Arts Archives

Don’t miss it: Summerfolk, at the Olivier, reviewed

Theatre

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 very well. Gorky appears to have written the script as a feverish homage to Chekhov, who died in 1904, and he pinched numerous characters and plot twists from his mentor. The beautiful, vain and sexually inert Varvara is a copy of Yelena in Uncle Vanya. Kaleria, the nervous actress who performs amateur verse for her friends, is inspired by Nina in The Seagull.

Graeme Thomson

Anthemic angst from The Twilight Sad

Pop

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 be full of the joys of spring, although they approach personal crisis – and catharsis – in very different ways. It’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth album by Scottish indie-rock band the Twilight Sad, is their first in seven years. During that hiatus lead singer and lyricist James Graham was dealing with his mother’s decline and eventual demise from early onset dementia, while also becoming a father.

Richard Bratby

Royal Opera’s Siegfried is magnificent

Opera

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 Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy? Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional.

Alex Diggins

Ovid puts today’s radicals to shame

Arts feature

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 mouth or languidly caresses her cheekbone with its tail. In the room behind me, another woman stares fiercely back. Her shoulders are bunched with muscle, arms stiff at her sides, like a nightclub brawler about to nut someone. But it’s the bull’s horns sprouting from her forehead, and the mane of matted fur marching down her back, that make it hard to meet her gaze.

18 March 2026

Lloyd Evans

Lazy: America is Beautiful, Chapter 1 reviewed

Theatre

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 Theatre. This complex arrangement sends a signal that LaBute is a mercurial and elusive artist whose fans must chase across London to savour the full richness of his talent. The lesbian stares and leers aggressively while her victim cowers and bleats in protest The first show, Chapter 1, consists of three unconnected skits about sexual jealousy.

James Walton

Charming: The Other Bennet Sister reviewed

Television

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 across as smug and snooty According to Mary Bennet’s opening voiceover: ‘It is a sad fact of life that if a young woman is unlucky enough to come into the world without expectations, she had better do all she can to ensure she is born beautiful. To be poor and handsome is misfortune enough; but to be penniless and plain is a hard fate indeed.

Sam Leith

Glorious: Resident Evil – Requiem reviewed

Why the Goldberg Variations fill me with dread

Classical

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 going to perform? And fair enough, because even with no advertised programme, the Wigmore Hall was sold out. Clearly, a lot of people will gladly pay to hear Schiff play anything at all, and part of me hoped he’d launch into Chopsticks or Richard Clayderman’s Ballade pour Adeline. But no, Schiff had a far crueller joke up his sleeve. He walked out without a word and began the ‘Aria’ from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. A purr of happy recognition ran through the room.

Deborah Ross

Toni Servillo’s face cannot bore: La Grazia reviewed

Cinema

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 Divo and, for television, The New Pope – this is sober, melancholic and elegiac, and possibly the better for it. Plus, it stars Toni Servillo, which is always a win. I’ve just checked his back-catalogue and can confirm: always, always, always a win.

Michael Hann

The alluring mess of CMAT

Pop

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 – big enough to have screens at the side of the stage for the 10,000 people watching, who knew almost every word of her songs. CMAT’s appeal, I think, is that her aesthetic is that of an ordinary woman acting out and acting up the Charli XCX image. The latter had said that her ‘brat’ aesthetic was: ‘Just, like, a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter, and, like, a strappy white top. With no bra. That’s, like, kind of all you need.

Rupert Christiansen

Today’s ballerinas are too perfect

Dance

‘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 quite different. First for me came Margot Fonteyn, of course – though I saw her only through the autumn of her career, when her body was stiffening and she relied on some divine inner grace to make an effect. (Meredith Daneman’s magnificent biography illuminates this weirdly complex woman, with her steely self-control, enormous generosity and poisonous political views.

Mike Pitts

A Ramses show that has little to do with Ramses

Exhibitions

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. Neither does the other gold and jewellery on display: his tomb was looted long ago, and all that remains is his recycled cedar box, sarcophagus and the king himself. A notable offer in the expansive retail zone is the chance to have your name drawn on papyrus by a robot. But go forewarned, and you will enjoy the experience.

Richard Bratby

Meet the world’s finest string quartet

Arts feature

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 that makes the Takacs Quartet so fascinating. A relocation from the eastern bloc to the free West, the retirement of all but one of the founding members – and yet 51 years later the Takacs Quartet is still, recognisably, the same group. Some would say that it’s currently the finest string quartet in the world. But throughout the story, there has been one constant: the group’s cellist, Andras Fejer.

11 March 2026

Rod Liddle

Harry Styles has a cute voice

The Listener

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 plays to his strengths. So what you get is lyrics as fabulously inane as on ‘Watermelon Sugar’ but very little of the pleasant tunes which accompanied that and his many other hits. There are some interesting rhythmic textures for sure, and a surfeit of old-skool playground synths. There is also a surfeit of repetition, a necessity for the oeuvre and a polite nod towards rap.

James Delingpole

Life could be worse – you could be Jonathan Ross

Television

‘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 to rock gigs on my Guzzi.’ And now here we were surrounded by music lovers of a noticeably certain age and not feeling at all out of place. Still, it could be worse. At least I’m not Jonathan Ross. In my youth Wossie was a sort of role model. I coveted his fame, his cheeky chappy banter, his Jean Paul Gaultier suits. What could possibly be more delightful a career than being on TV, talking to movie stars and being paid lots of money for it?

Digby Warde-Aldam

I miss post-internet art

Exhibitions

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’ Jay Jopling’, which counted for a rare laugh. Yet the tone was very much in tune with the art we covered. Whether it was video, sculpture, photography or pretty much any other medium, it was chiefly concerned with the intrusion of digital technology into – the style guide’s punctuation, not mine – ‘real’ life.

Lloyd Evans

Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula is tiresome

Theatre

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 few orchestral hits recorded on tape. Erivo plays all 23 roles and her performance is simultaneously filmed and broadcast to the audience on TV screens dotted around the theatre. This creates two problems. First, Erivo can’t see or interact with the crowd because she’s encircled by wardrobe assistants and cameramen who swarm around her like gnats. Secondly, the audience are expected to look at the screens and not at the stage. This is odd.

Deborah Ross

The Peaky Blinders film is surprisingly literate

Cinema

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 credits. It’s Cillian Murphy imploring audiences not to give away any spoilers and ruin it for everyone else ‘by order of the Peaky Blinders!’. There will be no spoilers here today. I have no wish to get my face slashed. There will be no spoilers here today.

Richard Bratby

Recordings have stunted us

Classical

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 back, though, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite that tension in a live performance – not from Pesek in Liverpool or Barenboim at the Proms, and not from this most recent encounter, with Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Bristol. So where am I getting it from? Recordings, presumably, and the long-embedded imprint of two boyhood idols, John Barbirolli and Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley.

Graeme Thomson

David Byrne has done it again

Pop

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 art lore. Read it aloud, however, and it becomes ‘Who Is This Guy?’, a more pointed title for an artist who has always seemed – to reference an old Talking Heads song – one of rock’s more slippery people. At the second of two recent Glasgow dates, both interpretations seem to fit. In Talking Heads, Byrne was a jerky, remote presence, aloof to the point of alien.

Simon Ings

The art of ageing

Arts feature

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 All-Bran breakfast cereal. ‘One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.’ The point being that ageing is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.

4 March 2026

Deborah Ross

Stunningly original: Sound of Falling reviewed

Cinema

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 tell you? I just love a beginning, middle and end – this is compelling and mesmerises even when it confounds. I think it’s saying that the past inhabits us all, which isn’t stunningly original, but the film itself is.

James Walton

Bonkers: Young Sherlock reviewed

Television

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 Netflix show that doesn’t so much combine slapstick, violence, cheery banter, mean banter, mystery, media satire and dark broodings on life, as simply shuttle between them. Now comes Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie, where again anybody searching for dramatic unity will search in vain.

Tom Slater

Morrissey is pop’s prophet of England

Pop

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: withering, self-aggrandising, hilarious. With a European tour and a new album about to be released, Morrissey is in a score-settling mood. And with good reason. Make-Up Is a Lie, out yesterday, is his 14th album. But it wasn’t supposed to be. Bonfire of Teenagers, originally slated for release in 2023, still remains on the shelf, following rows with his former record label. As does another unreleased album. He claims it’s cancellation.

Lloyd Evans

Fans of George Eliot are in for a shock: Bird Grove at Hampstead Theatre reviewed

Theatre

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 human situation starts the play. It’s instantly gripping. Mary Ann is in the drawing room being treated for headaches by a French mesmerist along with two wealthy radicals, Mr and Mrs Bray, who encourage her political activism. Her father, Robert, introduces his guests to each other and invites them to stay for tea. This fascinating glimpse of her early life shows George Eliot as a surly, arrogant, spoilt and heartless pest A hilariously awkward party ensues.

Richard Bratby

Bracingly inventive: Phantasy by the Piatti Quartet reviewed

The Listener

Grade: A You think you know a musical genre; then a new recording comes along and pulls something unexpected out of the bag. Walter Willson Cobbett (1847-1937) was an improbable culture-hero; a belt tycoon from Blackheath who devoted his spare time (and most of his profits) to domestic music-making, commissioning major British composers of his day and editing the single most readable reference book ever written about chamber music. Two ‘Phantasies’ from Cobbett’s competitions – reasonably familiar masterpieces of English pastoralism by Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells – are the starting point for this imaginative disc from the Piatti Quartet.

Michael Hann

Flexible and imaginative: Wednesday at the Roundhouse reviewed

Pop

How is it that two things that are fundamentally the same can be completely different? Two bands, each harking back to a specific historical reference point in heavy music, each using distortion and volume as an important part of their presentation. Standing just outside the big old turntable shed’s main room you could just hear them and easily imagine Wednesday and Airbourne following each other on some festival stage and sharing the same audience. Not so much inside the room, though. Wednesday, however they might care to describe themselves, are currently a grunge band, but with a singer-songwriter, Karly Hartzman, who dwells more in introspection and observation than rage and self-flagellation.

Oliver Basciano

A parade of monstrous and toxic generals: Beatriz Gonzalez reviewed

Exhibitions

You might be forgiven for thinking that a charity sale of particularly kitschy furniture has been set up just past the entrance of the Barbican Art Gallery. There’s a chunky brown dressing table, an ornate table several decades out of fashion and a trio of bedside tables. They are piled haphazardly and on each is a garishly painted picture, invariably a pastiche of a historical painting or a Biblical scene. Raphael’s 1512 ‘Madonna and Child with St John’ rendered slightly sloppily where the mirror of the bureau once was; ‘The Last Supper’ on the table top; three popes in profile staring impassively from the tops of the nightstands.

Richard Bratby

‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’

Arts feature

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. ‘All he can say is, “Go, then.