Arts
Huge Fun: Le Carnaval de Venise reviewed
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, but there’s still time for one last opera festival. Vache Baroque popped…
Picasso’s ravishing work for the ballet
Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new storehouse in Stratford’s Olympic Park are being enthralled by an atmospherically lit…
The time Spike Milligan tried to kill me
The theatre impresario Michael White rang me one day in 1964, and said he was presenting a play at the…
The brilliance of BBC Alba
During lockdown, a friend and I moved into a flat that had a difficult relationship with the TV aerial. Ineptitude…
In defence of Notting Hill Carnival
This isn’t going to be a piece celebrating the rich cultural tapestry of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, sombrely expressing the importance…
An English Chekhov: The Gathered Leaves at Park200 reviewed
Chekhov with an English accent. That’s how Andrew Keatley’s play, The Gathered Leaves, begins. The setting is a country house…
Fails to outshine the original: The Roses reviewed
The Roses is a remake of The War of the Roses (1989), the diabolically funny black bitter comedy that was…
A revelation: Delius’s Mass of Life at the Proms reviewed
Regarding Frederick Delius, how do we stand? In the 1930s, Sir Henry Wood believed that Proms audiences much preferred Delius…
Dark and ravaged places
Destiny was the first work commissioned under Anne-Louise Sarks’ directorship of the Melbourne Theatre Company and it’s appropriate that it…
A world away
Remember Gus the Theatre Cat in T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats? He says that he has acted…
The decline of Edinburgh International Festival
Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing.…
The mystical hold of the 1990s over Gen Z
At some point during the past decade and a half, it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age.…
A Brigadoon better than most of us ever hoped to see
The village of Brigadoon rises from the Scotch mists once every 100 years, and revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical…
Alien: Earth is wantonly disrespectful to the canon
I once spent a delightful weekend in Madrid with the co-producer of Alien. His name was David Giler (now dead,…
The Seeds are primitive but magnificent
Plus: am I the only person who finds M.J. Lenderman’s voice whiny?
Glorious: Good Night, Oscar, at the Barbican, reviewed
Good Night, Oscar is a biographical play about Oscar Levant, a famous pianist who was also a noted wit and…
The masterpieces on your doorstep
I do not, if I can help it, catch a train to anywhere on a Sunday. Yet there I was…
I’ve had it with Anselm Kiefer
August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on…
Shaggy dog tale
I thought it would be impossible to make a bad film about a dog but the production team for The…
Ultimately hard to resist: Elbow reviewed
Our relationships with bands are often very like our relationships with people. Some are pure and lasting love. Some start…
Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ,…
Woody Allen without the zingers: Materialists reviewed
Celine Song’s first film, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists.…
I love how awful My Oxford Year is
The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes.…
The rise of cringe
No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993…
