Arts
Sister act
The Mitfords is a superb one-woman show by Emma Wilkinson Wright who focuses her attention on Unity, Diana and Jessica.…
Riding high
In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…
Uneasy listening
I have always been fascinated by artists who bounce between tonal extremes when performing, particularly the ones who serve their…
All that remains
Barnaby Rogerson on how his collaboration with a great photographer has brought the ancient world very close
Modest fun: Red, White & Royal Blue reviewed
Red, White & Royal Blue is a rom-com based on the LGBT bestselling novel by Casey McQuiston. Nope, me neither,…
Dazzled by her gift
If you have never seen Bernadette Robinson give yourself a treat and see her current one man show, Divas. It’s…
50 not out
In 2015 Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from the Royal Ballet and the classical repertory. It seemed like the right…
Comedy gold
A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked…
Losing the plot
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Come let us adore them
It’s not just who our pop heroes are that marks the passing of the generations; it’s how those heroes present…
Fibre optics
Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited…
Hanging offences
Calvin Po laments the pious distortions of history at two of Britain’s best-known galleries
An air of baffled honesty
It’s an exciting prospect, Helen Morse in a play by the great Caryl Churchill. The artistic director of the Melbourne…
Good cop, bad cop
It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…
Clueless
The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which…
Brought to book
‘We all secretly want to be rock stars,’ the 2022 Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka said recently. By ‘we’ he…
Between two worlds
The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men…
More shell shock
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) began as a joke in 1984, a parody of the superhero culture of the time.…
Too hot to Handel
If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is…
Renaissance woman
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The…
All my world was a stage
Robin Ashenden remembers the heyday of local repertory theatre – now sadly in terminal decline
Magniloquent horror
The experience of watching Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, his film with Cate Blanchett as the nun running an orphange…
All’s well that ends well
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…
Salve Regina
We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music…
Splitting headache
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who…
