The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
No one has ever successfully explained cricket-obsession, and Marcus Berkmann doesn’t even try. He just expresses it, stamping about like Basil Fawlty in exasperation at England’s nearly constant humiliation at the hands of the Australians. He even confesses to a disbeliever that ‘some of my best friends are Australians’, and puzzles at the way they
One could easily get lost in Jerusalem’s myriad compartments. To begin with there is Preston Pinner, CEO of ‘AuthencityTM’, otherwise known as the ‘hip hub’, a ‘contemporary cultural consulting and production house’ deviously at work to manipulate consumer tastes. Then there is Preston’s father, David, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing junior minister about to depart to ‘Zambabwia’,
Patrick Oxtoby is 23 when his fiancée tells him she can’t marry him. He leaves home for a boarding house by the sea. He fantasises a bit about breaking his fiancée’s spine, but focuses on the people he meets in his new town. Shaun Flindall and Ian Welkin, the other two men in the boarding
Henrietta Bredin talks to Janis Kelly about her role in Rufus Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna Anyone less like the clichéd idea of a prima donna than Janis Kelly would be hard to find. She is known and loved as a singer and consummate actress with a conspicuous lack of airs and graces who will
Way back in carefree college days in Dublin, I had a friend who considered Dwight Yoakam one of the great artists of the late twentieth century. Since the glory of country music had yet to be revealed to me, I scoffed at this. Not that I was alone in doing so, mind you. Another friend
Year One 12A, Nationwide Year One is the latest Jack Black comedy and while I would not wish to put you off — my job is to gently guide, not instruct — it is fantastically bad and you’d be mad to go see it. Anything would be better, and more amusing. Self-harming in a bathroom
The Cherry Orchard Old Vic A Skull in Connemara Riverside Here’s a peculiarity of Chekhov productions that tour the world. There’s never any furniture. OK, there’s some. A card table maybe, a few spindly chairs, a samovar, a hat-stand, the odd stool. Matchwood accessories. But the sturdy oaken mammoths of Victorian decor, the chests and
Ballets Russes English National Ballet, Sadler’s Wells I think Diaghilev would have been thrilled to attend the opening night of English National Ballet’s centenary celebrations of his Ballets Russes. Not unlike his famously orchestrated 1909 dress rehearsal at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris, ENB’s performance was attended by a glamorous array of stars, celebrities and
With diffidence, I differ from my esteemed opera colleague. But I think Michael Tanner has got the new Covent Garden Lulu (Arts, 13 June) upside down. Catching it by chance a few nights ago, I’ll take the opportunity for an alternative opinion. First, for where we don’t differ. Singing is always adequate, sometimes outstanding, and
Famous, Rich and Homeless (BBC1) Psychoville (BBC2) Famous, Rich and Homeless, made by Love Productions for BBC1, and shown over Wednesday and Thursday nights, was a mess. It almost worked, but in the end it failed. For one thing, the five participants in the experiment were not particularly famous, and I doubt if any were
A curious programme on the World Service on Friday reminded us that although we’re now embarking on a new kind of technological revolution, dominated by twittering, downloading, waking up to John Humphrys not in BH but Karachi, we’ve not quite lost our connection with the mindset of the Middle Ages. On Blood and Lava Malcolm
Surviving, by Allan Massie The Death of a Pope, by Piers Paul Read Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole Alcoholism, with its lonely inner conflict between escapism and conscience, is an inexhaustible subject for literature. The emotional agony of addiction is fascinating, as long as it is other people’s. Allan Massie, the illustrious Scottish
Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong,
It’s a rewarding moment for a stroll round the London galleries. Good art is still being made and exhibited (some of it even selling), while more historical figures such as Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981) and Robert Motherwell (1915–91) are being accorded the benefit of monographs and mini-retrospectives. Winifred Nicholson is often overshadowed by the ambitious and
David Crane’s latest book is much more interesting than its title would lead you to believe. If you buy it hoping for a collection of stories of derring-do and British pluck, you won’t be wholly disappointed: you will indeed learn how Frank Abney Hastings, having got himself sacked from the Royal Navy for behaving like
Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber. On
Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character, edited by Frank Field This book consists of a 50-page introduction in which Frank Field, shrewdly though large- ly in eulogistic vein, analyses the character and political principles of Clement Attlee, followed by 28 essays, many of them book reviews or articles first published in the Observer, in
This evening I have the pleasure of speaking about the ongoing battle between the Commentariat and the Bloggertariat at an Editorial Intelligence event. My fellow panellists are David Aaronovitch of The Times, blogger Iain Dale, Mick Fealty (Slugger O’Toole and Brassneck) and Anne Spackman of The Times). Where do I fit in? I guess somewhere inbetween
Futurism Tate Modern, until 20 September The centenary of Marinetti’s ‘First Manifesto of Futurism’ is a wonderful excuse, if excuse be needed, for a celebration and perhaps re-assessment of a movement that attacked the past in the name of all that was modern. Today, Futurists would be execrating any movement as old and as passé
Jewels Royal Opera House Created in 1967 for a stellar cast of dance artists, Jewels is one of the most written about of Balanchine’s ballets. Intrigued by its uncommon structure, namely three choreographically diverse, plotless sections set to different music, dance writers have long debated the work’s possible meanings. Today it is generally agreed that
It’s not often that by chance you tune in to one of the annual Reith Lectures (Radio Four) and find what you’re hearing so gripping that you actually stay with it. It’s not often that by chance you tune in to one of the annual Reith Lectures (Radio Four) and find what you’re hearing so
Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Among them is Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction. Loy has many of the classic characteristics of the breed, including the tastes for hard
Even at 78 and from a distance, Sir Peter Hall has the look of an alpha male. There he is about 100 or so feet away, advancing towards me across the polished boards of his rehearsal room; head forward, bear-like, with the lonely charisma of a boxing champ. As he passes, the younger members of
Fidelio Garsington Parthenogenesis Linbury Beethoven’s Fidelio is one of the most moving operas in the repertoire, but I’ve usually been more moved by it in concert than on stage. The gaucheries of its plot, which include, really, hardly having any plot — we encounter, after the relatively light opening, the embodiment of noble feminine determination,
The Winter’s Tale Old Vic Phèdre Lyttelton I seem to be alone in feeling great waves of pity for anyone involved in an assault on The Winter’s Tale. This strange dud of a text remains mystifyingly popular with theatre folk. It’s two plays shunted together. Act one is a mawkish palace tragedy, act two is
Telstar 15, Key Cities Telstar is a biopic about the ‘ground breaking’ 1960s song writer and independent record producer Joe Meek, but unless you know a lot about Joe already — and, I confess, I didn’t — you’re never that clear about what ground he broke exactly. If you fancy seeing this film, I would
In the current anniversary-fest the musical world has awarded itself there is an omission which dwarfs the lot of them. This is the invention of what many people still call ‘modern music’. For it was in 1909 that Schoenberg wrote his Five Orchestral Pieces and the monodrama Erwartung. These were early atonal works which used
The City & The City, by China Miéville China Miéville’s second book, Perdido Street Station, made his name by reimagining fantasy as thoroughly as had M. John Harrison’s Viriconium or Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. He followed it with two more novels set in the same world, and a children’s fantasy (Un Lun Dun) that was hailed
Political feuds have always been at the heart of politics. The most public of these have occurred when the adversaries were confronting each other across the floor of the House, leaders of different parties bound by their roles to oppose each other on every occasion even when they had scant belief in the superior merits