Arts
This earth-shattering work
What a strange thing popular culture is. Back in the 1970s a lot of people might have affected to despise…
Director’s cut
The unlovely Rose Theatre in Kingston is a modest three-storey eyesore. The concrete foyer looks like an exercise area on…
The Stradivarius of models
‘What advice would you give to your younger self?’ has become a popular question in interviews in recent years. It’s…
Drunk on devotion
The intimate acoustic show can denote many things for an established artist. One is that, in the infamous euphemism coined…
Wing and a prayer
The Miracle Club, which is about a group of Irish women who travel to Lourdes, has a magnificent cast –…
Beyond the cringe
Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from…
Champion of the female sex
‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these…
Immaterial world
VR ‘immersion’ is everywhere in London this autumn, but is it of any value? Stuart Jeffries takes the plunge
That extraordinary mutant masterpiece
It’s been a long time coming, Patricia Cornelius’ My Sister Jill but she’s a playwright whose work demands to be…
Doom and gloom
Born in Tsarist Kyiv in 1898, Golda Meir grew up with what she called a ‘pogrom complex’. That perhaps explained…
Sledgehammer tactics
If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one.…
Godot with gags: It’s Headed Straight Towards Us, at Park200, reviewed
It sounds like a barking-mad student sketch but the final product is marinated in wisdom and maturity. It’s Headed Straight…
Band of brothers
Over the past few years, the National have become the most important band in modern rock music. The strange thing…
Embarrassing bodies
While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive…
The full English
Opera North has launched a ‘Green Season’, which means (among other things) that the sets and costumes for its new…
Comic relief
‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls…
Romancing the stone
Calvin Po on the revival of building in the solid, sustainable, dependable material that lies readily beneath our feet
His brilliant boggling career
It’s interesting to see that Mel Gibson, no less, is in the blood and violence TV streamer The Continental which…
Dancing feat
Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden,…
Arresting visual spectacle and superb fight scenes: Netflix’s One Piece reviewed
What would you say is the most successful comic-book series in history? If you’re thinking Tintin you’re not even close.…
Last orders
Ken Loach has said The Old Oak will be his last film – he’s 87; the golf course probably beckons.…
No balls
The first episode of George Osborne and Ed Balls’s new podcast, Political Currency, opened with an old clip of the…
Tidal power
In David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, the mob assembles before the music has even started – silhouetted at the…
