Arts and culture
Obscured by tattiness
A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her…
Dark and crooked byways
Isn’t it strange that the new television, the television of the streamers which has dominated our world since Covid, has…
The best and worst of the 2024 Met Gala
On Monday night, celebrities, designers and the highest edges of New York’s upper crust attended the biggest party of the…
Music as pasta
It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…
Is John Cleese right that the ‘literal minded’ have killed comedy?
John Cleese appeared in the West End this week. ‘I’ve got vertigo,’ he said as he walked on stage at…
Taylor Swift is a rotter
Taylor Swift has released another album spilling the beans on her private life. ‘I’d written so much tortured poetry in…
The barbarity of this man
It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of…
Shylock and the Nazis: the truth about Shakespeare’s most infamous character
None of William Shakespeare’s characters are more controversial than Shylock. The moneylender from The Merchant of Venice may be the…
The music of their eloquence
It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done…
Why one-man plays are all the rage
Well, it’s nice to feel on trend. The Today programme this morning carried an item on the popularity of one-man…
Somersaulting beauty of the songmaker
It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from…
A lithe brilliance
It figures that Australians should write great plays about sport because we are exceptionally – some people would say excessively…
Did he/didn’t he?
Good witches and witches dubbed bad and born green. Wicked is one of those pieces of musical theatre that will…
What a strange thing
It sounds irresistible, doesn’t it? A National Theatre Live version of a play by Jack Thorne (the magician who conjured…
Steve Harley was no one-hit wonder
Celebrity deaths range from the ‘tragically young’ (Amy Winehouse) to the ‘I thought they’d gone years ago’ (Peregrine Worsthorne) and the monumental (Michael Jackson). But there’s another…
Another popular feast
Miriam Margolyes was not wrong – however intrepid she may have been – to remark to Her late Majesty the…
Moody shifts of tone
It’s interesting to see a new production of The Sound of Music is on at the National Theatre (a somewhat…
Power beyond eloquence
It was fascinating to catch up with the Grammys the other night. There was the cheering sight of Miley Cyrus…
An all-but-lost treasure
Tennessee Williams is still looking like one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century and the plays he wrote…
A fey screeching parody
Is it a necessary declension, the descent from histrionic splendour to self-parody and worse? For years now Ryan Murphy has…
Ophelia in her madness
Why does Taylor Swift feel like such a force of nature? She transfigures the economy of wherever she lands and…
The writer with an incurable wound
‘They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the…
Artists behaving badly
What a weird situation it is that the painter Donald Friend once treasured by Robert Hughes for the lyricism of…
A deeply elegiac work
That superb poet Peter Porter who was also in love with music used to say there was no denying the…
Barbie’s Oscars snub isn’t sexist
Not for the first time, Hillary Clinton is outraged. Reacting to the news that Barbie star, Margot Robbie, and the…
