The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
You’re never too old to dance we are told nowadays. This encouraging injunction has been taken up by everyone from the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alessandra Ferri, who have found wondrously creative ways to compensate for their declining virtuosity and stamina, to septuagenarians who insist on bopping to Abba at their grandchildren’s wedding parties.
Do Belle and Sebastian have the most polite audience in pop? Normally when a pop singer leaves the stage to promenade through the audience, they are besieged. Even in seated venues most stars will make sure to take a security guard with them. I once saw bouncers drag women in red dresses away from Chris
Glenrothan is Brian Cox’s directorial debut and I wish there were a nicer way of putting it but, Brian: please, please, don’t give up the day job. The screenplay, meanwhile, is by David Ashton, whose only previous film credit seems to be Freddie as F.R.O.7 (1992), a James Bond spoof starring a six foot animated
Anyone for a spot of acoustic science? Apparently the distinctive colour of a musical note is concentrated almost wholly in the attack: the first split-second; the beginning of the sound wave. Obscure or somehow cut off, that first bite of a note or chord and what’s left sounds – well, not the same as everything
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a problem play. It debuted at the National in 1998 and ran for two years in the West End before transferring to Broadway. Since then, no UK producer has mounted a revival. Something must alarm investors. It’s a very chatty show. Three actors with three wooden chairs appear on a
HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those £10 a month subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per
Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer
In The Print is a docudrama about the bitter war between Rupert Murdoch and the unions in the mid-1980s. Murdoch was determined to computerise the production of his UK titles and to terminate the far left’s stranglehold on his business. Daily papers are vulnerable to last-minute strikes and his thieving employees made no secret of
How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually ‘sir’): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Last week I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits. And
Never let it be said that The Spectator fails to follow up an arts story. Long-term readers will recall that in the edition of 6 March 1711 Joseph Addison investigated the supply of live sparrows for the first production of Handel’s Rinaldo. ‘What, are they to be roasted?’ he asked, reasonably enough. No, they were
François Ozon’s The Stranger is an adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel about a clerk who – spoiler alert* – senselessly murders an Arab in broad daylight on a hot Algerian beach. Why did he do it? ‘It was because of the sun’ is all he can suggest. Existential ennui: that’s what’s at play here,
Crystal Pite is one of a handful of truly original choreographers today, extending the boundaries of her art form without going all doolally about trendy gender issues, AI or neuroscience. She is rooted in something more universal – the tension between conflict and connection, between what draws us together and what keeps us apart. ‘We
The Drama is the latest from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli whose films (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) always cause a stir, and this is no exception. It stars Hollywood big-hitters Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a happily engaged couple whose forthcoming wedding may not go ahead after one discovers a disturbing truth about the other.
Classic rock used to be an American radio genre made up of bluesy guitar bands from the past. It spawned Fathers’ Day compilation albums, a magazine and endless lists where ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Free Bird’ argued among themselves about which was the public’s favourite. But that’s not classic rock any longer; that’s
It’s not easy for a drama to be over-cautious and clumsy at the same time. Or to turn a real-life story that shocked (and, let’s face it, titillated) the nation into an oddly flat piece of television. So how did the much-hyped Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards manage to do both? The answer, I’d
Teeth ’ n’ Smiles is not quite a musical. David Hare’s 1975 play about rock’n’roll includes a handful of tunes performed by a group of failing musicians. It feels like several dramas rammed together. One strand concerns the aimless witter of instrumentalists who lounge around backstage discussing drugs and groupies. Another strand follows the lead
Grade: A– For some record collectors, the fun lies in comparing recordings of standard repertoire. For others, it’s more about exploring – discovering works that are extinct in the concert hall, but which the inscrutable economics of recording make viable. If you’ve a habit of forming modest crushes on wallflowers and unfashionable composers, the news
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
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
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