The Critics | The Spectator

Don’t miss this Cherry Orchard

Theatre

Where are we? That’s the question raised by Ian Rickson’s version of The Cherry Orchard adapted by Conor McPherson. The setting appears to be a capitalist Russian society that never existed. The young characters wear casual 1950s gear – T-shirts, wristwatches and sunglasses – but the older men can recall a time before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Slightly confusing. Has the revolution happened or not? It might be simpler to set the play in 1903 when it was written. The high-status characters use posh Home Counties accents while the servants and hangers-on seem to hail from Scotland, Ireland and Germany. That chaotic set-up works better than it might. The show never fully coheres and it almost feels like three separate plays.

Rupert Christiansen

Nureyev was a lousy choreographer

Dance

Rudolf Nureyev was no doubt a phenomenal dancer and an electrifying personality – nobody who saw him on stage could deny it. Those who knew or collaborated with him also remarked on his fierce intelligence, insatiable ambition and inexhaustible energy. Alas none of these great qualities made him a good choreographer and he lacked the humility to recognise that. His version of Romeo & Juliet, commissioned by London Festival (now English National) Ballet in 1977, provides stark evidence of his overreach.

James Delingpole

A new BBC series that captures some of the channel’s old values

Television

I watched Smiley’s People on BBC iPlayer recently because I fancied a nostalgia trip back to the days (1982) when viewers were literate and had attention spans, when even bit players could act because they’d all done rep or been voice-coached by Cicely Berry at the RSC, and where directors still had leeway to attempt to create art rather than product. What I loved – though not quite as much as the scene where Alec Guinness as George Smiley sits imperturbably through a throbbingly percussive live show at a seedy German sex dive – was the refreshing slowness.

Graeme Thomson

The problem with the Beatles

Pop

It’s become hard to imagine that there was once a time when the Beatles were more or less just another 1960s group. For most of the 1970s and 1980s, the Fabs were neither overly fêted nor weirdly fetishised. Writer and filmmaker Grant McPhee recently posted a fascinating Substack detailing how sidelined they became in Liverpool during this period. McPhee recounts Roger Eagle, co-owner of the pivotal punk club Eric’s, expressly telling young musicians such as Ian McCulloch not to listen to them. Reverence was thin on the ground. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver had not yet been dully canonised as the Best Albums Ever Made; the Red and Blue compilations, released in 1973, were about as much Beatles as most people really needed.

Andrew Watts

Ali G isn’t satire

Cinema

The two main problems with Ali G are, one, that it’s old hat (or old durag if you wish), and, two, that it somehow took hold that the programme was satire. Fair enough, he first appeared on a ‘satirical’ TV show but the joke was always incongruence, the juxtaposition of an expert – or Donald Trump – with a complete idiot. And a very good joke it was. But if it were satire, it must have had a target. Hence the tedious debate about whether Ali G was satirising black people, or white people who think they’re black, or white people who aspire to be black. (The film includes clips from commentators condemning the character for this cultural appropriation – the only one I recognised was Rachel Dolezal.) Ali G: Who Iz I?

Richard Bratby

Opera’s obsession with the Eastern bloc

Opera

There was a fad a while back for photo books about Eastern bloc architecture. Derelict megastructures, brutalist monuments; you couldn’t move for them in the Barbican gift shop. Anyhow, Patrick Nolan and Leslie Travers – the director and designer respectively of Opera North’s new production of Eugene Onegin – were presumably big fans, because they’ve relocated the action to a provincial sports centre in the dying years of the USSR. It’s a fairly common gambit with Slavic operas. British opera companies are surely world leaders, by now, at rendering faded paintwork and water-stained concrete. But why?

Robin Simon

The RA’s triumphant new exhibition

Exhibitions

What a show at the Royal Academy. You go straight into a room of Cézannes and Renoirs and that is how it continues, with one coup de théâtre after another, at the hands of Monet, Signac, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Bonnard and more, all of them in thrall to the astonishing light and colour of the Côte d’Azur. The completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway suddenly made this spectacular seaside accessible It hadn’t always been like that. These artists, Cézanne excepted, came from northern France and knew nothing about the southern coast. What changed it all was the completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway in 1860, which suddenly made this spectacular seaside accessible. Cézanne was from neighbouring Provence, and he arrived on the coast before anyone else.

Jonathan Glancey

Our thirst for torching old buildings

Arts feature

Regard the protestors. See how happy they are. Can you hear them whoop and whistle? The burning clock tower of the town hall has fallen inside the old building. Houp-là. How they whistle and whoop! The baying of such mobs in public places is as old as the history of towns and cities, the burning of buildings equally antique. Order and chaos, civilisation and barbarity, the call of the primeval. Limoges has long been famed for its ‘arts of fire’, of the elements and crafts involved in the making of enamelware that reached its artistic zenith between the 12th and 14th centuries with a host of exquisite crucifixes, crosiers and tomb effigies, a hosanna of book covers and reliquary caskets.

20 October 2026

Alan Judd

How Sweden has kept communism at bay

More from Books

Stay-behind cells in the second world war and the Cold War are familiar to students of intelligence and military history. These were groups of men who, during an invasion, would hide in concealed bunkers from which they would clandestinely emerge to report on enemy positions, possibly also to sabotage them. There are still an unknown number of such hides, neglected and forgotten, in Kent and Sussex woodlands. During the Cold War, units of the British Army were tasked with occupying similar hides on the continent. None was expected to survive for long. It is less well known that neutral Sweden had a similar organisation.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The end is nigh: Switzy, by Emma Cline, reviewed

More from Books

Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), sold more hardback copies than any other debut novel published in the UK that year. It was an atmospheric treat of a book about young women in a Mansonesqe cult. Her next novel, The Guest (2023), was a haunting story about a beautiful, brittle grifter trying her luck in the Hamptons and coming unstuck. In between came Daddy (2020), a collection of short stories united by their exploration of toxic masculinity. This latest novel, Switzy, which won her her first Booker Prize longlisting, is quite a departure, in that it is about a man with dementia contemplating the end of his life. Cline is attempting something even more difficult here than producing an interesting story about a boring man in the style of, say, John Cheever.

Maggie Fergusson

Dark, dank and mysterious: the haunting strangeness of boglands

More from Books

‘Bog’ is an unlovely word, and the expressions in the bog lexicon – ‘bogged down’, ‘bog standard’, ‘bog off’ – are pretty unappealing too. When Roald Dahl created Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda he invited us to envisage an obese, unattractive boy. But when Merritt R. Turetsky, aged 20, encountered her first bog, it ‘pulled me in, and I have never looked back’. Three decades on, she is never happier than when landing on a bog in a helicopter or float-plane, heading out across trembling sphagnum in her chest waders, lying on her stomach with her ‘face pressed close to the bog surface’, or ‘getting down and dirty with the peat’.

Stuart Kelly

Alternative universes: Exit Party, by Emily St John Mandel, reviewed

More from Books

The premise of this novel is weird and delightful. At a party in the year 2031, with the American civil war over and the Republic of California declared, it’s time to pop the corks in Los Angeles. Our protagonist, Ari, is slightly wary: she is newly out of prison and declares: ‘When I think about parties I think about bombs.’ This is the least of her worries, as in the inebriation she meets ‘the same woman she had seen earlier, wearing a silver pleated dress, but she’d changed into casual clothes now, jean shorts and a T-shirt’. Moreover, some people are calling her Ibari – ‘My legal name... I’ve literally never used it. It’s just the name on my ID.’ At the same party, the host disappears, and not just to stock up on the drinks.

James Barr

‘There’s a 50-50 chance I’ll get bumped off’: an American scholar foresees his death

More from Books

On a drizzly morning in January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), was walking from the lift towards his office on the campus when he was shot dead. His two assailants escaped. In 2020 Kerr’s widow Ann read Kim Ghattas’s book on Islamic extremism, Black Wave, and sent her an email:. ‘I would like to hear your thoughts about what lay behind Malcolm’s death. I wonder if you have more detailed information.’ Ghattas started hunting. Through the Kerrs’ and other stories she evokes the nauseous uncertainty of civil war Beirut – a place where people vanished and the Reagan administration came thoroughly unstuck. At the beginning of the 1980s the Kerrs were living in California, where Malcolm taught at UCLA.

Mathew Lyons

The intellectual passions of J.R.R. Tolkien

More from Books

It was December 1942 and J.R.R. Tolkien was having doubts about his new book, a sequel to The Hobbit published five years earlier. ‘Is such an “epic” possible to consider in the present circumstances?’ he wrote to his publisher Stanley Unwin. The specific circumstances included the second world war; but the literary climate was hardly more propitious. The warden of Merton College, Oxford, where Tolkien was Professor of English Language and Literature, was ‘visibly shaken’ when Tolkien showed him the blurb for that sequel, eventually titled The Lord of the Rings. Reviews were largely poor: the American critic Edmund Wilson was not alone in thinking it ‘juvenile trash’. In a sense, Tolkien’s question to Unwin holds good.

Susie Mesure

Homesick for Tennessee: The Newer World, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed

More from Books

‘I am become a name,’ Alfred Tennyson has Ulysses declare in his 1833 poem, an epigraph that sets up Sebastian Barry’s return to 19th-century America and the imagined world of his ancestors, the McNulty clan, one of modern literature’s greatest creations. The Newer World is the third in a trio of novels to feature Thomas McNulty, one of Barry’s forefathers, who swapped Ireland’s great famine for fighting in the Indian wars and the American civil war. It follows Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, which both explore similar territory and contain many of the same characters, although each book stands alone.

Oliver Soden

‘We think you’re the best’ – the actors’ tribute to Michael Gambon

More from Books

When Michael Gambon was made a CBE, Ian McKellen wrote generously on behalf of the acting profession: ‘We think you’re the best.’ Arthur Miller pronounced him greater than Laurence Olivier. From a spear-carrying start in the early days – indeed on the first day – of the National Theatre, Gambon rose steadily to stardom and eventually, via a series of movie flops, to the well-paid prison of the Harry Potter films. On stage, in Shakespeare, Beckett, Pinter and Ayckbourn, or on television in The Singing Detective and Longitude, there was a might and scale to his talent that few could match – a force that did not preclude delicacy and emotional truth, his physical bulk capable of both high comedy and balletic grace. The essence of Gambon’s art was contradiction.

Philip Mansel

A history of Napoleon’s marshals has all the dash and vigour of a cavalry charge

Lead book review

In his fourth book on Napoleon, after Napoleon and Wellington (2001), Waterloo (2005) and Napoleon the Great (2014), Andrew Roberts focuses on the emperor’s relations with his 26 marshals. Writing with the dash and vigour of a cavalry charge, having walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields, Roberts analyses campaigns and battles from Italy in 1796, through Austerlitz, ‘the greatest victory in the history of France’, and the retreat from Moscow (ten marshals served in the Russian campaign) to Waterloo in 1815. Accounts of marches and battles are interspersed with frequent quotations from the emperor’s letters, sent day and night to his marshals to micromanage their campaigns, as well as from the marshals’ personal correspondence with each other.

14 October 2026

Lloyd Evans

Rent has not aged well

Theatre

Rent is a show about mortality haunted by the untimely death of its author, Jonathan Larson. On the eve of the first preview in 1996, he underwent heart surgery but he didn’t survive to see his creation become one of the most enduring hits in musical-theatre history. The producers of Luke Sheppard’s version don’t need reviewers to offer their verdict because the show has a worldwide band of disciples who maintain its bankability. On press night, the loyalists clearly adored what they’d seen. The script takes the plot of Puccini’s La bohème and transfers it to New York’s East Village in the 1990s where a salon of artistes are facing eviction.

Richard Bratby

The Hallé is on a roll

Classical

Say what you like about Manchester – and who doesn’t, right now? – but when it comes to imaginative programming, the Hallé is on a roll. It opened its new season with two substantial premières. First up was Sir James MacMillan’s Sixth Symphony, conducted by the orchestra’s principal conductor Kahchun Wong, and superficially a more abstract conception than MacMillan’s tremendous Fifth Symphony, which was premièred in Edinburgh in 2019. That work had a subtitle, Le grand Inconnu, and it dealt with the Holy Spirit. The Sixth has no name, though MacMillan has said that it incorporates musical portraits of family members, alluding to the ‘friends pictured within’ Elgar’s Enigma Variations. It’s an interesting model.

James Walton

BBC1’s Time isn’t subtle – but it’s still riveting

Television

Jimmy McGovern is a writer whose sleeve is rarely heart-free. Since cutting his teeth on Brookside in the early 1980s, he’s served up one crunching drama after another (Priest, Hillsborough, Broken etc. etc.), all of them characterised by a mix of dark personal stories and even darker social issues conveyed in a way that leaves us in little doubt about how we should respond. Granted, there are some concessions to light and shade – but if there’s such a thing as unsubtle nuance, then McGovern has mastered it. Even so, Time may be the most crunching of the lot. The first series of this anthology show took place in a men’s prison and spared us none of the violence, mental illness and institutional failures involved. The second, set in a women’s prison, didn’t either.

Michael Hann

Status Quo are a much better band than people think

Pop

Some years ago a concert promoter called Alan Day explained to me how he had revived the touring fortunes of sundry long-in-the-tooth acts. He had explained to them, gently, that they were no longer rock’n’roll bands playing to rock’n’roll audiences in rock’n’roll clubs. The people who were coming to see them, he pointed out, were the same age as them, and probably didn’t want to spend a long evening on their feet, being cramped and jostled. Try theatres instead, he suggested. Nice seats, nice toilets, everyone happy. Once he started booking these bands into theatres only, fans started flocking back. He took Marillion from scuzzy rock rooms like the Forum in Kentish Town to two nights at the Albert Hall.

Deiniol Brown

The yacht rock revival

Arts feature

Returning to Britain this year, I have been struck by the re-emergence of some of the 1970s’ smoothest sounds. This summer it seemed that every pub in London was filled with mulleted twenty-somethings foot-tapping along to a yacht-rock classic. Steely Dan have gone from 2.5 million monthly listeners in 2022 to more than 8 million today Yacht rock developed on the west coast of the United States and combined complex, jazz-inspired composition with catchy hooks and a soft tone. Think Steely Dan or Rupert Holmes. But before this year I had assumed it was doomed to uncoolness. Then I came across Toast Club, who were selling tickets to their debut album release party at the Windmill in Brixton.

Hermione Eyre

Our obsession with the 1990s

Arts feature

Why are we drawn ceaselessly back into the ever-more-recent past? The 1990s trend has been building for years now, with bucket hats, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy chic, Oasis reunions and documentaries about Oasis reunions… There are clearly deep reasons to revisit that decade. Some have scores to settle (Earl Spencer), while Gen Z’s interest seems tinged with yearning – as well as prurient curiosity about how barbaric it all was. It was the twilight of the Yellow Pages, the last days of video. You were nobody without a landline, nowhere without an A-Z. It was a time of libertinism, it was a time of HIV. Of ecstasy (the drug) and agony (Gazza cried, Diana died). The 90s: Art and Fashion at Tate Britain guides us carefully into this distant land.

13 October 2026

Jenny Colgan

Homage to the two drama kings who ruled British television for decades

More from Books

If I were to say to you that one of these books contains an entire chapter on how to get rimming on television and one is about a 90-year-old man who was married for 68 years and specialised in costume drama, you might make a guess at which is the scandalous one. And you would be utterly wrong. Between them, the two Davieses have practically stitched up the past 30 years of great scripted drama, from the happy glories of Pride and Prejudice (1995)to the devastating, gamechanging It’s a Sin (2021). Now both have memoirs out, paeans to the glorious years of British television and their not insignificant contributions to the national happiness.

Lee Langley

A matter of life and death: Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, by Patrick Cottrell, reviewed

More from Books

Patrick Cottrell’s first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (2017), had a Korean/American returning to her Milwaukee adoptive parents’ home following news of a tragic family event. Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, the author’s second novel, begins: ‘Five years ago I put on my detective hat and my existential black turtleneck in order to solve the mystery of his suicide. I mean the reasons my youngest brother killed himself.’ Readers of the first novel will be aware that the suicide was apparently explained at the time. But now, just before the fifth anniversary of the death, comes an anonymous letter – a puzzling photograph of the dead brother which plunges the surviving sibling back into investigative mode. In the intervening years much has changed.

Tiffany Jenkins

Where have all the children gone? A demographic winter sweeps the world

More from Books

A gorgeous blonde crosses the threshold of a softly furnished Parisian hotel room, hand in hand with a man. It is, we are told, the same room in which she was conceived 30 years earlier. The scene opened ‘Do It For Denmark’, a 2014 ad campaign by a Danish travel company, attempting to turn Paris into a sales pitch for parenthood after the country’s birth rate had plummeted to a 27-year low. Tongue in cheek, the advert claimed that 10 per cent of children are conceived on holiday. More than a decade on, the same story is unfolding worldwide. In Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, the former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under David Cameron, charts an ‘extraordinary wave’ of childlessness sweeping the world.

Michela Wrong

The dark finale of the second world war

More from Books

When presented with yet another second world war doorstopper by Max Hastings, a reader should be forgiven for wondering what on earth the author can possibly add, given the many titles on the conflict already to his name. The question has, of course, also occurred to Hastings himself, and his answer is refreshingly honest. Plunder, he acknowledges, is essentially a mopping up operation, a chance to scoop up some tasty morsels missed the first time around: memories, insights and incidents that have nagged away at him since Armageddon, his account of the last months of fighting in western Europe, published more than 20 years ago. The result is a kaleidoscopic book which oscillates from the vast, strategic canvas to individual acts of treachery and heroism.

Brian Martin

Rifts and reconciliations: Adam and Eve, by Jeffrey Archer, reviewed

More from Books

The old master of the airport bookstall novel has published for the last time. His fans will be delighted with this vintage Archer. The story concerns the lives of two children born on Armistice Day 1918 – Evelina to Charles, Earl of Brancaster, and Adam to a shepherd on the Brancaster estate. The title echoes the blockbusting Kane and Abel with biblical resonance. The couple’s fortunes are charted to almost the end of the second world war. Adam and Eve fall deeply in love, Eve devoted to farming, Adam to the intellect. On the outbreak of war he is called to duty with the Royal Norfolk Regiment and is eventually awarded both the MC and the VC. Although the writing carries us along at a great pace with many twists and turns, both style and plot are clichéd.

Lionel Barber

An examination of current trade policies leaves us a bit short-changed

More from Books

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes described the age of economic progress which ended abruptly in 1914: The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their delivery on his doorstep… He regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable. The first world war shattered this first iteration of globalisation, unleashing beggar-thy-neighbour currency devaluations and a wave of protectionism.