Arts
Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier
Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…
Stimulating little exhibition: Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites reviewed
Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another?…
A spectacular failure: Royal Ballet’s MaddAddam reviewed
Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The…
How did Wolf Hall escape the attentions of the BBC’s diversity commissars?
Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed…
What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is
Finally, a taste of the authentic Bob Dylan live experience. On the two previous occasions that I’ve seen Dylan, in…
Heart-warming but safe biographical drama: Going for Gold, at Park90, reviewed
Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing…
Yes, Anora is as good as everyone says it is
Sean Baker’s Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is hotly tipped to win big at the Oscars and…
Why is Fauré not more celebrated?
It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and…
Striving of the individual soul
The Australian Ballet seems to have had a smash hit with Oscar. Not only did the ballet, choreographed by Christopher…
We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong
You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they…
I listened to a solid week of Woman’s Hour…
I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and…
A flop: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button carries a strap-line, ‘an unordinary musical’. Perhaps the word ‘extraordinary’ is simply too banal…
Fails to ignite: Royal Opera’s Tales of Hoffmann reviewed
I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t love Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Everything – everything – is stacked against this…
Top tosh: The Diplomat reviewed
The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of…
Is it meant to be a comedy? Gladiator II reviewed
It’s nearly 25 years since Ridley Scott’s Gladiator came out and you’ve probably been wondering what happened to the little…
Perfectly imperfect: Evan Dando, at Islington Assembly Hall, reviewed
‘Can I have a photo with you, please?’ It’s the most embarrassing question you can ask of someone you’re interviewing.…
Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows
Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…
William Morris’s debt to Islam
When William Morris was born in Walthamstow, in 1834, it was little more than a clump of marshland at the…
Narrative robbery
So the silly season, the festive season when we celebrate the incarnation of the Good is looming, yet again, and…
Spy-drama porn: Sky’s The Day of the Jackal reviewed
All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three…
One beauty – one turkey: Wexford Festival Opera reviewed
‘Theatre within Theatre’ was the theme of the 2024 Wexford Festival and with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Critic, that’s…
Radio 4’s Lord Lucan series is rescued by a brilliant narrator
It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become…
A riveting show crammed with the kind of risky gags rarely heard on stage these days
How To Survive Your Mother is a play based on a memoir by political dramatist Jonathan Maitland. He portrays himself…
Sad but beautiful exhibition of Afghanistan’s war rugs
Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah…
Too cautious and wildly over the top at the same time: Paddington in Peru reviewed
Toy Story or The Godfather? Which way would Paddington in Peru go? Would the third instalment of a much-cherished series…
