Arts
Absolute beginner
The House of Shades is a state-of-the nation play that covers the past six decades of grinding poverty in Nottingham.…
A gigantic field of feeling
I was never into the blues that much. I listened to a bit of Roy Buchanan and Rory Gallagher but…
Lilacs out of the dead land
April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east…
Playing chicken with your conscience
Jade Goody appeared on Big Brother in 2002. She was a short, loud, blonde-haired woman who broadcast her every thought…
Cruise control
Top Gun is back, nearly 40 years after the original, with reprised roles for Tom Cruise (59) and Val Kilmer…
Great Tenor, shame about the bric-a-brac
Lohengrin is early, just after Tannhäuser in the cavalcade of Wagner’s masterpieces, with a swan-drawn Arthurian hero in thrall to…
Doors of perception
Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…
Fresh knickers
Last April Fools’ Day, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo wound up their award-winning film review show on BBC Radio 5…
Oops! He did it again
Every so often, Jason Pierce drifts into focus. It happened at the end of the 1980s, when his then group…
It pierces the heart
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness.…
G-force
Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich…
Quiet thunder
Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet…
Poetry in motion
Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen
Rooney tunes
It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set…
A dramatic dream of Australia
1922 is the wonder year of twentieth century literature, the so-called annus mirabilis: T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James…
Soldiery stuff
The Battlegroundpodcast on the wars of the 20th century, said presenter Saul David happily, ‘will have lots of bombs and…
A sentimental surrealist
We’re doing multiverses now. Last weekend, a friend dragged me to see Marvel’s latest product, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse…
Come spy with me
How thriller writers must miss the Cold War! Early John le Carré and Len Deighton had it easy when trying…
Old cud and fleshy frumps
Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer. Laura Gascoigne on the many faces of Walter Sickert
The Muppet show
There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising…
Skin in the game
Drummers are patient chaps, in the main. Think of Ringo in Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles docuseries, Get Back. Lolling around…
Body language
‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining…
Life from both sides now
It’s a strange thing the way we keep interpreting and re-interpreting the different aspects of our culture that have become…
Dark side of the rune
In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later…
The hecklers
Keith Burstein recalls a key moment in the battle for emancipation from the ivory tower of atonalism
