Arts
Send in the clowns
Ian McKellen’s Hamlet is the highlight of Edinburgh’s opening week. In this experimental ballet, Sir Ian speaks roughly 5 per…
Primeval Voice
So, Archie Roach is dead at 66. It’s hard to read of the artistic triumphs and the personal catastrophes without…
All the world’s a stage
A neglected little town in Merseyside is the natural home for Shakespeare North, says Robert Gore-Langton
Mob mentality
It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so…
A backward step
Sick though one may be of the way that the poison dart of ‘woke’ is lazily flung at what is…
Striking a false note
The blurb accompanying the Radio 3 series World of Classical, inviting us to ‘join the dots between classical music traditions…
Queen B
You feel a little sorry for Renaissance, the first solo album by Beyoncé in more than six years. It just…
Hitting the high seas
The Barbican’s big summer show is billed on the website as ‘the sold-out musical sensation, Anything Goes’. The term ‘sold-out’…
Neighbours no more
It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…
All that jazz
Simon Godwin’s Much Ado About Nothing is set in a steamy Italian holiday resort, the Hotel Messina, in the 1920s.…
Keep on truckin’
Sam Kriss on why country-pop is the most modern music there is
Old news, but good news
When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of…
A sharp instant in nature
‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…
Spare us the preaching
It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on…
Black Midi: Hellfire
Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them,…
Clangers and colanders
Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely…
Call of the wild
It’s fascinating to hear that Warwick Thornton––who took the world by storm some years ago with that knockout indigenous film…
Some like it hot
Mary Wakefield on Katia and Maurice Krafft, who loved volcanoes and each other
Where the wild things aren’t
Where the Crawdads Sing is based on the bestselling book (by Delia Owens) that I picked up from one of…
Acid test
Many years ago a man on the end of my cigarette stole my soul. Mr Migarette (for such was his…
Smoke and mirrors
I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…
Let them drink fizz
There are composers who are known for a single opera, and there are operas that are known for only a…
Divine comedy
Patriots, by Peter Morgan, is a drama documentary about recent Russian history. And though it’s a topical show it’s not…
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
Genesis of a Dreamcoat
Just the other day came the announcement that a new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was to…
