in London, probably not for ages. In her two-part series for Radio 4, Mind the Gap, Lynsey Hanley set out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to access public transport outside the capital. In Skelmersdale, billed in the 1960s as a place of
You remember slow TV? Pioneered by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, with its classic Bergensbanen — minutt for minutt (2009), which simply stuck a camera on the front of a train and recorded the seven-hour journey from Bergen to Oslo, slow TV is a nice idea, unless you’re in a hurry, or you have an actual
In G.F. Watts’s former sculpture studio in the Surrey village of Compton, a monstrous presence has interposed itself between the dusty plaster models of ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson’ and ‘Physical Energy’. Standing 14ft tall, the brightly painted soldier with fez and sabre is a replica of a colossal puppet made by James Henry Pullen (1835–1916) while
It’s not a wrap. This is the first thing to note about the huge trapezoid thing that has appeared, apparently floating, on the Serpentine Lake. Many of the projects by the artists who conceived it, Christo and his late wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, have involved bundling something up in a temporary mantle. The items thus
To no one’s surprise, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian in Oxford, where J.R.R. spent so much of his time, has been a huge success. Were tickets on sale, it would be a sell-out, but the Bodleian has made it free. The visitors book is peppered with observations such as: ‘It made