Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Lloyd Evans

Tedious and threadbare: Unicorn, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Theatre

Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens

Regents Opera’s Ring is a formidable achievement

Opera

I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, has found its culmination and completion at York Hall, a rundown public bath better known for championship boxing. Tower Hamlets security staff scan you for concealed weapons on the way

I’ve had it with Pina Bausch

Dance

My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago, and I had hoped that the aura of divinity around her memory might now be fading. But no, it only burgeons and having joined with Terrain Boris Charmatz to honour her creations, the official keepers

The art of the anti-love song

Pop

Tracey Thorn released an album in 2010 titled Love and Its Opposite. When it comes to songwriting, it’s the ‘opposite’ that tends to throw up the more compelling discourse. The anti-love song has been a staple in popular music since Elvis’s baby left him and he wandered off to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Presley is a useful

Damian Thompson

Are these performances of the Bach cantatas the best on record?

Classical

Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic 25-year project to record all the composer’s vocal works – passions, masses, motets and more than 200-odd cantatas – in electrifying performances supplemented by lectures and workshops. At the helm is a Swiss choral conductor

Classical music has much to learn from Liverpool

Classical

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in

What a sad thing Strictly Come Dancing has become

Dance

Those of a violently masochistic disposition would have heartily enjoyed the Saturday matinée of the Strictly Come Dancing: Live Tour at the Utilita Arena, Birmingham. Talent loses out to glitter and hype, as shrieking vulgarity envelops all What deliciously perverse pleasure was to be drawn on this bleakly cold afternoon from the vast, snaking queues,

The maudlin, magical world of Celtic Connections

Pop

Is it possible to find a common thread running through the finest Scottish music? If pushed, one might identify a quality of ecstatic melancholy, a rapturous yet fateful romanticism, in everything from the Incredible String Band to the Cocteau Twins, the Blue Nile to Frightened Rabbit, Simple Minds to Mogwai. The Jesus & Mary Chain

The stupidity of the classical piano trio

Classical

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When the trio first evolved, in the age of Haydn, the piano (or at any rate, its frail domestic forebear) was the junior partner, and the two string instruments, violin and cello, were added to make

Jolie good: Maria reviewed

Cinema

Maria is a film by Pablo Larrain, who appears to have a soft spot for the psychodramas of legendary women (Spencer, Jackie) and has turned his attention to the prima donna Maria Callas. It stars Angelina Jolie, who trained as an opera singer for the role, God bless her, and while her voice is sometimes

Rod Liddle

The real best album of last year

The Listener

Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North Carolina has been described by the press as Americana, slacker rock, indie and alt-country. But we at The Spectator will call it how it is: this is country rock, pure and simple. And if country

Carols are much weirder than we think

Classical

Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in ‘O come, all ye faithful’ that goes: ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.’ Wasn’t it a bit weird? At last I found the answer

Superb: Ruination, at the Linbury Theatre, reviewed

Dance

Ruination begins with an ironic prologue in which a choric figure warns the audience that what follows makes unlikely matter for the festive season: look elsewhere if you’re after light entertainment, he says, because this is going to shake you up a bit. And it does. This is genre-defying physical theatre, ‘devised’ by Ben Duke,

Meet the king of comic opera 

Opera

John Savournin has been busy. That comes with the territory for a classical singer – things often get a little hectic as the music world barrels towards Christmas. But with Savournin, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of which theatre – which city – he’s in on any given night. ‘This week has been Pirates