Arts
Away with the fairies
Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs…
Bunker mentality
Phantom of the Open is a comedy-drama telling a true story that would have to be true as no one…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
An Englishwoman in Paris
A couple of years ago, I happened to read Graham Norton’s third novel Home Stretch. Rather patronisingly, perhaps, I was…
Great musicals
It’s strange how literature finds its way into other mediums. The current French film festival includes a film of Balzac’s…
The Weather Station: How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars
Grade: C– Anyone remember that TV advert for Canada from the 1980s – a succession of colourful images, including a…
Renaissance radical
‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in…
Lobster and dead pig
ITV’s new version of The Ipcress File began with a close-up of a pair of black-rimmed glasses just like those…
Wonder woman
Shedding a Skin opens with an office nightmare. Amanda is a mixed-race employee in a predominantly white firm who gets…
Old Marr, new Marr
Andrew Marr got his voice back this week. That may come as a bit of a surprise to everybody who’s…
Me time
I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It…
The artful todger
Mikey (Simon Rex) first appears striding down a road in utterly wrecked jeans and shirt. He is carrying nothing and…
The head in the bed
Fifty years since The Godfather’s release, Thomas W. Hodgkinson revisits the film’s most unforgettable scene
Tinkling irrevelancies?
So Opera Australia is in quest of a new artistic director to replace Lyndon Terracini. It’s a good moment to…
The philosopher and the philistine
The Collaboration is set in the 1980s when Andy Warhol teamed up with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat to create bad…
Avril Lavigne: Love Sux
Grade: B Yay, life just gets better and better. World War Three and now this. More petulant popcorn pre-school punk…
Mourning glory
The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh.…
Rapper’s delight
The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music…
Suited and rebooted
The latest Batman film, The Batman, may be a reboot, or even a reboot of a rebooted reboot that’s been…
Too hot to handle
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Wicked smaht
When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…
A new Arab spring?
Stuart Jeffries on Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning art scene
Got a gun in my hand
The final scene in the brilliant television series The Sopranos is set in a diner where Tony’s family is gathered…
Richard Roxburgh
It’s not often that you get such a rapturous reception for a new show as Fun Home received and the…
The Theroux Paradox
In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to…
