The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorientating, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the
An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can consume as much power as a city. It has been estimated that, not too long from now, we’ll require 92 cities’ worth of extra power just to meet the demands of artificial intelligence. Ergo, the
Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I listened to an entertainment-industry podcast recently which tried to explain. Apparently, chat shows are ratings death; hardly anyone watches them, so TV execs are very reluctant to launch new ones. But because of Traitors, Winkleman
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners won four Oscars and was nominated for 16 and I’d yet to see it. Sometimes the labels associated with a film can be off-putting and, for me, ‘horror’ and ‘vampires’ have the same effect as, say, ‘experimental’ or ‘like a poem’ or ‘directed by Michael Bay’. It’s now landed on the streamers
Dachniki meaning ‘dacha people’ is the Russian title of the National Theatre’s new production of Gorky’s sprawling 1905 drama. Nina and Moses Raine, who adapted the play, chose the flavourless title Summerfolk which doesn’t quite capture the play’s distinctive Russian atmosphere of ennui, intellectual rumination and despair. However, their perky, supple and idiomatic dialogue works
The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavour, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to
Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about
It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her
Neil LaBute is one of America’s most provocative and interesting playwrights. His best-known work, The Shape of Things, was made into a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd. America the Beautiful consists of nine plays in three chapters, the first two of which are being staged at King’s Head, the third at the Greenwich
The Other Bennet Sister is to Pride and Prejudice what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. The events of the original novel are all there, but the focus is on a character Jane Austen mostly neglected and occasionally scorned. One effect is that the other sisters, including the sainted Lizzy, come
Grade: A Lordy. The Resident Evil survival horror series is three decades old. It probably qualifies by now as Sitting Tenant Evil. Picture it snacking on flies in just the sort of dingy, hasn’t-been-tidied-for-30-years rent-controlled apartment that would make a good setting for a scene in the game. We’re still waiting for the instalment in
Is Sir Andras Schiff becoming the Ken Dodd of the piano? In his later years, you’ll recall, the Yorick of Knotty Ash took to delivering marathon one-man routines that finished long after midnight. A couple of years back, Schiff expressed a similar wish: why should he have to tell us in advance what he was
Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia is about an ageing Italian president who is coming to the end of his seven-year term, and must reflect on decisions made, decisions yet to be made and the moral complexities of life. Unusually for Sorrentino, who has a liking for the showy – Hand of God, The Great Beauty, Il
The last time I saw CMAT – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – was in the middle of a grey afternoon at a festival. She brought a charismatic refusal to be embarrassed to the day, and walked off with rather more fans than she had walked on with. Three albums in, she’s become a big deal –
‘Ballet is woman,’ Balanchine once gnomically pronounced. A remark not to be taken too literally, but essentially true. Like every afflicted balletomane, I can map out my lifelong passion for the art in terms of my adoration from afar of a succession of ballerinas – any awe I feel for their male counterparts is something
Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold is, let’s not shy away from it, a profit-seeking exhibition mounted by an entertainment business. Neon opened its high-tech space at Battersea Power Station last year with dinosaurs, and has partnerships with the likes of Harry Potter and Marvel. The gold mask fronting Ramses’s publicity has nothing to with Ramses.
Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to form a string quartet. That’s always an interesting choice. For a gifted and ambitious young musician, it takes a special kind of self-knowledge to pool your artistic future with three colleagues. But it’s what followed
Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe
‘Oh dear, you look like an old person,’ said Girl, greeting me in the interval of the Bach choir’s St Matthew Passion at the Royal Festival Hall. I took her point. Moments earlier I had been lamenting to the Fawn: ‘It seems like only yesterday when I had lovely long hair and you rode pillion
I got my first paid writing gig back in the early 2010s, for an online magazine fixated on the then-current phenomenon we were already calling ‘post-internet art’. The journal was all but unreadable, its house style both po-mo and po-faced to the extent that contributors were obliged to adopt pseudonymous bylines. I went with ‘Screamin’
Interest in Dracula seems to go on for ever. Kip Williams has chosen Cynthia Erivo to star in his new version of the yarn about a clique of blood-quaffers who bite their victims’ necks and lick the seepings. The show is staged as a read-through of Bram Stoker’s text supplemented by costumes, wigs and a
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the film that fans of the television show have long been waiting for, so I must watch what I say. The story follows a group of exceptionally violent Birmingham gangsters operating between the wars and if you see it at the cinema you’ll hear a message before the opening
Bring me my bow of burning gold; or failing that, the opening notes of Elgar’s Second Symphony. That’s how I’ve always imagined them anyway, those three swelling B flats – a mighty drawing back of the bow before Elgar propels his arrows of desire into the restless heart of this greatest of British symphonies. Thinking
The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky?. The phrase works two ways. Read literally, it has the playful 1960s feel of a Yoko Ono film or some absurdist Fluxus piece; firmly on brand, in other words, for someone as steeped as Byrne in New York’s downtown
More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draws the eye first. ‘These 2 men are the same age,’ says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, which won the Jury prize at Cannes, explores the lives of four generations of women growing up in the same rural farmhouse in Germany over the course of a century. It’s non-chronological, impressionistic, profoundly art-house and even though I am a fervent fan of linear storytelling – what can I
Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not as in gritty northern blokes smoking Woodbines and moaning a lot; rather, as in the writers throwing in everything but. A fortnight ago, I reviewed Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: a
Morrissey is back. And he’s sassy as hell. At the O2 on Saturday night, the once-waifish Smiths frontman turned stocky solo crooner cast shade on the haters: ‘As you all know, the jealous bitches tried to get rid of me, but thanks to you, and thanks to me, I’m still here.’ It was classic Mozzer:
Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is a comedy of manners set in 1841. A portly suitor, Horace, arrives at a respectable house intending to propose to a rebellious and brilliant 22-year-old, Mary Ann. Horace’s father is dying and he must find a bride before nightfall or lose a substantial legacy. This ludicrous but very
