Arts
Mad Men – The Opera
Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti begins not with a prelude, but a jingle. In Matthew Eberhardt’s production a trio of…
Cressida Campbell Still life with dragonfly 2016-17
Emerging from a gifted family, Cressida Campbell is now one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. She chose an unusual medium…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Comedy of terrors
Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is nearly two hours of men in bad suits bickering, but if you have…
Saints and sinners
Any rival reality-TV makers watching Channel 5 on Thursday will, I suspect, have been both mystified and slightly embarrassed at…
Seeing the light
Dance is an ephemeral art. It keeps few proper records of its products. Reputations are written in rumours and reviews.…
The bad sex award
Simon Stephens gives his plays misleading titles. Nuclear War, Pornography and Punk Rock contained little trace of their advertised ingredients.…
Xavier de Maistre
Gracie Fields used to sing: ‘I took my harp to a party but nobody asked me to play’. I can’t…
Gathering storm
Sally Potter’s The Party, which unfolds in real time during a politician’s soirée to celebrate her promotion, is just 71…
Raw materials
‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’…
When in Rome…
I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400…
Make mine a double
If two concert pianists are performing a work written for two grand pianos, there are two ways you can position…
Soap opera
Previously on Giulio Cesare… English Touring Opera’s new season caters cannily to the box-set generation by chopping Handel’s Egyptian power-and-politics…
Perishable goods
Labour of Love is the new play by James Graham, the poet laureate of politics. We’re in a derelict…
Cabbages and kings
The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919)…
Faulty connection
There’s no doubting her passion for the programme of which she is now chief of staff. Talking to Roger Bolton…
Pretty vacant
Alice is at it again. Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 three-act ballet began another sell-out run at Covent Garden last week. It’s…
Back to the future
Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner first came out in cinemas 35 years ago, which I was going to say probably…
Mourning glory
On the face of it, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds aren’t exactly a natural fit with the O2. Cave’s…
The Merry Widow
Not everyone celebrates a 55th anniversary, but if you are a national ballet company at the peak of its form,…
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Vice and virtue
‘Can the ultimate betrayal ever be forgiven?’ screams the publicity for The Judas Passion, transforming a Biblical drama into a…
Pole position
Did you know that they used to make the Fiat 126 in the Eastern bloc? They did, apparently. There was…
Verbal diarrhoea
In Beckett’s Happy Days a prattling Irish granny is buried waist-deep, and later neck-deep, in a refuse tip whose detritus…
Savage beauty
Could it, at times, be frustrating to have taken one of the world’s most famous photographs? Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl’…
