Arts Reviews

The Sleeping Beauty English National Ballet, Coliseum Forgive me the lame pun, but although The Sleeping Beauty is performed worldwide, there are not that many great Beauties around. One exception is, arguably, the one staged under Kenneth MacMillan’s supervision, first seen in Berlin in the Sixties, then reworked for American Ballet Theatre in 1986 and now performed impeccably by English National Ballet. Unlike some 20th-century stagings of the celebrated classic, MacMillan’s relies on a profound respect for performance tradition and, at the same time, a choreographically and dramaturgically vibrant reading of the old text. As such, it remains one of the clearest, most immediate and most enjoyable versions of the

We have a super-efficient friend who has all her Christmas shopping both purchased and wrapped by the end of the summer holidays. It drives Mrs Spencer — who regards the approach of Christmas with the panic-stricken horror of a hedgehog who spots an oncoming truck — almost mad with jealous rage. In an attempt to calm her down, I always say that we should just buy each other a small token (chocolate peppermint creams for her, Australian soft-eating liquorice for me), so she has one thing less to worry about as she does the rounds for her relatives, friends and colleagues. Then I find myself loafing in the West End

It’s not a job I could do now that I’m supposedly mature, let alone when I was in my twenties. To take charge of a prison full of angry young men plus a team of disgruntled, de-motivated staff officers. But on Radio Four this week and next we heard from four prison governors, most of whom are yet to reach their thirties. In Young Governors Take Control (Monday), produced by Deborah Dudgeon, Clare English revisited four graduates of the Intensive Development Scheme (IDS) run by HM Prison Service whom she first interviewed for Radio Four three years ago. How were they doing now that they had left behind their control

Hänsel und Gretel Royal Opera House Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen Ardente Opera The Royal Opera’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, has two completely different casts and two conductors. For that matter, it has two producers, too, but they are both involved in the same production: Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, with their usual attendant designers, etc. As usual, too, the production this pair has come up with is in most respects unremarkable, until Act III. Act I is set in the children’s bedroom, a diagonal affair with a two-dimensional forest surrounding it. Act II is the two dimensional forest itself, with a recess where one sees more trees;

Mother Goose Hackney Empire Hamlet Novello God, I hate the panto season. Especially the reviews. You get some cynical, steely-hearted, acid-flinging critic who takes his two-year-old kid to a Christmas show for the first time and the old bruiser’s heart melts, his brain mushes up and his review reads like the last paragraph of a Mills & Boon novel, all gooey and dribbling with marshmallowy tosh. It’s bloody awful. Mind you, if you’d seen little Isaac at Mother Goose perched on my knee with his friend Leo beside him in his yellow parka with the hood up, your heart would have melted too. What a huggable wuggable pair of idgeable

So what were we watching in 2008? The multiplication of television continues at speed. If you have cable TV you might have, say, 80 channels to choose from, most of them having nothing to offer you whatsoever. Some have almost no viewers. You could afford to advertise a missing cat on some of them, except that nobody who might have seen your cat is watching. Richard and Judy have been demoted from terrestrial TV to a hopelessly obscure channel — ratings at one point dropped to 21,000 — yet their book club continues a sort of phantom existence, selling huge quantities of paperbacks even though almost no one sees R&J