Arts Archives

The genius of Romeo Castellucci

Opera

Birds do not sing. They bleep and rattle and buzz like a dial-up modem. That we consider what comes out of those pointy mouths as synonymous with natural beauty and the highest achievements of melody is all down to a musical sleight of hand – centuries of gaslighting and free PR from classical music. The first composer to level with us, to faithfully transcribe the monstrous noises that these creatures actually make, was Olivier Messiaen. His music is stuffed with this fabulous fax-machine weirdness. It reaches an apotheosis in his massive opera Saint François d’Assise (1983) – six hours with intervals.

Richard Bratby

This giant of romanticism deserves so much more

Opera

Pity Carl Maria von Weber. On the morning of 5 June 1826 a servant knocked on the door of his bedroom in Great Portland Street, and heard no response. Stricken by tuberculosis, and tortured by the ‘thick, dank, yellow’ London smog, Weber had died in his sleep, aged 39. He knew that he was dying, and he’d travelled to London to try and make as much money as possible for his wife and children. He spent his last strength on Oberon; a sprawling half-opera, half-pantomime that he had been assured would drive British audiences wild. So it was fitting that the Proms should commemorate the 200th anniversary of Weber’s death with a concert staging of his only English opera, warts and all.

James Walton

Is Alley Cats really that bad?

Television

We first saw Sybylla, the heroine (in every sense) of My Brilliant Career, at a society gathering in 1900 Australia reciting a poem she’d written. After much racy talk of ‘forbidden fruit’ and ‘secret places’, it went on to describe a man as ‘a whisky breath seeking to possess something that will never be his’. We next saw her a month earlier when she was living with her family on their small, failing farm. ‘Women should swear,’ she told her sister. ‘They should eat like a man, ride like a man, decide their fate like a man.’ Sybylla, then, it seemed safe to deduce, is a feminist. Which, as it transpires, is pretty much the entire plot.

Deborah Ross

Stars can’t rescue this snooze-fest

Cinema

The film & Sons, in which a patriarch summons his estranged sons to let them in on a secret, has a stellar cast: Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West (briefly), Johnny Flynn, George MacKay, Noah Jupe. It can’t possibly fail, you might reasonably think. But when I heard my companion snoring at around the midway mark, I can’t say I didn’t feel a little jealous. This is not a family you’d wish to spend any time with. If they ever ask you for Christmas, say you’re away. It sounds juicy on paper, as you’ll see. Nighy is Andrew Dyer, a famous literary novelist who, J.D. Salinger-style, is now a recluse and hasn’t written anything for 20 years.

Michael Hann

The joy of Toto’s ‘Africa’

Pop

There comes a point in most bands’ lives at which their appeal has become too selective for them to sell out the venues they feel befit their status. The stadium band slips down to the arenas, the arena band to theatres, the theatre band to clubs. If you depend on the roar of thousands of people for validation, that creates some problems: if a power chord is played in an arena, and no one is there to hear it, does it even exist? The answer is the package tour. Pull together two or three bands (both these shows had a third, complimentary act on the bill) and sell tickets to different fan bases.

Lloyd Evans

The star of the Fringe

Theatre

Attention spans at Edinburgh are brief. With thousands of shows on offer, the punters have to make a split-second decision based on the title and the poster. A blunt descriptive name works best, hence the popularity of Dan Kelly: How I Went to Every Supermarket in the World. Kelly spent 11 years as a data analyst collecting the prices of 164 basic items from supermarkets on every continent. The information was sold to international firms that needed to calculate the salaries of their overseas staff. Kelly, a solitary and obsessive character, liked to tour the shops with a dictaphone taped to his chest and to record the prices by muttering into the hidden microphone, like a spy. His adventures are limited to shopping centres in large cities so his observations lack surprises.

Jonathan Meades

The man who – inadvertently – invented the 1970s

Arts feature

Style, self-evidently among those who pursue an interest in such affairs, is, according to the Comte de Buffon, the man himself – the essence, the heart, the bowel, the bovril. While, among the much greater majority who pursue an ignorance in such affairs, it is an assumed gamut of off-the-peg tics, props, accent – style is something bolted on to a being’s chassis and core in the hope that it will hold. We can be certain which of these two nugatory classifications better suits the late Christopher Gibbs who in the course of his long, more or less antiquarian life encountered Everyone, absolutely Everyone. ‘Everyone’ in this instance unhelpfully signifies little beside the people, per se, whom Gibbs met, smiled at, sold to, bought from, bought for, advised and charmed.

12 August 2026

Rupert Christiansen

Carlos Acosta just gets better with age

Dance

No ballet dancer has been a ‘household name’ in Britain for more than a generation now – even mention of Darcey Bussell would draw a blank on the Clapham omnibus were it not for her post-retirement stint as a judge on Strictly. The days when the likes of Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer were splashed over front pages have long gone. But Marianela Nunez and Carlos Acosta seem to have enough traction in the metropolis to sell about 11,000 seats each for week-long seasons at Covent Garden showcasing their artistry. (In other words, they could just about fill Wembley Arena once.) Both are without question enormous talents, celebrated internationally, their Hispanic origins reflecting a global trend in ballet demographics.

Lloyd Evans

The slow death of the Edinburgh Fringe

Theatre

The Edinburgh Fringe is getting bigger. Last year’s total of 3,893 shows is surpassed this year by 4,206 productions. More people are coming to Edinburgh in search of fame but the pressure of numbers doesn’t guarantee quality. Rival events are treading on Scotland’s turf. London produces two festivals in August that appear to challenge Edinburgh directly. The Camden Fringe offers 450 shows covering theatre, comedy, opera and dance, while the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival stages a mix of theatre, circus and street art. The Edinburgh Fringe used to hold a unique place in the world of British entertainment as an informal talent contest where newcomers were spotted, nurtured and launched as stars.

James Delingpole

The Shards is easily the best drama on TV

Television

My father once drove down the King’s Road with Marianne Faithfull and Terence Stamp in a paisley-painted Mini to buy a velvet suit from Granny Takes A Trip while high on acid. No, not really. I was always very disappointed with my parents’ ‘what it was really like in the 1960s’ anecdotes because basically they didn’t have any. Now my own children are having similar problems with my anecdotes about the legendary 1980s. Yes, it’s true that I did go to see Duran Duran at the height of their fame, but only to keep my little sister company in a football stadium smelling of chips and fizzy pop and filled with screaming 12-year-old girls. Yes, I did wear eyeliner and white lipstick once, but I looked a prat.

Graeme Thomson

A joyous opening to Edinburgh

Pop

The title of the opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival is also the thesis statement for this year’s entire EIF programme. All Rise is intended to be a celebration of integration, pluralism and collective acceptance, ‘togetherness and ascendance’, at a time when such notions could hardly be less in vogue. It takes a big work to live up to the billing. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s 12-part symphony, which premièred in New York in 1999, certainly doesn’t lack scale or ambition. For this mammoth hybrid composition for jazz ensemble, symphony orchestra and choir, Marsalis and his Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra were joined at the Usher Hall by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.

Deborah Ross

The wisdom of Anthony Bourdain

Cinema

Tony is a biopic of Anthony Bourdain, the late, great chef who, in fact, considered himself a writer first – his memoir Kitchen Confidential has sold in its millions – and a ‘skilled cook’ second. It’s not a Wikipedia entry, filmed. And it’s not hagiographic. It focuses on 1975 and the formative summer he spent washing dishes in Provincetown. He was 19 and the film opens with his own description of himself at that age: ‘I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, thoughtless young lout who needed a good ass-kicking.’ I would say Nigella is also a writer first, skilled cook second, but perhaps any similarity ends there. Though the film feels authentic, it isn’t true true. In fact, you may sometimes wonder: did that actually happen?

Richard Bratby

A much-deserved revival of a formidable British composer

The Listener

Grade: B+ ‘Cheltenham Symphonies’, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found a natural home at the Cheltenham Music Festival. But it was also a sneer: a dig at the supposedly parochial nature of British music in the 1960s and 1970s. Over in Europe, the avant-garde was doing whizzy things with Marxism and electronics. British music, went the narrative, was suburban, outdated and drab. Now listen to John McCabe’s Third Symphony of 1978. McCabe’s orchestration is as gorgeous as a bird of paradise; it shimmers like the colours on the surface of a bubble. Not that there’s anything fragile about McCabe’s musical engineering.

Damian Thompson

Apple Music has redeemed itself

Classical

Just two weeks ago I was ready to cancel my subscription to Apple Music. I’d stumbled across its ‘Composer Essentials’ – a list of 100 composers so significant that they merit their own curated playlists. It includes Bonds, Boyle, Caccini, Dawson, Dett, Perry, Poldowski, Sohy, Strohl and Walker. If those names don’t ring a bell, how about the composers who are missing? Albeniz, C.P.E. Bach, Bellini, Berg, Bizet, Borodin, Chabrier, Kodaly, Martinu, Messiaen, Mussorgsky, Nielsen, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Walton, Weber and Webern. See what I mean? The ‘Essentials’ list is stuffed with DEI hires. Which – an analogy with Cambridge University comes to mind – does no favours to the black and women composers who deservedly feature in it, such as Joplin and Beach.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Why does anyone take Ai Weiwei seriously?

Exhibitions

When Ai Weiwei (b.1957) arrived in Europe in 2015, fresh from state-imposed house arrest, he was greeted as a hero. Museums and galleries fell over themselves to host exhibitions devoted to the West’s new favourite dissident – even while those galleries continued, mysteriously, to participate in Chinese art fairs. Nobody dared say it at the time, but his actual art – vast, chaotic installations and whimsical sculptures that drew on Chinese folklore – was even then just a bit dull. Soon enough, the artist was positioning himself as the voice of the global dispossessed, in the process (to borrow someone else’s phrase) morphing into a kind of Chinese Banksy. His work became self-aggrandising in tone and ever more naff in form, in the process losing any trace of subtlety.

Richard Bratby

A triumphant adaptation of Game of Thrones

Arts feature

Wasn’t it Philomena Cunk who first observed that Shakespeare’s greatest work is Game of Thrones? She had a point. When I told friends that the Royal Shakespeare Company was adapting George R.R. Martin’s saga for the stage, the GoT fans lit up. The non-fans were incredulous, and not in a good way. Now Game of Thrones: The Mad King has landed, nearly four hours of it, and it represents a gamble for the RSC. Nearly a decade after peak Thrones, a vast inbuilt audience can no longer be assumed. This new stage version needs to please both camps if it’s to become the money-spinner that the company clearly (and justifiably) intends it to be. I’d like to imagine that I’m the target audience.

5 August 2026

James Delingpole

What happened to Gomorrah?

Television

You’re not going to like this and it pains me to say so but Gomorrah: The Origins is not in the same league as Gomorrah. The wardrobe is more stylish, the characters are more approachable, the dialogue is more expensive, the locations are more attractive, the plotting is more comprehensible, and the mise-en-scène is lusher, more cinematic and less spare. But in the context of the original, these qualities aren’t so much a virtue as a capitulation. Gomorrah (or Gomorra – La Serie, as it was in Italian, so one can never remember whether or not to include the ‘h’) ran on Sky Atlantic for five seasons from 2014 to 2021. This was a period where Anglo-American TV had long since begun its inexorable decline into glib, shallow and predictable diversity-cast wokedom.

Lloyd Evans

An enjoyable circus show masquerading as education

Theatre

Brainiac Live! is a ‘family science’ show based on a popular Sky TV programme. It’s ideal for children under 12 and for mums and dads who want an hour-long break from their normal parenting duties. The show is performed by a trio of lab-coated ‘brainiacs’, Ed, Ned and Raz, whose antics centre around loud bangs, naked flames, puffs of smoke and the destruction of props. The fun kicks off with a helmeted Ned preparing to dive into a sheet of cling film stretched across an empty doorframe. He runs. He leaps. He plunges through the transparent barrier which rips apart as he crash-lands on to a discarded mattress. Is that science? Not really. It’s a low-level stunt performed in conditions of extreme safety.

Daisy Dunn

In defence of Thames Water

Radio and podcasts

Perhaps the greatest honour ever paid to Queen Victoria was to have a sewage-pumping engine named after her. Both she and Albert – and the future Edward VII, plus Alexandra – had the delight of becoming bywords for the mighty machines constructed by Joseph Bazalgette to lift waste from the depths of his (literally) ground-breaking London sewer system. Listening to Thames Unfiltered, a new six-part podcast from the Evening Standard, I was amused to learn that the trend now favours the Greek gods. Among the eight barges constructed to serve the Tideway Tunnel sewer, completed last year, are a Zeus, a Poseidon, an Apollo, a Phoebe and, er, a Churchill. What else to give those who have everything?

Damian Thompson

What cinema gets wrong about nuns

Cinema

Why are filmmakers so interested in nuns? They’ve been exploring the subject for more than a century, which might seem odd, given that real-life dramas in convents are mostly confined to quarrels about the washing-up. But celluloid nuns are a different matter. As early as 1922, in the Swedish silent movie Häxen, a nun reaches for a spiked leather belt before leading her sisters in a demonic dance. That’s the beginning of one stereotype, the nun as sadomasochistic hysteric, which reached its apogee in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971).

Michael Hann

The court music of the ruling class

Pop

It would be difficult to do certain shows in the courtyard of Somerset House. One can’t really host anything too confrontational in a Georgian quadrangle: the clash of surroundings and sound would be too jarring. So instead the annual Summer Series tends to gravitate towards the feelgood or the inspiring, which is perfectly fine. However, if you go to more than one of the shows, it can feel as though you are watching some variant of the same performance. Flaming Lips and Black Country, New Road are very different bands at a surface level. The former – a psychedelic band formed in the early 1980s in Oklahoma City who, somehow, after nearly 20 years, catapulted to success at the end of the 1990s – come from outside the pop industry.

Richard Bratby

Don’t miss this dark Hansel and Gretel

Classical

The Three Choirs Festival always feels so nourishing, so eternally English, that you sometimes forget how much history has been made there. It was in Gloucester in 1910 that the young Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney heard the world première of Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia while Elgar, in rented digs, tried out his Violin Concerto with Fritz Kreisler. Three years later you’ve got Sibelius despatching Aino Ackte to première Luonnotar, and Saint-Saëns, at 77, playing Mozart by day, then cracking out his celebrated musical impersonations at the post-show party. Apparently his Cosima Wagner was quite the knockout. The point is that there have been moments when the musical universe pivoted around this quiet cathedral close.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

In praise of postcards

Arts feature

In its campaign to preserve traditional British screen-free pleasures, English Heritage is promoting a variety of wholesome pastimes this summer, such as puppet shows and fairground and circus skills. Children will lap those up; but will they respond equally enthusiastically to English Heritage’s new initiative for 2026: to revive the habit of holiday-postcard writing? This is the vision: that their young visitors, inspired to verbal exuberance by the castle, stately home or ancient ruin they’re enjoying, will snap up a couple of the new limited-edition postcards specially commissioned by English Heritage from the artists Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake, and (ideally in the café) will write to their grandparents, aunts, uncles and godparents.

3 August 2026

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The best of Rod Liddle’s Listener columns

Commissioning Rod on pop was easy. I’d email him a list of eligible albums and he’d ignore me and offer to review something completely deranged such as Cradle of Filth’s The Screaming of the Valkyries (‘plenty to admire’, B+). Within a few hours I’d receive a flawless little column. He started doing a monthly Listener in 2017. His musical interests were vast and unpredictable. He reserved his highest praise for albums by the likes of Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, Cypress Hill, A.G. Cook, Rosalia, Wet Leg, M.J. Lenderman, PWR BTTM, Snoop Dogg, Fat White Family. He much admired the Tuareg desert blues band Tinariwen and wondered if I might fly him to Austria to hear a Philip Glass recital.

29 July 2026

Lloyd Evans

The Trainspotting musical is made for cruise ships

Theatre

Plenty of critics have mocked Trainspotting – the musical (with lyrics and music by Irvine Welsh and Stephen McGuinness, respectively) but the producers know their audience’s mind. They want to see live theatre without taking the risk of a new play, which might be gruesome, and they prefer a dead-safe replica of a glamorous movie to something by Chekhov or Pinter. Reviewers admire novelty and inventiveness so they tend to punish theatre-makers who reheat leftovers. The show follows the book more closely than the film, where Renton was the central figure, and here he blends in with the community of wasters and criminals who mope around Edinburgh trying to raise cash for smack. The characters are reduced to simplistic gestures, as easy to read as hand signals. Begbie is a cocky thug.

James Delingpole

I suspect a lot of TV is AI-generated

Television

AI slop is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more prevalent as the lazy, the modish and the sub-literate take advantage of an apparently beneficial and cost-free leap in technology that will save them the time and effort formerly required to construct a speech, CV, article or image. I only started picking up on it myself quite recently. But now, when I get the feeling I’m being fed AI-generated pictures, I react like those dogs in the movies that are trained to spot Terminators. Thanks to the proliferation of sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV etc. there’s an awful lot of cable-TV slop about these days, as there has to be with all that space to fill, all those subscription costs to justify.

Graeme Thomson

Is this really the best Charli XCX can do?

Pop

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli XCX’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on ‘Camera’, the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. ‘Do I want to make music?’ she asks herself. ‘Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?’ Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.

Melanie McDonagh

Bring back the old Tube seat designs!

Exhibitions

Enid Marx once pondered ‘whether postage stamps are fine or industrial art. In my view the question rests on the quality of a design rather than its purpose. It is generally agreed, for example, that the work of Thomas Bewick is fine art, even when it is merely the engraving of a “trade card”.’ Marx was a textile designer, book illustrator, lino-cutter, wood-engraver, poster illustrator and, yes, postage-stamp designer (‘The calling card of a nation’, as she put it) and in all these things, the quality was unquestionable. Her unique, memorable designs were absorbed, unknowingly, by any number of people. Her best-known work was the sturdy moquette fabric she designed for seats on London Underground in the 1930s.

Richard Bratby

The concert of the year

Classical

Ah, so that’s where the kangaroo comes in! Garsington Opera produces a souvenir mug each summer decorated with cartoons of that year’s operas. Buy yours early enough, and you get a ceramic preview of the season – in the case of Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a drawing of a kangaroo. True, Barry’s operas are famously anarchic. But quite where a marsupial was supposed to fit into Oscar Wilde’s comedy was unclear until halfway through Act One. Suddenly, there it was: fuzzy and large as life, lolloping dolefully across the stage. Because? Well, because someone said ‘Australia’, silly. That’s how it works.