Arts Reviews

A lap of honour at the Royal Court. Bruce Norris has been one of the big discoveries of artistic director Dominic Cooke, who takes his bow by directing The Low Road. Norris’s greatest hit, Clybourne Park, was a savage and illuminating satire about racism. His next trick is to examine the burning issue of the day, unfettered greed. A great start. But he can’t decide whether he’s for or against the profit motive. And he has no idea where to mount his attack. He time-travels to 18th-century America and imagines an unscrupulous spiv, a bit like Barry Lyndon, who climbs from destitution to wealth and whose life touches American history

Newt Gingrich has a new love. ‘It’s a great study of plot,’ the failed Presidential runner and former Speaker of the House told Slate magazine. He was not referring to a ’90s sleaze inquiry, or the reasons why he lost to Mitt Romney. The object of his obsession is our very own Downton Abbey. In what could be mistaken for an interview about his once colorful private life, Gingrich went on: ‘It has about 15 subplots plus four or five that come and go. At any given moment you could list these different developments going on with these different personalities. See, you’re never bored.’ Apparently, ITV’s most successful export is

It was a gamble that seems to have paid off. American online entertainment giant Netflix commissioned their first ever original series with a Washington adaptation of Lord Dobbs’s classic, House of Cards. According to its star, Kevin Spacey, the show is today the most watched ever on the service. Season one ended on a cliff hanger that promises to deliver still more viewers. The new House of Cards is sufficiently different from the old to attract a new audience; yet there were enough nods to the original BBC series to keep Westminster loyalists happy. Dobbs, the brains behind Francis Urquhart (who has been renamed Underwood and upgraded from a Tory shireman

Did you catch Dr Who over the weekend? Clarissa Tan, who wrote our latest TV column, was surprised that the Dr had to contend with ‘something in the wi-fi’. How’s wi-fi for a thoroughly modern enemy? Here’s the prequel to this week’s episode, The Bells of Saint John: Clarissa also watched Rachel Johnson learning to be a Lady. It might sound like a bit of a drag, but ‘what could have turned out to be a rather prissy affair turns out to be a fun watch’. Johnson tries to master riding side-saddle, and ponders why etiquette lessons are becoming more and more popular. Here’s Johnson describing what makes a 21st

As Easter comes upon us in this bitter spring, many of us are drawn to contemplate the mystery of Christ’s passion: his Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven. You don’t have to go to church to do this, for reverie or prayer can take place in a quiet landscape or by a cosy fireside, but there are various aids to meditation, and none better than the appropriate visual art. Although we live in an increasingly irreligious age, there have been religious painters of real power in recent years, and perhaps none more so than Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009). Aitchison is an unlikely choice because he himself professed no particular belief, although