Arts
A bland, reverential portrait of a socialist martyr: Nye at the Olivier Theatre reviewed
The memory of Nye Bevan is being honoured at the National Theatre. Having made his name as a Marxist firebrand,…
Turgid, vacuous, portentous: The Sandman reviewed
One of the great things about getting older is no longer feeling under any obligation to try to like stuff…
A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed
Grade: A– There’s a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the…
The joys of mudlarking
Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past.…
A latter-day exercise in Dada: Nature Theater of Oklahoma reviewed
What to make of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which this week made its British debut at the Queen Elizabeth…
A theatrical one-woman show: Billy Eilish at the OVO Hydro, Glasgow reviewed
Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance,…
Definitely the film of the week: Four Letters of Love reviewed
In the brief lull between last week’s summer blockbuster (Superman) and next week’s (Fantastic Four) you may wish to catch…
The Alfred Hitchcock of British painting
Carel Weight, the inimitable painter of London life and landscape, was my godfather. I remember a clownish-faced elderly man with…
The transcendence of style
Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: a play in five evictions is a superlative piece of theatre and it demonstrates unambiguously that…
How to holiday White Lotus-style: Billionaire Playground reviewed
Today’s television is notably fond of presenting us with very rich people to both despise and wish we lived like.…
A delight: Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park reviewed
We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many…
Watch the 1978 version instead: Superman reviewed
My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film…
A contradictory staging, but the music floods the ear with splendour: Semele at the Royal opera reviewed
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t.…
What we get wrong about modernism
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: ‘we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the…
Grayson Perry has pulled off another coup at the Wallace Collection
This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it ‘awkward and snarky’,…
More drama-school showcase than epic human tragedy: Evita reviewed
Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the…
The greatest photography exhibition of all time
I am sitting on a neat little park bench in a tiny medieval town in rural Luxembourg, and I am…
Bush noir
Barry Jones likes to allude to the fact that John Adams declared that he had to study agriculture and warfare…
Depressingly corny: Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet, reviewed
It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a…
The greatest decade for British painting since Turner and Constable? The 1970s
Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and…
No amount of discourse will make a good pop song into a great one
There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be…
The political climate at Glastonbury was not especially febrile
Everyone who wasn’t at Glastonbury this year knows exactly what it was like: a seething mass of hatred and rabid…
Brave and beautiful: Longborough’s Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed
King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score…
The Simpsons may be genius – but it’s also evil
Marge Simpson is dead. But does anyone care? I’ve written loads of pieces over the years about the genius of…
Scooby-Doo has better plots: Almeida’s A Moon for the Misbegotten reviewed
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a dream-like tragedy by Eugene O’Neill set on a barren farm in Connecticut. Phil…
