The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If Olivia Dean is the girl next door, Rosalia is the girl next planet. Their shows in successive weeks at the O2 – Dean had six nights, Rosalia two – were object lessons in presentation. Dean’s gig looked like some high-end light entertainment from the 1970s, Rosalia’s like something the National Theatre might dream up
Children of the Blitz began with the surprising news – to me anyway – that while 800,000 British children in places likely to be bombed were evacuated during the war, two million weren’t. The evacuees’ stories have long been a TV staple, but this riveting documentary was the first programme of any kind I can
It takes some gumption to name a podcast History’s Greatest Dishes and proceed to offer episodes on pizza, blancmange, balti, gooseberry fool and Victoria sponge. Where’s the rarebit, the pottage, the pigeon pie? But the boldness of the podcast is one of its charms, and the choice of topics isn’t terribly important. Food historian Annie
Please Please Me is a play about Brian Epstein whose brief and troubled life remains relatively unknown. Tom Wright’s linear script opens with the teenage Epstein enjoying secret affairs with teddy boys while working at his dad’s record shop on Merseyside. When he spotted the Beatles at the Cavern, he was smitten by their homoerotic
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo were popular regulars at Washington’s Kennedy Center until Trump’s demented blast against decadent queerness. In truth the company is simply blameless pantomime, innocent fun for all the family. Based in the USA and clocking up 50 years tirelessly on the road, it consists of male dancers in drag gently
Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a deliciously sly, twisty, darkly comedic take on the art world starring Ian McKellen who has never been better on film. (Let’s not mention 2023’s The Critic ever again.) The trouble with McKellen is that for some people (i.e., me) it’s hard not to always see Ian McKellen, but that’s
Elsewhere in British music in 1960: William Walton was writing his Symphony No 2, Benjamin Britten his opera on Midsummer Night’s Dream and Michael Tippett was about to start King Priam. Meanwhile in Cambridge, an ex-pat composer from Catalonia, Roberto Gerhard, was puzzling out how to knit together a new large-scale piece for orchestra and
There’s a photo of Paul Hindemith with the pianist Artur Schnabel on hands and knees, surrounded by model railway track. Huge railway enthusiast, Hindemith, you see: he laid sprawling networks through the rooms of his Berlin apartment (before the Nazis drove him out), and organised marathon operating sessions with friends. Anyway, for various reasons, this
Commercial success has a way of corroding critical regard. The more popular a playwright becomes, the more the critical establishment becomes suspicious of their intellectual credentials. Consider Peter Shaffer. He collected Tonys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a CBE and a knighthood, and yet his reputation has contracted to a single work. Shaffer’s Amadeus premièred
At Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s home of 42 years, now owned by the National Trust, lies his painting studio. Reached by a path through the green-gold gardens, it is a standalone building with a little doorway and a soaring ceiling, clearly a place of refuge, and recreation, but also of serious commitment. The walls display
Grace Pervades by David Hare is a drama-documentary about the life and theatrical work of the great Victorian thesp, Sir Henry Irving. He was a morose and obsessive perfectionist whose style was considered dated even in the 19th century. Success arrived relatively late in life. He was making his way as a jobbing actor until
‘Warmer, sharper and funnier than ever,’ claims one reviewer of ‘the BBC’s disgraced cookery show’ MasterChef. But this is nonsense. First, MasterChef was never ‘disgraced’. It was just the victim of some desperate sub-#MeToo media insinuations about the mildly laddish shenanigans of its two ex-presenters John Torode and Gregg Wallace. These insinuations were likely not
I’m bullish about AI. All aesthetic snobs should be. In the war on man-made slop – still the most pressing threat – algorithms are an ally. After all, how much of the output of Netflix, Hollywood or Sony will retain its allure once AI is ventriloquising it to perfection? The qualities that have made popular
Anyone who was listening to independent music back in the 1980s and 1990s might find it surprising to learn which determinedly non-mainstream bands from that era resonate with the youth of 2026. My Bloody Valentine are selling out arenas. Cocteau Twins have influenced everyone from Chappell Roan to Wolf Alice. Mazzy Star’s dolorous ‘Fade Into
A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you
This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked by a theme of bereavement. That sounds bleak until you consider that Puccini’s Trittico was originally inspired by The Divine Comedy, and who bothers about that today? Anyway, the three operas that make up Tales
The problem with exhibiting costumes is well known. Should the mannequins be lifelike with human features, or faceless? What about trying a more surreal approach with Perspex or metals? This show of her late Majesty’s wardrobe opts for something more ghostly: hundreds of shoulderless, neckless, wristless, legless figures, floating magically in space, presented in cases
Multi-sensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there
The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is one of those films which, if chanced upon when flicking television channels, I will always stick with for a bit. It has zing. It has bite. It has memorable lines that I can remember without having to look them up. (‘Are we going to a hideous skirt convention?’) But
Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to the all-conquering Baby Reindeer, began with approximately ten seconds of some people at a wedding in rural Scotland having a good time. Two episodes later, they’re still about the only characters we’ve seen who aren’t having a gruesomely bad one. After that brief blast of jollity, the show moved
How do we evaluate Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series, which over a period of 35 years recorded more than 200 works for piano and orchestra? Was it one of the glories of the catalogue or a repository of works whose ambitions exceeded their achievement? The answer, of course, is that it was both. The paradox
By the time Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief was born in 1991, Kim Gordon had already released seven albums with Sonic Youth. It’s not that there were no women in bands in the 1980s but there were few enough that the concept of the ‘Women in Rock Special’ was very familiar to desperate music journalists.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey’s book by Dale Wasserman, is exactly like the movie but without Jack Nicholson’s star power. The cast have to impersonate lunatics for 150 minutes and they clearly love their job. Playing madmen comes naturally to actors and it’s an easy task because no creative discipline
Grade: B ‘Is that Haydn or Mozart? One can’t always be sure,’ remarks Kenneth Clark in the 18th-century episode of Civilisation, and there’s the British intelligentsia’s relationship with music, right there. Imagine saying that about any other art form, and still passing as a connoisseur. ‘Rembrandt or Poussin? Not much in it, really.’ ‘Michelangelo or
I’d just emerged from Stratford station when I realised it had been almost a decade to the day since I’d last been here. I thought back to a dismal morning press call in early 2016 to the mangy park landscaped as a visible legacy of the London Olympics. The collected hacks shivered as Mayor Johnson
‘Professor Sir Wayne McGregor CBE’ runs the headline to a biographical essay in the programme for the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of his recent work. Knighted and honoured at the heart of the dance establishment, McGregor has a solid reputation as the trusty insider who is also a radical outsider. What a dangerous place for
The Festival of Britain – that much mythologised moment of national renewal – is wheeled out every time the country goes through an identity crisis. An echo of the Great Exhibition, the 1951 South Bank extravaganza was spoofed by Tony Blair in his millennium plans and Theresa May in her entirely forgotten ‘Festival of Brexit’.
A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbaran
A Doll’s House has been reconstructed at the Almeida with a new script by Anya Reiss. Torvald Helmer is an inept drug-addled financier who wants to sell his business to a wealthy American investor. But the deal is a dud. Without his knowledge, Torvald’s bossy wife, Nora, has stolen £860,000 from a client’s account to