During the two previous recessions it was not unknown for Rolls-Royce and Bentley owners to replace their cars covertly. Proprietors were reluctant to be seen to trade in their two-year-old Shadows or Turbo Rs for brand new ones while staff were being laid off. They still bought the new models but they specified identical-looking cars
Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from the Courtauld Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, WC2, until 25 January 2009 This is the first full display of the Courtauld’s holding of Turner watercolours, recently enriched by nine paintings from the Scharf Bequest. The exhibition is further enhanced by loans from the Tate, and offers a splendid introduction to
Gethsemane Cottesloe State of Emergency Gate There’s a massive hole in the middle of David Hare’s new play. It’s called Iraq. What an issue that was. What a best-seller. Talk about box-office. For two or three years it seemed that Hare had single-handedly won the Iraq war but his victory proved tenuous and short-lived. Once
Boris Godunov English National Opera La rencontre imprévue Guildhall School of Music and Drama The new production of Musorgsky’s most important work Boris Godunov, at English National Opera, raises more questions than it answers. It is an impressive achievement, showing a seriousness of commitment to the work on the part of everyone involved, and yet
Body of Lies 15, Nationwide Body of Lies is the latest film from producer/director Ridley Scott and it is an espionage thriller set mostly in the Middle East — Iraq, Jordan and Syria — featuring espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and, if you can keep up, which I didn’t, there is probably a considerable amount of counter-counter-counter-espionage
Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. But I genuinely found his sitcom, Outnumbered (BBC 1, Saturday), co-written with his long-time collaborator Guy Jenkin,
Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind. When, finally, you can no longer ignore what is happening all around you, at least you can be comforted by the
The Baader Meinhof Complex 18, Key Cities The Baader Meinhof Complex is, well, just horrible really. Horrible, horrible, horrible and for those of you who are slow out there — and I know who you are; don’t think I don’t — it is horrible; just horrible. It is brutal, relentless, nihilistic, violent, terrifying, relentless, psychopathic,
I had what reformed alkies call a moment of clarity last week. On one of my regular trawls through the Amazon website, I clicked the One-day 1-Click button and ordered the first CD in what I felt in my guts was going to be an expensive and enjoyable binge. But instead of the usual response
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare Mark Morris Dance Group Barbican Like child prodigies, enfants terribles do not last forever. As both epithets imply, there is always a fairly traumatic moment in which they stop being children. True, enfants terribles normally outlive child prodigies, at least because the label is never so strictly related
There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about the BBC’s World Service in the past week as cuts were announced in the Russian service. Isn’t it a bad time to reduce the BBC’s output in the Russian language when relations between London and Moscow are so frosty? Surely it should be broadcasting more of
Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists Royal Academy, until 2 January 2009 The role played by dealers in modern French art seems to exceed that of their English counterparts. Perhaps this is because the French were more bombastic and self-serving, but we remember the names of the great dealers such as Vollard
Elektra Royal Opera House For You Linbury Studio The revival at the Royal Opera of Strauss’s Elektra in the production by Charles Edwards, who is also responsible for the sets and lighting, is so drastically modified from 2003 as to amount to a fresh start on the piece. It is still modernised, set in a
Yard Gal Oval House Lucky Seven Hampstead Last week I saw a little-known play, Yard Gal, which I’m pretty sure is a classic. Written ten years ago by Rebecca Prichard and revived with scintillating and furious energy by Stef O’Driscoll, the play follows the lives of two drug–whore teenagers, Boo and Marie, living in the
You’re a middle-class Pole living in modest bourgeois comfort in a detached house in the handsome Austro–Hungarian city of Lwow in 1939 when there’s a knock at the door. Two officers from the newly arrived Soviet army of occupation have come to tell you that from now on all bar one of the rooms in
W 15, Nationwide W, which should be pronounced ‘dubya’, the Texan way, as in George ‘Dubya’ Bush — but never as in, for example, Dubya. H. Smith — is Oliver Stone’s dramatised portrait of the 43rd American President and it’s pretty much neither here nor there; neither sympathetic enough to be one thing nor, alas,
Overture 2012: Power and Passion Royal Albert Hall Julie Gilbert/Jean-Baptiste André The Place Triple Bill Royal Opera House I have to confess that the idea of 120 children and teenagers dancing to Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony did not sound particularly appealing. I have nothing against children, but their performances bore me to death. The problem is
I watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4, Thursday) if only so that you don’t have to. It’s rather lazy, like the unpleasant message he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone and then broadcast on Radio Two. You’d think that if they were going to be offensive to a well-loved old thespian gent they
From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, until 13 December Private collections of art are fascinating, both for the light they shed on the tastes and preoccupations of their owners, and for the otherwise often hidden network of associations they can reveal. Paintings and sculptures made on a
To Be Straight With You Lyttelton American Briefs Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1 It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these