Arts
Vanessa Downing and Geoff Morrell in Black is the New White
I should have written about this play earlier; it is on now at the Sydney Theatre Company Wharf 1. Black…
When will I ever learn?
Oh, Pirates of the Caribbean, I have given you every chance down the years. Every chance. I am always hopeful.…
Being and nothingness
Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art…
Around the horn
The concert began with a flourish and a honk. Well, of course it did. Telemann wrote his last Ouverture-Suite in…
Crime and punishment
‘Hell is better than what I personally witnessed,’ says Ben Ferencz, who was one of the American troops sent in…
The great rock’n’roll swindles
Birds have been giving me a lot of grief of late. There’s Tappy — the blue tit who has built…
PWR BTTM: Pageant
How about some queercore garage punk? PWR BTTM — the name means something empowering to do with buggery — are…
Period drama
Harpsichordists are supposed to make love, not war: Sir Thomas Beecham famously compared the sound they make to ‘two skeletons…
Death wish
Anyone who thinks they have experienced absolute boredom, or even doubts that such a state can exist, should go to…
Sado-erotic review
The Olivier describes Salomé by Yaël Farber as a ‘new’ play. Not quite. It premièred in Washington a couple of…
Making waves
Hokusai wanted to paint everything, says Laura Freeman, and at 70 he was only just beginning
Making waves
The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much…
Taryn Fiebig for Pinchgut Opera
Baroque opera is increasingly popular in Australia, particularly in recent years through the work of Pinchgut Opera. This administratively tiny…
The play’s the thing
Donald Winnicott once told a colleague that Tolstoy had been perversely wrong to write that happy families were all alike…
No laughing matter
We love Amy Schumer. Fact. And we love Goldie Hawn. Fact. But can we love Snatched? Not so much, if…
League of nations
‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini…
Roving eye
Photography has many genres, even more than painting, and most photographers achieve fame by focusing on one of them. There…
Moment of truth
Two extremes of the listening experience were available on Monday on Radio 4. The day began conventionally enough with Start…
An artist of the quickening world
What is it about Yorkshire, particularly Leeds, that it has bred or trained such a succession of famous modern sculptors?…
Police force
I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…
False start
When a composer begins an opera, they create a world. You don’t need a full-scale overture: the tear-stained violins that…
Killing time
Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed…
A method to his madness
His cartoons were semi-serious responses to societal problems, as this extract from Adam Hart-Davis’s new book shows
Bingeing on Bach
Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession —…
Teenage kicks
Imagine living in a country where the average age is under 16 (in the UK it’s currently 40 and increasing)…
