Arts
The 23rd Biennale of Sydney
Advance notice has been given about the Biennale of Sydney for 2022. No one else should get overexcited about this…
The great unveiling
The way an object is stored can magnify its beauty and enhance expectation. Joanna Rossiter wonders whether the opening up of galleries will have the same effect on an art-starved public
The perils of lockdown drama
Hats off to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. They’ve discovered a new form of racism. Some people say we…
Selling out
Stuart Jeffries on the artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise
Filthy lucre
If you’re after an exciting, twisty programme about police corruption that doesn’t also feel a bit like sitting an exam…
Dumber and dumber
Truly we are living in the golden age of the grifter. From Fyre Fest to the WeWork empire to Theranos…
Down the rabbit hole
Black Bear is one of those indie dramas that is meta on so many levels you can either sit with…
Nowt so great as folk
Has any musical moment extended its tendrils in so many unexpected directions as the English folk revival of the mid-1960s?…
Berlin
Theatre is slowly, tentatively opening up again and there’s no denying that a good play with however small a cast…
She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism
Art movements and fashions may come and go but Australians love of their impressionists seems only to grow stronger. The…
Theatre’s final taboo – fun
The stage has become a pleasure-free zone in which snarling dramatists fight over their pet political causes, says Lloyd Evans
Where to start with Ethel Smyth
I’m reminded of an old Irish joke. A tourist approaches a local for directions to Dublin. The local, after much…
A dish served very hot
Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting —…
Ill-judged sanctimony
I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the…
Soul-dead crypto world
Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated…
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil… the Art of Starting Over
Grade: Z If you wish to experience the full hideousness of Now, of our current age, condensed into one awful…
Ladies of misrule
General Secretary is a new drama with a dull title and an off-putting poster. A pair of angry women in…
Cheerleaders, cultists and King Kong
Social distancing continues to put the kibosh on large-scale productions, but Jo Stromgren has a nifty workaround in Rooms, which…
A Murder of Crows
Sometimes a crime show on TV turns into something higher and better, a transfigured thing. The Victim, from Scotland, falls…
Opera on the Harbour: La Traviata
These days, you’d need to be as game as Ned Kelly to run an opera company. It’s a chancy enough…
Cooking the books
Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s…
Sins of the father
I’d forgotten what a rich and deep and characterful voice John le Carré had. Listening to author and lawyer Philippe…
Not down with the kids
Some pictures are now so mediated that their actual physicality has long been dwarfed by a million reproductions. The ‘Mona…
A changed woman
Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris,…
The Mozarts of ad music
Richard Bratby meets the hidden men and women composing melodies to make you buy
