Arts
China wants robots to look after the elderly
An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can…
Goodwill will not save Claudia Winkleman’s new chat show
Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I…
For those of a nervous disposition, is Sinners worth it?
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners won four Oscars and was nominated for 16 and I’d yet to see it. Sometimes the labels…
Don’t miss it: Summerfolk, at the Olivier, reviewed
Dachniki meaning ‘dacha people’ is the Russian title of the National Theatre’s new production of Gorky’s sprawling 1905 drama. Nina…
Anthemic angst from The Twilight Sad
The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail…
Royal Opera’s Siegfried is magnificent
Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to…
Ovid puts today’s radicals to shame
It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected…
A versatile and virtuouso figure
Well, the Oscars have come and gone and we tend only to remember the anomalies. Julie Andrews winning the Oscar…
Lazy: America is Beautiful, Chapter 1 reviewed
Neil LaBute is one of America’s most provocative and interesting playwrights. His best-known work, The Shape of Things, was made…
Charming: The Other Bennet Sister reviewed
The Other Bennet Sister is to Pride and Prejudice what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet.…
Why the Goldberg Variations fill me with dread
Is Sir Andras Schiff becoming the Ken Dodd of the piano? In his later years, you’ll recall, the Yorick of…
Toni Servillo’s face cannot bore: La Grazia reviewed
Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia is about an ageing Italian president who is coming to the end of his seven-year term,…
The alluring mess of CMAT
The last time I saw CMAT – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – was in the middle of a grey afternoon at…
Today’s ballerinas are too perfect
‘Ballet is woman,’ Balanchine once gnomically pronounced. A remark not to be taken too literally, but essentially true. Like every…
A Ramses show that has little to do with Ramses
Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold is, let’s not shy away from it, a profit-seeking exhibition mounted by an entertainment business.…
Meet the world’s finest string quartet
Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to…
Uncanny mutations
Isn’t it odd the way we can start watching a streamer in absolute disgusted disbelief only to discover that we’re…
Life could be worse – you could be Jonathan Ross
‘Oh dear, you look like an old person,’ said Girl, greeting me in the interval of the Bach choir’s St…
I miss post-internet art
I got my first paid writing gig back in the early 2010s, for an online magazine fixated on the then-current…
Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula is tiresome
Interest in Dracula seems to go on for ever. Kip Williams has chosen Cynthia Erivo to star in his new…
The Peaky Blinders film is surprisingly literate
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the film that fans of the television show have long been waiting for, so…
Recordings have stunted us
Bring me my bow of burning gold; or failing that, the opening notes of Elgar’s Second Symphony. That’s how I’ve…
David Byrne has done it again
The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky?. The phrase works two…
