Arts
Family entertainer
Stormzy occupies a curious place in British pop culture right now. He’s the darling of liberals for all his good…
Lend me your ears
Don’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses, says John Phipps. Listen to it
A true maverick
Art That Made Us is an ambitious new series, firmly in the ‘history of something in a load of different…
Mighty and majestic
There is nothing like a ghastly war, an inscrutable election and a great rush of entertainment high and low to…
Man up
For an art form that once boldly set out to question conventional divisions of gender, ballet now seems to be…
Saint or hustler?
Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael
Safe and sound
This year the Oscar for best film went to the drama Coda– ‘Child of Deaf Adults’ – but the ceremony…
In the land of the subtitle
The iron law of TV these days is that if you want to avoid series that are suffocatingly right-on the…
Band of Horses: Things Are Great
Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it…
Shaw thing
It’s good of Nicholas Hytner to let Londoners see David Hare’s new play before it travels to Broadway where it…
Bird brained
Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden…
A darkened stage lights up
An American in Paris was always a stage musical waiting to happen even though it is immemorially associated with Gene…
Bring up the bodies
BBC2’s one-off drama Then Barbara Met Alan(Monday) told the true story of how two disabled performers on the cabaret circuit…
Sheer torture
Cock was written by Mike Bartlett in 2009 while he was in Mexico at a drama conference. The title suggests…
‘I had no interest in the theatre whatsoever’
Lloyd Evans talks to Keith Allen about Max Bygraves, how he fell into acting and the sensitivities of contemporary audiences
Around the world in 80 studios
Picture the artist’s studio: if what comes to mind is the romantic image of a male painter at his easel…
Great Britten
No question, the Royal Opera is on a roll. Just look at the cast list alone for Deborah Warner’s new…
Oxxxymirin: Beauty & Ugliness
Grade: A+ I was going to review hyperpop chanteuse Charli XCX’s album this week, but it was such boring, meretricious,…
User friendly
‘I like to have a martini,/ Two at the very most./ After three I’m under the table,/ After four I’m…
Norwegian wood
The Worst Person in the World is a Norwegian film that has made a big splash. To date, its star…
Not worth the price of admission
There are moments when you wish the theatre would just be swallowed up and be as if it had never…
Go down, Moses
Robert Gore-Langton on the man who wrecked New York
Miller’s crossing
Bloody Difficult Women is a documentary drama by the popular journalist Tim Walker, which looks at the similarities between Gina…
Study in Scarlett
Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has…
Her dark materials
It took a moment to realise Keeley Forsyth was there. There were already three musicians, faint figures on a dark…
