The Illusionist is one of those films that gains points for trying to be clever and different and ingenious but then promptly loses them all for being not clever or different or ingenious enough. It’s frustrating, really, because you can feel the good film trying to get out — ‘let me out, let me out!’
Sunday evening at the Barbican was a revelation, no less gushy word will do. Janacek’s comic opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek is the Cinderella in his operatic output, if you don’t count the very early works, whole or fragmentary; even the weird but kind of wonderful Osud is more likely to turn up these
Michael Keegan-Dolan is to dance–theatre what radical and elusive Banksy is to the visual arts. Indeed, these two acclaimed bad boys of modern-day culture have a great deal in common; both derive their art from cruel satire of the everyday, which they portray with similar irreverent and shock-provoking strokes, in spite of their different means
I used to write a few political profiles in my time, and the one thing I always hoped was that the subject would refuse to co-operate. You had to offer to interview them, naturally, otherwise there might be legal difficulties. But you prayed they would say no. That rarely happened. When I did see them,
Got the right place? Yup, this looks like it. I’m about to meet TV’s grumpiest man, and his fixers have booked us a room in a fashionable media institute in Covent Garden. I peer through the frosted glass at what appears to be a hotel, a bistro, a therapy centre and a health farm all
If ever there was an exhibition which warranted a speedy and assessing first look, and then a longer, more lingering concentration on certain pictures, then Citizens and Kings is it. Subtitled ‘Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830’, it doesn’t have an exactly prepossessing moniker. Citizens and Kings sounds like something out of one of
The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century
Sheridan Morley died suddenly last weekend. He was The Spectator’s theatre critic from 1990 to 2001. His knowledge of both the stage and its leading practitioners was encyclopedic, while his many theatrical anecdotes were hugely entertaining. He and his wife, the producer and critic Ruth Leon, were planning to spend more time shuttling between London
The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the
‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed. First, the contrasts: Tchaikovsky the emotional, passionate, subjective, confessional, pouring his heart
Exactly 400 years ago, 24 February 1607, the first great opera received its première in Mantua. It’s a crucial date in the history of the arts in Western Europe, and it would have been agreeable to be able to report that Opera North, in its new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, did it justice. And musically
Sometimes when listening to Radio Four you can have the odd experience of spiralling downwards into your very own time warp. Lying in the bath on Sunday morning, for instance, with the radio warbling in the background, you could almost pretend you were back in the 1970s (except that the cork tiles and avocado finish
Insomnia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When, for example, I made up my mind that I was going to review the BBC’s new series Sleep Clinic (BBC1, Monday), I knew that later that night I would have enormous difficulties getting to sleep. This is one of the horrible tricks we insomniacs play on ourselves. We’ll have
The most exciting thing to do in Middlesbrough on a Sunday afternoon, Ronnie Scott used to say, is watch the traffic lights change. Not any longer, since the opening in January of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Mima is the latest addition to the band of new public galleries stretching across Britain from the West
It was a dark and stormy night when I got to Liverpool and, on my way to the Tate at Albert Dock the next morning, a gale-force wind nearly propelled me into the Dock’s murky, choppy waters before I reached the sanctuary of the museum. Here, on a quiet lower floor, there’s a small but
William Hogarth (1697–1764) was a rambunctious figure, controversial and quarrelsome by nature, but the first British artist to achieve worldwide recognition. He did this not through his paintings but through his prints, which were easier and cheaper to obtain, distinctly portable and offered a clear indication of his ideas. For Hogarth was a man of
Agrippina is widely agreed among Handelians to be his first major opera. Constituted, to a large extent, of arias from pre-existing works, it does have a strongly distinctive character, and is as precocious a work as any operatic composer has achieved by the age of 24. What makes it still more striking is that it
By the time you read this, the new Radio Three schedule will be up and running — more jazz, more words, fewer ‘live’ broadcasts (as opposed to live recordings) and Choral Evensong switched from Wednesdays, where it has been for decades, to Sundays. There was a terrible hoo-ha at the time these changes were announced
I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception
The great lyric poets of the English language wrote — and, I hope, are still writing — words which have their own melodic quality, cadences which lure composers to add music to them. Shakespeare, Herrick, Blake, Tennyson, Burns, Yeats have been set to music by numerous composers, creating a lasting heritage of English song. A