Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
Well, it wasn’t quite the theatrical event of the year I was expecting. Theatre of Blood is an adaptation of the 1973 cult film in which a disgruntled actor murders a group of drama critics and I was hoping that members of the current crop, like the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, would be instantly recognisable.
I walked into The Philadelphia Story with a real spring in my step. Admittedly, I’d never seen this play before, but how bad could it be given that the film — surely one of the two or three greatest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood — was so closely based on Philip Barry’s
It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on
Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote —
One of the cardinal rules of theatre reviewing is that you’re not supposed to talk about the play until you’ve left the venue. This is ostensibly to stop critics influencing one another’s opinions, to force them to make up their own minds, but there’s another — better — reason, as I discovered last week. On
Since 25 October, I’ve been appearing seven times a week on stage, so getting to see anything has been extremely difficult. My last night is 15 January, so I’ll be able to resume my full reviewing duties after that, but in the meantime I thought I’d bring you up to date on the only three
Once upon a time, long, long ago, people used to argue about politics. Now they argue about parenting. Thirty-five years ago, the issue that defined a generation was whether American troops should be in Vietnam. Today, it’s whether to follow the advice set out in The Contented Little Baby Book. Defend the war on Iraq
Tom Shone, the ex-film critic of the Sunday Times, is out to pick a fight. The clue is in the subtitle of this book, a surprisingly sympathetic history of Hollywood’s most despised school of moviemaking. To the untrained eye, it will simply conjure up Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
Cloaca, Kevin Spacey’s debut as the artistic director of the Old Vic, must rank as one of the biggest disappointments of the year. It isn’t bad, exactly, but I was expecting so much more from the man who electrified British theatergoers with his star turn in The Iceman Cometh six years ago. I sat there
What will happen to British culture when the United Kingdom disintegrates into half a dozen warring republics? Who will protect our museums from marauding bands of looters when the rule of law breaks down? What will become of the crown jewels when the royal family is banished to Monaco? If our cultural heritage survives at
This book, which presents itself as a no-holds-barred account of Joe Eszterhas’s reign as the toughest and most highly-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, is doubly misleading. To begin with, it’s heavily censored; and, secondly, he isn’t the fierce defender of his work that he purports to be, at least not judging from the way he’s allowed
H. L. Mencken once said that the function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but few of us manage to live up to that standard today. On the contrary, most of us are more likely to hurl ourselves at the feet of the high and mighty and ignore everyone else.
Dear James, Thanks for sending me a copy of your … what shall we call it? Memoir? Novel? Anyway, I really enjoyed it. You’ve completely captured what it was like to be an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-80s — all that Sloane Ranger crap, the Pimms, the seccies. Every time I turned the page I
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. For the next 24 hours I’ll be glued to my television set watching the final moments of Celebrity Big Brother. Admittedly, it hasn’t proved quite as compelling as the first series, but it has been pretty entertaining nevertheless.
The big play at Edinburgh this year – the one with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in it – was The Guys, a heartfelt tribute to the ‘ordinary’ heroes of 11 September. Written by a journalist called Ann Nelson, it tells the story of her encounter with a New York fire captain who asked for