The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
What does it mean to be a ‘good’ sports presenter? Really, it should mean nothing. They aren’t important. They should have a sense of perspective, a sense of remembering that they are peripheral to the most popular consumer product and human activity that we have come up with. Of course, it doesn’t work like that.
The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is
Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo. He accepts employment with an agency that gets performers to play roles in real people’s lives. You may need a friend, for example, or a mourner should you fear your funeral will be sparse. (Tell me about it.) Fraser won an Oscar
First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A hulking pink Rolls-Royce was parked on Bow Street – a real oaf of a car, the lumpish nepo-baby of a Humvee and Lady Penelope’s Fab 1. And as we stood outside the Royal Opera House,
I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth gallery and the city’s municipal art museum. She was given to management-speak and annoying soundbites – she more than once described herself as ‘feisty ’ – but she’d done a superlative job. She was charismatic
Some time in the next few weeks, a great ocean liner will be lost at sea. One of the greatest, in fact. When the SS United States made its maiden voyage in July 1952, it was the last word in transatlantic liner design. In an age of ocean-going elegance, the ‘Big U’ was the newest,
Freighted by a 350-year history, the Paris Opéra Ballet is a behemoth of an institution – lavishly subsidised by the state, hampered by barnacled traditions (including compulsory retirement on a full pension at the age of 42) and about twice the size of our own dear Royal Ballet. They do things differently there. Programming favours
Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of their son (the titular Hamnet) and how this may have inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. It stars Paul Mescal and an extraordinary Jessie Buckley, who will likely win every award going, yet be warned: it
Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been asking themselves ever since European institutions began displaying bodies of the dead – notably Egyptian mummies – in the early 19th century. It’s the same question that continues to be posed today in Canterbury. Here,
Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all those film trailers beginning ‘In a world…’. ‘The London Thames,’ she intoned as gruffly and menacingly as she could, ‘winding silently through the capital. But in Victorian times…’ dramatic pause ‘…it had a sinister side.’
Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad who had grown up in Worcestershire, became the leonine singer of Led Zeppelin in 1968, a self-proclaimed ‘golden god’. Lydon, a scrawny kid from Holloway, who had been hospitalised for a year with meningitis as
The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one of those, and you’re walking a tightrope. Add further players and the issue is redundancy: you’d better know precisely what you want to do with those additional voices, because otherwise they’ll congeal like cold gravy.
The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers a faithful production of John Millington Synge’s grand satire about dim-witted Oirish peasants and, perhaps unwisely, she spreads the show across the entire length of the vast Lyttelton stage. It looks as if it’s being
To accompany an exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2004, a performance was arranged of Morton Feldman’s composition written in homage to Guston, for which I was persuaded to page-turn. For Philip Guston runs non-stop for four hours and the thick A3 bundle of manuscript paper
‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges – in this case, a bevy of Monty Python bruisers in nylon frocks. The audience stirs. We’re being invaded by outsize schoolkids and what looks like a Scandinavian Eurovision entry, pushing through the stalls to
Song Sung Blue is a musical biopic of the real-life Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act and never hit the big time, or anywhere near. At its heart is a love story – one that is beautifully told. It stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, who is so sublime that we may
Unusual. After the press night of Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, no one leapt up and cheered. The crowd applauded politely at the amusing dialogue and the marvellous acting in Jonathan Kent’s handsome three-hour production but there was no standing ovation. The script feels like a literary novel overstuffed with detail. Flora Crewe is a
Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway – and am dearly hoping that I might bump into someone at a party who will blurt out all the plot details and spare me the misery of having to sit it out to the bitter
Flanders and Swann; Tom and Jerry. Some things come in pairs. Like Turner and Constable, even though our two most famous painters were more like chalk and cheese than cheese and pickle. They were close contemporaries: Turner was born in 1775, Constable a year later. Both painted landscapes. But that’s almost all they had in
Grade: D A Montreal band led by a Ukrainian/Canadian called Ivan Doruschuk, with a histrionic baritone, famous solely for having had the most ludicrous hit of that ludicrous decade, the 1980s, with ‘Safety Dance’. Perhaps more famous still was the hilarious video that accompanied the song: Mr Doruschuck in medieval gear cavorting in fields with
In the ruins of a 16th-century mosque, in the heart of the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara, dozens of abstract figures stand mute and motionless. As the desert sun dips below the horizon, and the shadows thicken, the effect is eerie. Wandering among the statues alone, you feel as though you’ve stumbled upon the aftermath
‘Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are unaware,’ wrote Stanley Spencer. Mystically devoted to the Berkshire village near the Thames where he grew up, Spencer was synonymous with Cookham as early as 1912, when he was at the Slade; ‘Cookham’ was his nickname. His greatest work
The path that links the Spice Girls to Jeffrey Dahmer – necrophile mass murderer of at least 17 men – is a circuitous and unusual one. It involves the establishment of Mothercare and Harold Wilson’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the New York underground of the early 1980s. The thread that joins the
Who doesn’t love Paddington? The winsome marmalade junkie has arrived at the Savoy Theatre in a musical version of the 2014 movie. First of all, the show is sensational. Absolute box-office gold, full of joy, mirth and spectacle. It’s also quite pricey but never mind. Sceptics who feel indifferent to children’s fiction will be relieved
Two years ago I was flown to Reykjavik to interview the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a weird old trip, booked in at 48 hours’ notice, but Ragnar was consistently charming and generous. Indeed, the only slightly touchy moment came when I asked him about his 2012 video installation The Visitors, a berserk
I called on Hugo Wolf the other week, and he didn’t look too great. He wouldn’t, of course; he died in a mental asylum in 1903 after suicide attempts, professional disappointment and the slow poison of tertiary syphilis. His face gazes glumly out from his monument in Vienna: above him, a single laurel branch, beneath
The Christmas film Goodbye June marks Kate Winslet’s directorial debut. It’s based on a screenplay by Joe Anders – the 21-year-old son she had with Sam Mendes. I would like to be gracious about it. But it would help if it were a better film. It’s about four, fractious adult children who are forced to
Secrets of the Conclave seemed rather optimistically titled, given that everybody at this year’s papal election had made a solemn vow before God not to divulge any. But, while we duly heard nothing about backstage politicking – apart from regular assurances that none took place – this respectful and quietly charming documentary did succeed in
By all accounts, the world première of Elgar’s Sea Pictures at the October 1899 Norwich Festival made quite a splash. Elgar conducted, and the soloist was the 27-year-old contralto Clara Butt – dressed in a silky, sinuous number which drew gasps in those corseted late-Victorian days. Elgar thought she looked ‘like a mermaid’; the critics,