Arts Reviews

When is an opera not an opera? How much can you strip and peel away, or extend and graft on to the genre, before it simply ceases to be itself? These questions dominated a week in which directors turned vivisectors for new productions — reimaginings — of Purcell’s Indian Queen (ENO) and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Silent Opera). Anyone familiar with Peter Sellars’s work will know better than to expect any paring back from the larger-than-life American. Amplification is the order of the day for Purcell’s semi-opera — expanded from a trim 50 minutes of unfinished music yoked to a play by Dryden and Howard to a three-and-a-half-hour musico-dramatic spectacle. If

There’s always seemed something masklike about Julianne Moore’s face: she seems walled in by her beauty. When she smiles, the only thing that moves is her mouth; that superb fenderwork of bone remains as impassive as a sphinx. This very inexpressiveness gives her an air of trapped intelligence, which she used to great effect in the early part of her career playing a string of numbed-out beauties— her coked-up porn actress in Boogie Nights; her neurasthenic housewives in Safe and Far from Heaven, all dying behind the eyes. More recently, she has cut loose to channel something of Diane Keaton’s scatterbrained comedy in The Kids Are All Right, in which

When I was a kid, I was taught by a kindly old Jesuit whose youth had been beguiled by George Bernard Shaw. The provocative ironies of ‘GBS’ were quoted everywhere and he was, for several decades, the world’s leading public intellectual. But as a schoolboy I found it hard to assent to the infatuations of my elders and though I relished Shaw’s aphorisms (‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history’) I conceived a suspicion that he was smug and overrated. A babbler. Perhaps even a bore. Man and Superman, rarely revived at full length, offers us GBS with all the taps running. Imagine Fry, Brand and Norton

Sky1’s new hospital drama Critical (Tuesday) can’t be accused of making a timid start. Within seconds, an urgent request had come over the loudspeaker system for ‘the trauma corps’ to head to the emergency department, causing the main members of the cast to sprint down various corridors at impressive speed. Meanwhile, a patient was briskly wheeled to the same department from a helicopter on the roof, pausing only to cough up blood all over the lift. Moments after that, the trauma corps were already exchanging the kind of rapid-fire medical speak — ‘Dullness to percussion on the left side!’— that most viewers mightn’t entirely comprehend but that clearly translates as

No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special for you now.’ Having your radio shows downloaded to your phone, music player or computer, rather than plucked out of the air the old-fashioned way, immediately grants the listener a great deal of extra freedom: you choose the feeds to which you subscribe, you decide which episodes to hear and in which order. But it also demands from the listener a measure of extra trust, or at least a ruthless readiness to skip, because what a producer puts on a feed can vary much more than in the scheduled-to-the-second world