No doubt one reason why British people like Kath & Kim (often on BBC2, now on Living, Thursday) is that it takes the mick out of Australian suburban life. That makes those of us who lead British suburban lives feel superior. But it’s more than that. It’s very funny. It’s worth watching just for the
On Tuesday Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor take on Othello at the Donmar. If the show hasn’t sold out already, it soon will. Doubtless the starry cast will help shift a lot of tickets but so will the play’s peculiar ‘self-rationing’ effect. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, Othello is the least often revived. The play
What has come to be known as the Sex Show at the Barbican has received mixed reports. Some people dismiss it out of hand (and unseen) while others profess to enjoy it immensely. One painter I know loved it, but then he is a voyeur both by profession and inclination. I approached it with an
Percy Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957, Design Centre, Rugby School, until 8 December In the 1915 Vorticist Manifesto, published in the movement’s magazine Blast, Wyndham Lewis (he dropped Percy) wrote: Lewis is one of them, as this first-rate exhibition at his alma mater — he was a pupil for two years from 1897 — amply demonstrates. It
Just outside Florence’s city walls, marooned in the middle of a huge great ring road, lies a foreign field that is for ever England. Well, it’s really for ever Switzerland. The English Cemetery of Florence is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and is officially called the Protestant Cemetery of Florence. But, because the
‘We have introduced an artificial and theatrical music into the church, a bawling and agitation of various voices …Amorous and lascivious melodies are heard such as elsewhere accompany only the dances of courtesans and clowns.’ ‘The singers wanted to overshout each other, they were frequently out of tune, the sound uneven, the conducting without any
’Tis the season to be cheerful, especially if you like shopping. Which, obviously, as a heterosexual white middle-class male in his forties with no money, I don’t much, unless it’s for books or CDs. But at this time of year those of us of a non-shopping persuasion must bury our prejudices, venture out into the
The ambulance creeps to a halt outside the Brixton Academy at 9.15 on the evening of Amy Winehouse’s second London gig on Friday and is greeted with a ripple of excitement by the crowd. ‘She’s arrived’ is the whisper through the queue. And whether by this means or another, Amy does indeed arrive, beetling on
As the holiday season is all but upon us, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on Christmas movies of the past and the standards that have been set. There was one called Jingle All the Way that I liked very much indeed. It was about a man of foreign heritage who spoke
L’Elisir d’amore; Das Wunder del Heliane After not seeing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore for years, I went to two new productions of it in five days. The Glyndebourne one, which I reported on last week, is admirable, but the Royal Opera production is in some ways better still. That surprised me, because the director is Laurent
The Dysfunckshonalz!; Some Kind of Bliss; William Blake’s Divine Humanity The spirit of punk and its exhilarating lunacies are brilliantly captured in a new show at the Bush. Mike Packer’s affectionate satire tells the story of The Dysfunckshonalz, a major punk band of 1977, who 30 years on are approached by an American bank eager
It’s not what you think, we were warned by Jenny Uglow, the far-seeing biographer of Hogarth and Elizabeth Gaskell. Those ‘dark Satanic mills’ and ‘mountains green’ of William Blake’s epic poem were never intended as an anthem in praise of England’s democratic virtues. Blake was neither a conservative, nor nostalgic for an imaginary golden past.
On the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert. Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production company RDF who personally edited
Igor Toronyi-Lalic on the important role opera played in the early days of cinema In 1978, the Swiss impresario Rolf Liebermann picked the veteran American director Joseph Losey to direct a film adaptation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. At that point they hadn’t yet met or spoken but Liebermann, having passed over Franco Zeffirelli and
Home and Garden: Domestic Spaces in Paintings 1960–2004; Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, E2, until 4 February 2008 The final part of a quartet of exhibitions devoted to the subject of Home and Garden, competently supported by a useful catalogue, is currently enlivening the Geffrye Museum in London’s East End. It’s a pleasure to visit: the
Lynn Painter-Stainers PrizePainters’ Hall, until 1 December Art competitions suffer from a basic problem: how to apply a first-past-the-post system designed for racing to art. In some cases, contestants don’t even qualify for the same event — this year’s Turner Prize, typically, pits film and photography against installation. To avoid this sort of stupidity, the
Len Tabner Messum’s, 8 Cork Street, London W1, until 1 December For those of us who live in the British Isles there are two unassailable facts. We are island dwellers who live surrounded by turbulent seas. Our emotional lives, in other words how we experience our existence and express ourselves, often have recourse to rich
Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin is at the Playhouse Theatre, London, 6 December to 12 January; 0870 060 6631. The first time I saw Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin on stage it starred a West Highland white called Chester, playing Snowy. The dog’s is a walk-on part only; he’s rapidly substituted for a talking actor with a
Demand for new musicals has reached the point where investors are ready to sink funds into a whole new method of production — the we-can’t-write-a-musical-so-let’s-write-a-musical school of musicals. In the latest effort the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan has been crossbred with the songs of Blondie. A terrible ugliness is born. The songs don’t fit
Tell me, what hope is there left in the world when Harold Pinter, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh — and maybe Jude Law, should you wish to count him in — can come together and make a film as sterile, mindless, pointless and wearisome as this? I’d like to bang their heads together. I’d like to