Arts
The barbarity of this man
It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of…
Sordid, ugly and threadbare: Jimmy Carr – Natural Born Killer reviewed
Here’s an offensive joke: ‘Jimmy Carr gets paid to do a Netflix special.’ All right, it’s not original – I…
Tennis romance that doesn’t contain much tennis: Challengers reviewed
It sounds straightforward enough: a tennis romance starring Zendaya, idol of the mid-teen demographic and last seen riding a sandworm…
Cheesy remake of Our Mutual Friend: London Tide, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed
Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more…
Taylor Swift’s new album is exhausting
How to explain the supercharged star power of Taylor Swift? An undeniably gifted artist, Swift’s albums 1989, Folklore and Evermore,…
How to live off the land for a year
Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge…
You could have built a tent city from all the red chinos: Aci by the River reviewed
The Thames cruise for which Handel composed his Water Music in 1717 famously went on until around 4 a.m. The…
The latest Venice Biennale is ideologically and aesthetically bankrupt
Last week’s opening of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale marks a watershed for the art world. In much…
‘I couldn’t afford loo roll’: Bruce Robinson on being skint, Zeffirelli’s advances and Withnail’s return
Bruce Robinson is ramming a huge log into the grate of his ancient fireplace in mud-clogged Herefordshire. He’s 77 and…
The music of their eloquence
It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done…
Entirely pointless and extremely pleasant: House Flipper 2 reviewed
Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them…
Player Kings proves that Shakespeare can be funny
Play-goers, beware. Director Robert Icke is back in town, and that means a turgid four-hour revival of a heavyweight classic…
How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become
The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions.…
Baffling and vile: ETO’s Manon Lescaut reviewed
In 1937, John Barbirolli took six pieces by Henry Purcell and arranged them for an orchestra of strings, horns and…
Should beautiful actors be allowed to play those with plain faces?
Sometimes I Think About Dying is one of those titles you want to shout back at – what? Only sometimes?…
Danny Dyer’s new C4 programme is deeply odd
Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a…
Why garage punk is plainly the apogee of human achievement
How is it that a group that sounds like the Hives are selling out the Apollo? In a world configured…
We have lost an unforgettable teacher and one of the greatest living critics
Tanner, the critic RICHARD BRATBY Michael Tanner (1935-2024), who died earlier this month, had such a vital mind and stood…
Somersaulting beauty of the songmaker
It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from…
Better than expected (but my expectations were low): Back to Black reviewed
When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’…
I’m ashamed that I used to think ABBA wasn’t cool
One of the joys of listening to archive BBC interviews with pop stars is the chance to hear long-discarded hipster…
Grey, gloomy, and utterly joyless: Ripley reviewed
If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture…
What would Tanner say?
On the train home from the Royal Festival Hall I learned of the death of Michael Tanner, who wrote this…
The mayhem ‘Born Slippy’ provoked felt both poignant and cathartic: Underworld, at Usher Hall, reviewed
On the same night Underworld played the second of two shows at the Usher Hall, next door at the Traverse…
In defence of noise music
It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics –…
