The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Contrary to general belief, there is little glamour in the professional life of a dance critic. What there is, though, is a considerable amount of time spent confronting painfully unsuccessful attempts at making art or, at least, making something worth seeing. What makes one digest those endless stretches of choreographic drabness is the promise —
Peter Brook’s 1964 staging of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade for the RSC was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life as a young journalist. The magnificently titled Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade was a knockout. With
Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind
At last, it’s reached the West End. Lee Hall’s hit play, The Pitmen Painters, tells the heartening tale of some talented Geordie colliers who won national acclaim as artists during the 1930s. Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot, has done extremely well from a pretty limited set of dramatic techniques. He draws each of his coal
Here’s an idea from the heyday of radio comedy. A soap star about to get the chop improvises an unscripted deathbed recovery during a live broadcast in order to save his career. I think it was Tony Hancock who starred in that sketch. To expand it into a full-length play would be quite a challenge.
L.A. The Eighties. Hard rock is alive and well. Two smalltown hopefuls, Drew and Sherrie, arrive on Sunset Strip, as a German property developer is threatening to flatten it. Both find work in the same bar, and Drew has just plucked up the courage to tell Sherrie, ‘I think you’re really rad,’ when jaded rock
Riots at theatres, commonplace before the Great War, have mysteriously gone out of fashion. J.M. Synge’s classic, The Playboy of the Western World, was disrupted many times during its opening week in 1907 by Dubliners who objected to its portrayal of the rural poor in the west of Ireland. Strange that, feigning outrage on behalf
It’s a record breaker. The Trafalgar Studio is staging a rare revival of Christopher Hampton’s breakthrough play, written when he was 18, which made him in 1966 the youngest writer ever to have his work staged in the West End. This record has now stood for so long that it could probably do with a
A world première at the Almeida. My City written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Is it any good? Well, let’s see. Plot, first. It’s not that Poliakoff can’t write a plot; he can’t even think one up. Instead he sets himself a high-minded riddle and examines its possibilities. Take an archetype, ‘the kid-fearful-of-the-dark’, turn it
Next month it will be five years since the death of my former boss, Peter Hepple, and I still miss the man who saved my career and very possibly my sanity. Peter was for 20 years, from 1972–92, the editor of the Stage newspaper, often affectionately known as the actors’ Bible. But he contributed to
Well done, the Royal Court. It’s got the art of audience abuse down to a tee. The queue for the tiny studio theatre snakes up an airless flight of stairs and bottlenecks into a doorway where each play-goer receives a personalised earbashing from an usherette. ‘Hello, did you hear all that? It’s one hour straight
Once or twice a season Shakespeare gets booted out of the Globe. In his place a modern author is given a chance to shine. The Scottish writer Chris Hannan’s new play, The God of Soho, opens with a frolicsome nod to classicism. We are in heaven where two demotic deities, Mr and Mrs God, engage
Anna Christie, an early Eugene O’Neill play, has brought Jude Law to the tiny Donmar Warehouse. Set in New York among migrant longshoremen, the script takes ages to get to the point. Mat Burke, a randy Oirish loon, wants to marry Anna, a winsome worldly blonde, but faces opposition from her narky, knife-wielding dad, Chris.
There’s something decidedly odd in being part of a largely grey-haired audience sitting respectfully through a play about the discomforts of a cantankerous old butcher’s ménage consisting of a chauffeur, pimp, demolition worker and, ah yes, a professor of philosophy incomprehensibly returning from his American campus to the bosom of his dysfunctional family. This revival
Weird experiments in stone and glass clutter the South Bank opposite the Tower of London. The near-spherical City Hall looks like a speeding squash ball photographed at the moment of impact with a racquet. Around it stretches an acre of sloping flagstones, ideal for freestyle biking and skateboarding. (Sure enough, both activities are vigorously suppressed
Take one chip pan full of cooking oil, one crippled old lady and one strong-framed Irishwoman in her prime. Let the younger one heat the oil till it’s scalding, and pour it on to the older one’s trapped hand so she screams and screams (make the older one her mother, for good measure…). When she
Loyalty at Hampstead is two sensations in one. First, it’s a sensational drama written by the partner of a key Blair aide, Jonathan Powell, about the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, it’s a sensational finale to Mr Powell’s career. The author, Sarah Helm, records events unfolding in London and Washington from
Kafka, I was informed at school, was a genius. Now that I’ve grown up a bit I can see that my teachers were being typically overgenerous in their estimate of moderate abilities. Kafka was a cartoonist. He’s the Magritte of literature. His outlandish surrealism is so potent that it has succeeded in occupying the imaginations
Lay Me Down Softly (Tricycle Theatre, until 6 August) is set in Delaney’s Travelling Roadshow, sometime in the 1960s, in the middle of the Irish countryside — even the characters don’t know where. A string of exciting crimes of passion is being committed at the rifle range, in Paddy Hickey’s Mercedes and by the bumper
The Royal Court’s at it again. The Royal Court’s at it again. The boss, Dominic Cooke, likes to place his theatre at the disposal of Sloaney young princesses with an itch to write. It’s a great policy — mad, innovative, unpredictable and at times revelatory. Some of these women are seriously talented. Trouble is, Mr
After all the splendiferous photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, how about something more subversive? That is what Kew Palace delivers in its exhibition of George III caricatures from the collection of Lord Baker. This is royalty filtered not through the flattering lenses of the modern photographer, but through the sharp nibs of
Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne? We don’t know exactly where, how or in what degree Richard III’s deformities manifested themselves. Was it curvature of the spine? Was it a club foot? Was it just an epic dose of facial acne?
Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to the West End. Sir Tom and Sir Trevor — Stoppard and Nunn — have teamed up to realise Sir Trevor’s ‘40-year dream’ of bringing Sir Tom’s breakthrough play to
I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. In similar vein, London has
Here’s the thing. This box-set business. Do you get it? I tried. I failed. But everyone else goes stark raving mad about these fictional treasures. Once you’ve sampled a box set (or boxed-set?), you’re hooked. Here’s the thing. This box-set business. Do you get it? I tried. I failed. But everyone else goes stark raving
Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics. Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics. ‘You see them coming into the theatre,’ he says, ‘like the homeless who’ve lost their soup-kitchen, shuffling in with their plastic bags, deranged and vacant.’ After watching him play Henry Higgins in Pygmalion the reviewers have dumped poor Rupe in the poop. ‘Sad
A miracle at the Barbican. I reached the venue after a mere half an hour blundering around following directions from helpful staff. The main stage, which is so vast it feels like an open-air theatre, is the result of an alluring misconception of scale. You build a venue the size of the cosmos and you
A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. A short while ago Rupert Goold transplanted Prospero’s isle to an Arctic ice floe. His latest hazard as theatrical travel agent is to whisk Antonio and Shylock off to Las Vegas. The hurly-burly of a modern casino turns out to be
The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov’s barmiest and bleakest play. It’s also his richest. The madness starts immediately. To set the opening scene of a sprawling family drama at four o’clock in the morning seems eccentric to the point of rashness but Chekhov is a master of