Arts
The last survivor of The Birthday Party’s 1958 première remembers the traumatic first night
‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at…
David Hare is the kind of second-rate artist who flourished under Stalin
Shortly after my rave review of McMafia eight weeks ago, I got a long message from an old friend chastising…
A colossal bore: Royal Opera’s Carmen reviewed
The new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera has received mixed reviews. It shouldn’t have done. They should…
Why do sweet, tender young lefties like MGMT love the decade of Reagan and Bush Snr?
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the…
Radio’s role in winning the Cold War
Some of us grew up worrying about reds under the bed, which was perhaps not as foolish as all that…
‘I was really, really scared’: Jonas Kaufmann opens up about his #MeToo moment
‘Hi, it’s Jonas.’ When the great tenor rings from Vienna, I ask if there are any topics he wants me…
I liked Shape of Water well enough but Lady Bird is where it’s at
Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Greta Gerwig with a plot synopsis that need not detain…
Why do critics claim to adore the waffle-fest that is Long Day’s Journey into Night?
It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a…
Paula and Helen Thomson in Top Girls
Caryl Churchill is getting on a bit; I know because she was born just two days after me. She is…
Are cruise liners the solution to the housing crisis?
Looking at the sketchbook of William Whitelock Lloyd, a soldier-artist who joined a P&O liner after surviving the Anglo-Zulu War,…
Lemons and pebbles are as important to Kettle’s Yard as the art
When I first visited Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, I was shown around by Jim Ede, its founder and creator. This wasn’t…
Channel 4 marked women’s suffrage with an episode of the Secret Life of Five-Year-Olds
To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage — if a little oddly — Channel 4 on Tuesday brought us…
Yet another dud Un ballo in maschera: Opera North’s new production reviewed
A chaste act of adultery and a silent conversation: these are the encounters at the heart of Un ballo in…
Bold, in its way, but Ben Whishaw is ill-suited to Shakespeare: Julius Caesar reviewed
Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two…
Devastating but also more involving than you’d ever think possible: Loveless reviewed
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is, indeed, devastatingly loveless, as well as devastatingly pitiless, which does not sound hopeful. Yet it is…
BBC Arabic’s version of Woman’s Hour is rather different to Radio 4’s
When the BBC’s Arabic-language network went out on air for the first time 80 years ago, on 3 January 1938,…
Rod Liddle finds his inner SJW listening to Justin Timberlake
Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history…
Railways and the Raj
Many of our acquaintances now rarely watch 7.30, partly out of irritation with the succession of whingers and trade union…
What’s it like being the only right-wing comic?
Geoff Norcott is lean, talkative, lightly bearded and intense. Britain’s first ‘openly Conservative’ comedian has benefited enormously from the Brexit…
The joy of buses
It’s a pity Will Self didn’t embark on his bus tour round Britain before the Brexit vote. If he had,…
Gursky’s subject is humanity: prosaic, mundane, extremely messy His colossal, panoramic pictures are brilliant and lowering at the same time
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me…
Celebrating Carter was one of the most energising musical occasions in years
Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there…
The worst thing about Piers Morgan is that he deserves his success
Perhaps you missed the fuss because there has been so little publicity about it. But last week, at Davos, the…
There are many scenes in this overlong play that consist, literally, of drivel: John reviewed
The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’…
Wonderfully fixating and wholly non-formulaic: Phantom Thread reviewed
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a lush psychosexual drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a pampered, tyrannical, pernickety 1950s couturier…
