Arts Archives

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.

7 October 2026

Sam Leith

Marvel’s Wolverine just doesn’t work

Celebrity Traitors is evil

Television

At the time of writing I’m still in the dark as to whether Richard E. Grant’s Celebrity Traitors gambit – viz, admitting to his fellow players that he has been chosen as a traitor within minutes of being secretly selected – pays off. Will it prove the counterintuitive master stroke that wins him the game? Or will it turn out to be the fantastically naive indiscretion which sees him sent packing shortly after his first and only murder victim Amol ‘glottal stops? Nein danke!’ Rajan? If you know what I’m talking about without my having to explain, shame on you.

Lloyd Evans

The Standard of Living didn’t make me feel anything

Theatre

James Graham’s new play is a biography of John Maynard Keynes, known as ‘Mennid’ to his friends, which feels like a visit to a stately home. Mennid narrates the show and introduces us to the main events and personalities of his life but he doesn’t get involved. This is a eulogy, not a drama. He’s a civilised oddball, a highly polished introvert, a maths geek with a saviour complex. His mission is to rescue Britain from the Great Depression by increasing the national debt and blowing the loans on railways and power stations. He uses his lectures to tell a fairy tale about a mythical traveller who finds a dying village and revives its economy by spending £1 in the local tavern.

Richard Bratby

Royal Opera’s maddeningly erratic Parsifal

Opera

If the Royal Opera’s new Parsifal had ended after Act One, you’d be reading right now that it was one of the finest British Wagner productions of recent years. The prelude is played with the curtain down; a rare gesture of faith these days. When the curtain does rise, it’s on a dark vaulted space that might or might not be Wagner’s Grail temple: sublimity from the perspective of a broken and brutal age. Figures in overalls cluster at a bank of screens (Wagner specified no period for the mystery that’s about to unfold). Others tend, gently, to a man who lies bloodied and prone on the floor.

Graeme Thomson

A rough and exhilarating ride with Bill Callahan

Pop

It’s as difficult to pin down exactly what Bill Callahan does as it is to explain what makes it so compelling. Now 60, Callahan has been releasing music since the early 1990s, first as Smog and more recently under his own name, which has been variously categorised as indie-folk, lo-fi, alt-country and Americana. Really, he’s just an idiosyncratic singer-songwriter with a deeply cool voice and an unusual way around a song. That voice is Lou Reed by way of Death Valley. A wobbly conversational baritone, by turns comedic, moving and unsettling, it’s the perfect vehicle for his series of unreliable narrators. Callahan writes like Randy Newman exiled to a dude ranch, his lyrics a potent mix of soul clichés – ‘Gabriel, come blow your horn!’; ‘Yes, I am your lover man!

Rupert Christiansen

The genius of Pam Tanowitz

Dance

Too much ballet these days is top-heavy with narrative that would be better served by the spoken word than it is by body language. And too few choreographers know how to engage with music, rather than using it as a mere sonic backdrop. So what a blessed relief it was to encounter Pam Tanowitz’s utterly delightful Pastoral, which is guilty of neither of these failings. I enjoyed it so much that I was compelled to go back and see it again, at my own considerable expense, two days later. Pastoral lasts for an hour or so, but seems to ignore tick-tock time: it is both simple and complex, naive and sophisticated.

Daisy Dunn

In praise of Obama’s podcast

Radio and podcasts

Barack Obama has launched a books podcast. Three years ago, this would have been an automatic cause for celebration in the book world. Now, however, the tide has turned. Publishers have started to realise that touting their authors on podcasts may actually do more harm than good; that having a writer discuss their new release for an hour may give the listener all they want and deter them from actually purchasing a copy. The surest way the producer of a podcast can mitigate against the risk is to exclude books by living authors. Obama’s team mostly do just that. The former President has authors as guests, but the books they talk about are in most cases decades old.

Sam Kriss

The Social Reckoning is deeply boring

Cinema

Has anyone in human history inspired more visceral disgust than Mark Zuckerberg? Hard to imagine. I know I used to get a shudder down my spine every time I saw him on TV, being upbraided by some kind of congressional subcommittee. Look at this uncanny demon, white as death, covered in a thin liquid sheen, with his big watery eyes like an uncomprehending animal, his blank inhuman face, his halting and inarticulate speech, and his sinister, gangly form, which didn’t seem to stand up on its own feet so much as it drooped down from the neck, as if he were being hung up on invisible hooks. This is not a human being but an ungainly meat puppet, a shell for some slithering being. Which made sense, really.

Digby Warde-Aldam

The Turner Prize is only 50 per cent dreadful

Exhibitions

Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that my relatives founded Middlesbrough but it’s entirely true. Having raised the money to build Stephenson’s Rocket, my Quaker forebears realised that, if only there was a port nearby, there might be options for export. Their brainwave gave birth to ’Boro, a town now widely assumed to be the Detroit of England. It’s an interesting place: there’s no grand architecture, but it does at least have the vestiges of the old ICI chemical plant, a complex so prominent that it supposedly inspired the cityscapes of Blade Runner. There’s no romanticising it, though: Middlesbrough is deprived to the extent that I should probably be paying reparations.

Rupert Christiansen

The woman who showed us the real Russia

Arts feature

It’s hard to know where to start – or finish – when explaining the formidable Lilian Hochhauser, due her centenary birthday card from the King next month. Over more than 75 years, she and her husband Victor, who died in 2019, were Britain’s most respected musical impresarios. Their net ranged wide – from Gracie Fields and Mario Lanza in the 1950s to Chinese acrobats in the Noughties – but they will undoubtedly be best remembered for a unique ability to negotiate with stonewalling Russian bureaucracy and winkle out some of the Soviet Union’s greatest talents. ‘I worked hard, I loved music and I loved what I was doing.

30 September 2026

Richard Bratby

Do we really need a Dudamel Schumann cycle?

The Listener

Grade: B These are strange days in the recording industry. Heaven alone knows why Platoon – an Apple sub-conglomerate with all the charm of the Borg – has decided that this is the moment to release a cycle of Schumann symphonies recorded live by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2018. But I’m not complaining. No conductor records these four misunderstood masterpieces for the glory. No: it has to be love; and while you can draw any number of conclusions from Platoon’s decision to give the recordings away for free via streaming and download platforms, the real value is in the listening. If perceptions of Dudamel as a hyperactive ex-wunderkind were ever really justified, they aren’t now.

James Walton

War is as good as Succession

Television

In his ruefully funny 2012 novel The Man Who Forgot His Wife, John O’Farrell compares the increasingly uncivilised process of divorce to war: ‘In 1939 the RAF thought it was immoral to bomb the Black Forest to deprive the Germans of timber. But by 1945 they were deliberately creating firestorms to kill as many civilians as possible.’ As the title suggests, the starry new divorce-based drama War makes a similar comparison – except that here the unhappy couple are cutting straight to Dresden. The show began as it meant to go on: which is to say, glitteringly. At a London awards ceremony of ineffable poshness, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) was named Pioneer of the Year for creating one of the world’s biggest yet nicest social media platforms.

Lloyd Evans

The problem with Sting’s musical

Theatre

The Last Ship, a musical written by and featuring Sting, is touring Europe, Australia and America. The show is a class-war parable set in Newcastle during the 1980s. A team of shipbuilders are about to complete a new vessel, the Utopia, when a bossy government minister, Baroness Tynedale, arrives at the docks to deliver bad news. With her bright- blue suit and posh hectoring voice, she’s a pantomime Mrs Thatcher and she announces that the yard will be seized and flogged to private investors. The shipbuilders establish a Marxist committee and plot to overturn her evil scheme. A gripping start. Plucky Geordies pitted against yuppie scavengers from London. The show even features a song about the competing merits of collectivism and monetarism. Then it all implodes.

Michael Hann

Ian McCulloch’s still got it

Pop

No one ever joined a rock band because they didn’t want to be recognised. Being adored matters to stars, sometimes too much, but that only makes those who love them care even more. That could be heard in the cries of ‘We love you, Mac!’ at a glorious night in Regent’s Park. Echo & The Bunnymen’s singer Ian McCulloch – who was once famous for pronouncing on how much better his band was than any other – has not had an easy time of it in recent years. Unlike his peers in the Cure and U2, he’s not playing to 50,000 people at a time, though his band were regarded as every bit their equals – perhaps their betters – in the early 1980s.

Richard Bratby

Meet the man behind Royal Opera’s new Parsifal

Opera

Evgeny Titov has landed at the Royal Opera, and he has good news for Britain’s beleaguered opera scene. ‘It’s the best place to work,’ he declares, leaning forward with enthusiasm; and already he’s thrown the interview off course. Usually with overseas artists there are courtesies, and then a tactful acknowledgment that British companies work under unavoidable pressures of time and money. But this actor-turned-opera director, whose career has taken him from St Petersburg to the Salzburg Festival, has seen a few things, and he means what he says. He likes it here. ‘Everybody told me before I came, “You will love it,”’ he says. ‘“Oh, is that so?

Hermione Eyre

The singular vision of Quentin Bell

Exhibitions

Every visitor to Charleston Farmhouse will know the work of Quentin Bell even if they don’t realise it. He made the distinctive clay colander lights there, and many of the zany sculptures and ceramics. The son of Vanessa Bell, he grew up at Charleston, and later, when he was of great age – and even greater beard – he led a campaign to ensure the place was properly preserved. But what was Bell’s work really like? This exhibition gives us about 100 examples so that his singular vision emerges, and guess what, for all the progressive modernism of his background, he had a taste for Victoriana, fairground illusionism and the Belle Époque. His reliefs are dancers out of Degas, his figurines dressed like Manet’s bar attendant.

Rupert Christiansen

Today’s choreographers stand no chance against Balanchine

Dance

The only problem with presenting a blazing masterpiece such as Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements as a curtain raiser is that it will make anything that follows it look pallid or insignificant. And that’s what blights English National Ballet’s new triple bill, which starts with a massive blast of electricity and ends in a big slow yawn. Symphony in Three Movements formed part of the astonishing festival that George Balanchine masterminded in 1972 as a homage to his close friend and artistic inspiration Igor Stravinsky, who had died the previous year. Presented in one week were 31 ballets to the composer’s scores, 21 of them new, ten of them by Balanchine himself.

Daisy Dunn

Why artists love Aphrodite

Arts feature

Aphrodite – talk about a difficult birth. Her father the Sky (Ouranos) had come to resent the fertility of his wife/mother the Earth (Gaia). They’d had 18 children already – a gamesome brood that included Titans, Cyclopes, and the 100-handed Hecatoncheires. The last of these were so hateful that Ouranos convinced himself that he would be murdered by one of them and usurped as ruler on high. Ouranos’s way of coping with his complex was to keep on having sex with his wife so as to hole up his offspring in the birth canal. Gaia urged her sons to save her, but only Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was brave enough. While his father was still at it, Kronos went in and lopped off his genitals with a sickle.

23 September 2026

Lloyd Evans

One for hardcore fans: Golden Boy reviewed

Theatre

Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets in 1937, feels like a Norman Wisdom movie. A talented boxer wants to become a great violinist so he refuses to throw heavy punches in case he damages his fingers. The boxer, Joe, comes from a loving family who urge him to pursue a musical career but he meets a greedy, fast-talking agent, Tom, who promises him wealth and fame in the ring. To prise Joe away from his family, Tom encourages his adorable girlfriend, Lorna, to use her influence on him. Lorna promptly falls in love with Joe and the romantic triangle adds heaps of conflict to his career as a boxing champ. Josh O’Connor, looking more like a Hungarian philosopher than a streetfighter, brings an arrogant physicality to the role of Joe.

Graeme Thomson

Farewell to Saint Etienne

Pop

There are many ways for an established act or artist to call it a day. Some implode mid-tour in a fireball of drugs, ego and flying guitars. Others drift quietly out of sight unannounced. Some take their cue from those annoying people at parties who bid everyone a fulsome farewell and then just keep coming back. Most, as we know, don’t manage to say goodbye at all. As ardent scholars of pop history, Sarah Cracknell, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley are more aware than most of all the pitfalls and indignities involved. They have duly planned Saint Etienne’s exit from the scene with obvious care and attention. Like those annoyingly reasonable couples who throw divorce parties, the trio have pitched their retirement as a celebration. This is conscious dethroupling, indie-pop style.

Deborah Ross

The new Sense and Sensibility is not a patch on the old one

Cinema

Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility, which advertises itself as ‘a fresh take for a fresh generation’, has its work cut out. Not only is the Jane Austen novel beloved but there’s also the shadow of Emma Thompson’s sublimely deft 1995 version directed by Ang Lee (with its unforgettably magnificent ugly-cry scene). This one has no such grip on the book, and is considerably drearier and less affecting, but it’s not bad bad. It’s not Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion, after which we decided she should never be allowed near Austen again. On this occasion the ‘old take for the old generation’ cannot be surpassed – although well done, fresh generation, for having a go. Top marks. One doesn’t wish to be discouraging.

Bryan Appleyard

When will the art world acknowledge this master?

Exhibitions

Watercolours can be fatal for your standing in the art world. ‘As soon as you say you paint in watercolour,’ says Gerard Stamp, ‘you can see people popping you into a pigeonhole – ah, you’re a Sunday painter doing vases of flowers.’ There are many flaws in the aesthetics of the ‘art world’, but this one is unusually absurd. Stamp’s paintings are some of the most beautiful of our time. ‘I presented one to Queen Elizabeth II when she opened Norwich Cathedral Hostry on behalf of all who love the Cathedral. I had an exhibition there… and showed her round together with the Duke of Edinburgh, who took me aside, pointed to a large charcoal drawing and said: “How the bloody hell did you do that?” I’m told the painting is still hanging in Sandringham.

Damian Thompson

The genius of Sherlock & Co.

Radio and podcasts

The podcast audio-drama Sherlock & Co. is an updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in which the great detective is neurodivergent and gay, Dr Watson is a millennial who preaches against ethnic stereotyping, Lestrade is a woman who speaks with a Caribbean twang, and the society gossip Langdale Pike has morphed into a drag queen. Throw in the fact that it’s produced by Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger and you might imagine that we’re talking about a woke brew designed to repel conservative Holmesians like me. Actually, Sherlock & Co. is my favourite podcast ever. I love it almost as much as Conan Doyle’s ur-text and infinitely more than the BBC’s Sherlock, which began well but then disappeared up its smug backside.