Arts
The power of BBC’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
It’s been a good week for fans of TV dramas that are set partly in Syria, feature poetry-lovers confronting extreme…
Irritatingly, Wet Leg’s new album is pretty good
Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of…
Brilliant rewrite of Shakey: Hamlet, at Buxton Opera House, reviewed
‘There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,’ said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot…
Magnificent: Stevie Wonder at BST Hyde Park reviewed
The highs of Stevie Wonder’s Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated,…
Beguiling grot, TfL surrealism and Insta-art: contemporary art roundup
Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition…
The podcast of the summer
The cover painting for The Specialist, a new podcast from Sotheby’s, looks like a scene from Mad Men. The people…
Why has the world turned on the Waltz King?
On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and…
A touch of the unthinkable
The other night we watched one of the greatest American films ever made. Network was directed by Sidney Lumet to…
A startling inversion of the original opera: The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor in Aix en Provence reviewed
On the continent this summer, new operas from two of Britain’s most important composers. Oliver Leith likes guns, animals and…
A bland, reverential portrait of a socialist martyr: Nye at the Olivier Theatre reviewed
The memory of Nye Bevan is being honoured at the National Theatre. Having made his name as a Marxist firebrand,…
Turgid, vacuous, portentous: The Sandman reviewed
One of the great things about getting older is no longer feeling under any obligation to try to like stuff…
A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed
Grade: A– There’s a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the…
The joys of mudlarking
Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past.…
A latter-day exercise in Dada: Nature Theater of Oklahoma reviewed
What to make of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which this week made its British debut at the Queen Elizabeth…
A theatrical one-woman show: Billy Eilish at the OVO Hydro, Glasgow reviewed
Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance,…
Definitely the film of the week: Four Letters of Love reviewed
In the brief lull between last week’s summer blockbuster (Superman) and next week’s (Fantastic Four) you may wish to catch…
The Alfred Hitchcock of British painting
Carel Weight, the inimitable painter of London life and landscape, was my godfather. I remember a clownish-faced elderly man with…
The transcendence of style
Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: a play in five evictions is a superlative piece of theatre and it demonstrates unambiguously that…
How to holiday White Lotus-style: Billionaire Playground reviewed
Today’s television is notably fond of presenting us with very rich people to both despise and wish we lived like.…
A delight: Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park reviewed
We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many…
Watch the 1978 version instead: Superman reviewed
My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film…
A contradictory staging, but the music floods the ear with splendour: Semele at the Royal opera reviewed
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t.…
What we get wrong about modernism
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: ‘we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the…
Grayson Perry has pulled off another coup at the Wallace Collection
This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it ‘awkward and snarky’,…
More drama-school showcase than epic human tragedy: Evita reviewed
Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the…
