Arts Archives

The early-music movement is ageing well

Classical

The early music movement: it’s grown up so quickly, hasn’t it? The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is 40 years old in 2026 and if you can remember its debut, back in the 1980s when Beethoven on period instruments was pretty much the wildest thing going, you’re going to feel terribly, terribly old. Right from the start, the OAE was in the vanguard of the second wave. As late as 1978, the gut-strings and Bach brigade had assumed that Mozart was beyond them. The newly founded OAE was straight out of the traps with Weber, Mendelssohn and Schubert – halfway down the 19th century without drawing a breath.

Rod Liddle

Old songs for an audience of elderly people: The Damned’s Not Like Everybody Else reviewed

The Listener

Grade: B I remember hearing ‘Neat Neat Neat’, the Damned’s second single, and actually falling off a chair laughing. Is that really the future, I wondered, clutching tight hold of my New Riders of the Purple Sage album. Yes, reader, I’m afraid it was, with the Damned pre-eminent, handmaidens to the whole thing. They made by my reckoning three half-decent singles – ‘New Rose’, ‘Smash It Up’ and the ‘Ça plane pour moi’ facsimile ‘Jet Boy, Jet Girl’. And that was it. Pantomime punk that morphed into pantomime Goth, mostly. Now they are back doing what pensioned-off boomers have been doing for years, the 1960s (largely) covers album, a last resort when inspiration and public attention have left for other places.

Damian Thompson

The problem with the new Shakers biopic

Arts feature

Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th–century Manchester, celebrated for put-downs worthy of Coronation Street’s Bet Lynch. But instead of calling time on regulars at the Rovers Return, she announced that it was closing time for the whole of humanity. As a young woman Ann had joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or ‘Shaking Quakers’. In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden.

4 February 2026

Michael Hann

Electrifying: Annie & the Caldwells, at Ronnie Scott’s, reviewed

Pop

Annie & the Caldwells are a long-running family gospel ensemble from West Point, Mississippi – father and sons playing guitar, bass and drums, mother and daughters singing. The chaps offer a sinewy, stripped-down funk redolent of the late 1970s: dad, Willie J. Caldwell Sr, is a fantastic guitarist, and mother and daughters tear the roof off the place. They came to attention when David Byrne put out a record on his Luaka Bop label, and suddenly they were no longer just a local gospel group. Except they are. In an early show at Ronnie Scott’s, Annie – seated centre-stage in what looked like a black leather housecoat – was there to save souls. She refused to be discouraged by only three hands rising when she asked who believed in Jesus.

James Walton

Fascinating: The Fabulous Funeral Parlour reviewed

Television

The Fabulous Funeral Parlour ended with possibly the least necessary caption in TV history: ‘Filmed in Liverpool’. Whenever I go back there (quite often these days for family reasons), I’m struck all over again by how the whole city seems engaged in the production, distribution and promotion of Scouseness. Yet, even by normal Liverpudlian standards, the people in this old-school, narrator-less documentary put in an impressive shift. Leading the way was Hayley, the owner of both the parlour in question and, despite fierce competition, the most extravagant trout pout we saw. Hayley’s mother died five years ago aged 59, and it was then that she decided to set up Butterflies Rising Funeral Care.

Richard Bratby

Richard Jones’s Boris Godunov feels like a parody

Classical

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is back at Covent Garden, and there are ninjas. This isn’t a spoiler. There hasn’t been a note of music at this point, and it’s almost the first thing you see. A ginger child in a weird mask is playing with a spinning top when the black-clad assassins stalk on and slit his throat. Cue gasps. Well, the director is Richard Jones, after all; quirky, garish and occasionally macabre is what he does. And the (alleged) murder of a child pretender to the Russian throne is the horror that drives the entire plot, at least in the first (1869) version of the opera, which is what we’re given here.

Lloyd Evans

Marvellously conservative: Cable Street reviewed

Theatre

Cable Street is a musical that premièred last year at the Southwark Playhouse and has now migrated to the Marylebone Theatre. Fans of beautiful staging will be instantly smitten by the amazing achievement of the designer, Yoav Segal. The script by Tim Gilvin and Adam Kanefsky tells the story of a violent stand-off in October 1936 between cockney activists and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The authors treat the East End during the depression as a panto or a moral fairy tale. It’s good vs evil. The socialists are hard-working, golden-hearted heroes who rise up against the wicked landlords and their cruel rent hikes. The fascists are angry, misshapen losers led by a waddling baldie in a stick-on moustache. The socioeconomic background is hard to decipher.

Deborah Ross

Gripping: Melania reviewed

Cinema

The documentary Melania, which follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s 2025 presidential inauguration, has already been savaged by critics. It is ‘shallow’ and ‘a shameless infomercial’ and ‘designer taxidermy’, and according to Variety, ‘if they showed this on a plane people would still walk out’. It is, it’s true, a film that could have been authored by Hello! magazine, but isn’t there some value in seeing how someone wants to be seen? There’s also no shame in being in it for the rich lifestyle porn – on that count it delivers handsomely. I was hanging on to every detail, from what will be served at the inauguration dinner (golden eggs and caviar) to the width of the ribbon on her hat. (Should it be narrowed? Will it be?

Rupert Christiansen

The joy of Paul Taylor

Dance

When the American choreographer Paul Taylor died at the age of 88 in 2018, he should have been consecrated a patron saint of modern dance. He had respectfully lifted the pall of earnestness and mythic archetypes that his mentor Martha Graham had stiflingly cast over it, and let the sunshine in. Graham may have been a pioneering genius and an earth mother, but she wasn’t much of a laugh, and after performing in her company as a young man for seven years, he needed a break.

Adam Scovell

The demise of London’s junk shops

The alt-right are clueless about neoclassicism

Arts feature

The adherents of the American alt-right are not known for their delicate aesthetic sensibilities, but there is an exception. They love neoclassical architecture and are calling for it to be deployed in the 250th celebrations this year of what they still call ‘the country of liberty’. Judging from the desecration of the Oval Office and its surroundings, and the plans for the world’s most expensive dance hall, what they have in mind is a style derived not from ancient Greece and Rome but 1950s Technicolor movies. Donald Trump’s White House interior reminds me of Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French 18th-century rococo interiors: ‘All gilt and beshit.’ Expect more of the same.

28 January 2026

Graeme Thomson

Who stuck the great Emmylou Harris in a sports hall?

Pop

Somebody obviously thought it a good idea that Emmylou Harris play her last ever Scottish show in a soulless sports hall in the east end of Glasgow. Built for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the feel of the Emirates Arena on a chilly January night was less Sweet Home Alabama, more Home Counties Ikea. As well as kicking off this year’s Celtic Connections, the city’s annual festival of roots music, Harris was also kickstarting her farewell tour of Europe. She plays her final UK shows in May, including one at the Royal Albert Hall, which seems a more fitting setting for a regal adieu than a pimped-up cycling track. Presumably, the choice of venue was a numbers game. Whatever the reason, it was a poor one.

Hermione Eyre

How fantastic to see Hogarth’s largest paintings in their original glory

Exhibitions

The long overlooked staircase by Hogarth at St Bartholomew’s Hospital has been cleaned and restored in a £9.5 million scheme. It is now open to the public, the management says, for the first time since the 1730s, although when I lived nearby in the 2000s, I used to slip in to look at it sometimes. No one seemed to mind. Murals are of course the original site-specific artworks, and you have to enter a working hospital to see this one. Literally: turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural. Turn right for the clap clinic, turn left for the Hogarth mural You might pass a small group of patients smoking outside in the James Gibbs quadrangle; I remember seeing people who were visibly sick, in wheelchairs or on ventilators, puffing away.

Damian Thompson

The Neapolitan Horowitz

Classical

‘You play Bach your way, and I’ll play it his way.’ That remark by the Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska is often described as an ‘infamous put-down’, but it was really just a playful quip directed at Pablo Casals after they disagreed about trills. Anyway, the line has been running through my head all week because I’ve been listening to a recording of the Goldberg Variations – Wandowska’s signature piece – by a pianist who was quite determined to play them her way, not Bach’s. Maria Tipo was born in 1931 and died last year – the same dates as Alfred Brendel, though it’s hard to think of two pianists with less in common. In her heyday she was promoted as ‘the Neapolitan Horowitz’.

Deborah Ross

Beautiful if hagiographic portrait of Godard

Cinema

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague dramatises the (chaotic) making of Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic. It’s a film about a film, told mostly in the manner of that film, with the same kind of liveliness. Godard is as impossible to comprehend by the end as he was at the beginning It isn’t necessary to watch Breathless first by the way, although why not? It’s widely available on streaming platforms and, while it remains one of the most influential movies of all time, it’s just 90 minutes long. Christopher Nolan take note. You too, James Cameron. (His latest Avatar is three hours and 20 minutes, for heaven’s sake.) Linklater certainly recreates the look, feel and sound.

Angus Colwell

Our verdict on the new In Our Time presenter

Radio

Melvyn Bragg’s first ever intro to In Our Time in 1998 clocked in at 21 seconds. Misha Glenny, meanwhile, took one minute and four seconds to get through his. The initial public reaction to Glenny taking over from Bragg was positive. The prevailing sentiment was ‘thank Christ it isn’t Stephen Fry’. But now you felt as though you could hear two million people shouting ‘Get on with it!!’ at the radio as he stressed and elongated virtually every syllable. John Stuart Mill and his wife had been labouring over ‘On Liberty together for soooome yeeaarrss’. Then we were away. And he’s all right, thank God. With In Our Time, there is no upper bound on how haughty and arrogant a presenter should be I emphasise ‘all right’, though, because there were definitely problems.

Lloyd Evans

If this play is correct, the Foreign Office is a joke

Theatre

Safe Haven is a history play by Chris Bowers who worked for the Foreign Office and later for the UN as a human-rights activist. The two careers seem to be interchangeable. His drama follows an idealistic and oversensitive Oxford graduate, Catherine, who joins the diplomatic service during the first Gulf War in 1991. Catherine believes that the Foreign Office exists to throw money at basket-case countries that lack the maturity to govern themselves. The entire department acts as a sort of puppy rescue service for dysfunctional nations overseas. All her colleagues accept the wisdom of this approach even though it has the same effect as casting diamonds into quicksand. Catherine responds to historic events like a homeowner assessing a new lamp for the guest bedroom.

James Delingpole

Gripping: Amazon Prime’s The Tank reviewed

Television

I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank. It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see coming a mile off. But don’t be put off by its structural and narrative shortcomings. This is still a very watchable, gripping and sometimes moving portrait of men at war, and likely the most realistic ever depiction of a second world war tank crew. It’s far superior to the ludicrous Fury, where Brad Pitt plays an implausibly elderly tank commander, and where a single Sherman successfully takes on virtually an entire SS Panzer Grenadier regiment.

Richard Bratby

Seductive Debussy and Ravel from the RLPO

The Listener

Grade: A It’s a cliché that the best Spanish music was written by Frenchmen but it’s mostly true nonetheless, and here to prove the point is Domingo Hindoyan and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Debussy’s Iberia and Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole form the balmy, orange-scented heart of this Franco-Spanish album, featuring not a single note by an actual Spaniard. It’s a beaker full of the warm south; summer holiday music for these bleak, damp days. Four Spanish-themed French miniatures fill out the programme, including Ravel’s spicy orchestration of Alborada del gracioso. I’ll be honest, though, they had me at Chabrier’s Espana, that shameless little burst of sunshine from a composer who spent two decades as a pen-pusher in the Ministère de l’Intérieur.

Muriel Zagha

In praise of French brothels

Arts feature

In the days of the Belle Époque and Jazz Age, a trip to Paris would have included, for the discerning tourist, a visit to the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and the Comédie Française, but also to Le Chabanais, the One-Two-Two or Le Sphinx. There would have been no need to give the driver an address: they would have known exactly where to go, for these were Paris’s most luxurious brothels, famous the world over for their beautiful inhabitants, sumptuous interiors, outlandishly themed rooms and specially designed erotic furniture. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the abolition of the French maisons closes system – also known as maisons de tolérance – the network of officially sanctioned whore houses that sprang up in the early 19th century.

21 January 2026

Sam Leith

The depressed duck detective is back

Why is this low-grade Ayckbourn play in the West End?

Theatre

Woman in Mind is a dyspeptic sitcom set in 1986 starring Sheridan Smith as Susan, a moaning Home Counties housewife who slips into a Yorkshire accent when she gets cross. Susan sunbathes in her leafy garden sipping coffee and carping about everyone close to her. She loathes her scowling sister-in-law, Muriel. She can’t bear her husband Gerald, a cerebral vicar, and she refuses to revive their moribund sex life. She constantly badmouths their grown-up son, Ricky, who lives with a community of mute hermits in Hemel Hempstead. How did this scout-hut show reach the West End? In Act One we learn that the rules of Ricky’s community forbid him from speaking to his parents. But in Act Two the story changes.

James Walton

The worst Agatha Christie adaptation I can remember

Television

When it comes to Agatha Christie adaptations, there are normally two possible responses to the denouement. One is a deep satisfaction that the unlikeliest suspects were the inevitable culprits after all. The other’s the same as that – except approximately a quarter of an hour later you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘Hold on a minute…’ But with Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, neither was the case. The unlikeliest suspects remained laughably unlikely even as their guilt was revealed – and the ‘Hold on a minute’s came not after the show finished, but with pretty much every twist of a plot that, almost impressively, kept finding new levels of preposterousness to scale.

Daisy Dunn

Three cheers for Poems on the Underground

Radio

The idea for Poems on the Underground was thought up by a New Yorker 40 years ago this month. This may surprise you, given that the posters are synonymous with London. But then again, the creative possibilities of a transport system tend to be lost on its native commuters. Judith Chernaik, a lecturer in English literature, had recently relocated to the capital when she fell in love with the Tube: ‘Compared to New York it’s bliss – clean, safe and fast, too… if things are working of course.’ Ozymandias was soon riding the lines from Aldwych with Robert Burns In As You Like It, Orlando goes around the Forest of Arden dangling sonnets for Rosalind from trees.

Michael Hann

Why I will always have time for Bernard Butler

Pop

Bernard Butler has popped up a couple of times in this column, but not alone – once, with two fellow songwriter-guitarists as Butler, Blake & Grant; but also writing and performing with Jessie Buckley, to sublime effect. Over 30 years Butler has become one of pop’s great enablers. He’s worked on hit records, miss records and records that were never intended to be hits. He’s played with everyone, but has seldom sought much of a spotlight himself. Like Johnny Marr, he stepped away from a generational band – Suede – at the height of the mania for them. Like Marr – and unlike most others who step away from stardom and seek the shadows – he continued working, but always on his own terms.

Deborah Ross

The cruelty of H is for Hawk

Cinema

H is for Hawk is an adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Helen Macdonald who, following the sudden death of her beloved father, channels her grief through the training of a goshawk, Mabel. The film stars Claire Foy, who is superb, as is the nature photography, but is it right, keeping a wild animal captive, and depriving it of its natural behaviours because it helps you in some way? What’s in it for this gorgeous bird, I kept wondering. The cruelty is never addressed. This is solely about human need. We’re not even told who plays Mabel, so I can’t say what she has been in before or whether she has won any awards. (I would hope so; she is magnificent.

Richard Bratby

Rattle’s glorious Janacek

Classical

The Czech author Karel Capek is probably best known for his plays: high-concept speculative dramas such as R.U.R. and The Insect Play, bristling with wit and ideas. But he paid his bills as a newspaper columnist, and he seems to have been pleasantly surprised when Janacek approached him about turning his ‘conversational, fairly unpoetical and over-garrulous play’ (Capek’s words) The Makropulos Affair into an opera. Capek licensed Janacek to adapt it as the composer saw fit, in words that have the authentic ring of the working journalist – ‘because I simply wouldn’t get round to revising it myself’. No fear on that count. The Makropulos Affair is a brisk, nervy play but Janacek, at 69 (there’s hope for us all), was an old theatrical hand.

Mike Pitts

Dazzling: Hawaii, at the British Museum, reviewed

Exhibitions

Climb the Reading Room steps to reach the British Museum’s dazzling Hawaii exhibition, and you perform an obeisance. At the top is a representation of Ku, a larger-than-human god of war and chiefly power, carved in stylish fury from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. He once commanded a flight of stairs at the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. In Hawaii he would have looked down with royal authority from a stone temple mound. We pass below him into the show, it feels, only with his consent. This is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits For that we should offer thanks. At an important time for the museum (on which more below), this is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits.

Arthur I. Miller

What drama gets right and wrong about science

Arts feature

A few days after Tom Stoppard’s death last month, Michael Baum, a distinguished surgeon, wrote a letter to the Times. He explained how Stoppard’s discussion of chaos theory in Arcadia had inspired him to discover a new and far more effective chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. ‘Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia,’ wrote Baum. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between science and drama. I knew Tom Stoppard and when I was professor of history and philosophy of science at UCL, we had several illuminating conversations about art, science and theatre, which he recalled in a 1994 article entitled ‘Playing with Science’ for the journal Engineering and Science. ‘Science and art are nowadays beyond being like each other.