Arts
Why has it all gone wrong for The Night Manager?
The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes;…
Brendan Fraser is the king of the everyman: Rental Family reviewed
Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo. He accepts employment with an agency that…
This Royal Opera Traviata is no ordinary revival
First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A…
Does Tate’s director care about art?
I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth…
The art of the transatlantic liner
Some time in the next few weeks, a great ocean liner will be lost at sea. One of the greatest,…
Being Hermann Göring
Nuremberg Directed by James Vanderbilt Starring Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Rami Malek, Leo Woodall Before last Monday, the most recent…
Remembrance of things past
It’s easy to forget the artistic range of people who have died recently. Susie Figgis, in charge of casting the…
What has happened to the Paris Opéra Ballet?
Freighted by a 350-year history, the Paris Opéra Ballet is a behemoth of an institution – lavishly subsidised by the…
Ruthlessly manipulative: Hamnet reviewed
Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of…
Cadavers will always captivate. Museums need to chill out
Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been…
Lucy Worsley’s sleuthing is rather impressive
Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all…
Johnny Rotten’s still got it
Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad…
The magnificence of Beare’s Chamber Music Festival
The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one…
Why has the National got it in for Oirish peasants?
The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers…
The genius of Morton Feldman
To accompany an exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2004, a…
Rebels and Rivals
It’s funny how implicated we are in the places from which we take our bearings. Memories of the Lexington-Concord bridge,…
An opera that will actually make you laugh
‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges…
Sublime: Song Sung Blue reviewed
Song Sung Blue is a musical biopic of the real-life Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act and…
One for hardcore Stoppard fans: Indian Ink reviewed
Unusual. After the press night of Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, no one leapt up and cheered. The crowd applauded…
Enough with torture-porn TV
Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway –…
Constable, not Turner, changed the course of painting
Flanders and Swann; Tom and Jerry. Some things come in pairs. Like Turner and Constable, even though our two most…
Who let Men Without Hats make a new album?
Grade: D A Montreal band led by a Ukrainian/Canadian called Ivan Doruschuk, with a histrionic baritone, famous solely for having…
Am I a useful idiot visiting Uzbekistan’s first art biennial?
In the ruins of a 16th-century mosque, in the heart of the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara, dozens of abstract…
The full range of diversions
Who can say what a world of Christmases will unfold this year? Sir Keir Starmer was knighted for services to…
The thrill of Stanley Spencer
‘Places in Cookham seem to me possessed by a sacred presence of which the inhabitants are unaware,’ wrote Stanley Spencer.…
