Arts
A fun evening that finished early enough for dinner – neither a given in Handel
On a sward of AstroTurf somewhere off Silicon Roundabout, Mountain Media is hosting its summer party and, well, it’s the…
This adaptation of Miss Julie is a textbook lesson in how to kill a classic
Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls…
No fear
Hereditary is the horror film that has been described as a ‘ride of pure terror’ and likened to The Exorcist…
You vote for my pupil, I’ll vote for yours – the truth about music competitions
A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and…
Meet ‘the queen of shitty robots’
Older readers will perhaps recall the once popular Sunday evening TV programme Scrapheap Challenge, in which oily, boilersuited blokes competed…
Giorgio de Chirico Gare Montparnasse
The other morning, the Director of MoMA from New York, Glenn D Lowry was on ABC Breakfast. He was knowledgable…
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
Why has the National given over its largest stage to one of the nation’s smallest talents?
The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been…
A full-on Freudian Oklahoma! at Grange Park Opera
Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side…
Longborough continues to be a refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing idiotic productions
Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off…
Exhilaratingly original, C4’s Flowers is much more than just a ‘dark comedy’
On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines,…
Women can now make dull formulaic franchise films too! Hurrah! Ocean’s 8 reviewed
Ocean’s 8 is the all-female spin-off of the all-male Ocean’s trilogy and it’s a sop, with a third act that…
Rod Liddle is wrong: if anything we still hear too much from male presenters on Radio 4
I don’t know which day Rod Liddle travelled down from the northeast and found nothing but women’s voices cluttering up…
The best and most extensive exhibition on Napoleon in three decades
The Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has a new exhibition that I believe to be the best…
I don’t get why people worship Bach
I don’t get Johann Sebastian Bach. I mean, I get that he was good — no Mozart, sure, but definitely…
Michael Lewis as Rigoletto
Sir Walter Scott published The Bride of Lammermoor in 1819 as one of his hugely successful Waverley novels which captured…
Musically, politically and culturally, Kanye West is uncontrollable and unignorable
Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the…
Gripping piece of comic-horror nonsense: Killer Joe at Trafalgar Studios reviewed
Tracy Letts begins his trailer-trash comedy Killer Joe with the corniest of platitudes. A runaway druggie named Chris Smith needs…
Garsington makes as good a case as you can for Strauss’s frothy Capriccio
‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard…
Edward Bawden is deservedly one of Britain’s most popular 20th century artists
‘When I’m on good form,’ Edward Bawden told me, ‘I get to some point in the design and I laugh…
Cynical, one-dimensional and oddly colourless: Jurassic World – Fallen Kingdom reviewed
Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would…
Why is this Israeli drama such a hit with Palestinians? Because it tells the truth
‘The rule in our household is: if a TV series hasn’t got subtitles, it’s not worth watching,’ a friend told…
Why is Today losing its audience? Because it doesn’t care about its listeners
Headlines announcing that Radio 4’s flagship Today programme is losing its audience while Radio 3’s Breakfast has put on numbers…
Cold and confusing: Garsington’s Die Zauberflöte reviewed
The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive…
A smidge of self-indulgence amid the power and grace: Akram Khan’s Xenos reviewed
‘Comedy Sunil Lanba, Salman Quaraishi, Omar Syed…’ Names play from a crackling gramophone. We hear what they were before the…
