The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘The natural aids to horsemanship are the hands, the legs, the body and the voice.’ But a Thelwell pony sometimes required some, er, additional aids. Norman Thelwell’s first pony cartoon was published in Punch magazine in 1953 and struck a nerve with readers; so much so that the editor asked Thelwell for a double-page spread
Tucked away in the schedules, just before midday, just after midweek (on Thursday), just four lines in the Radio Times, was one of those radio gems. Nothing remarkable on the surface, but every so often sparkling with insight, or a different way of seeing. Woolf in the Jungle (produced by Dan Shepherd) took us to
According to its executive producer Griff Rhys Jones, A Poet in New York (BBC2, Sunday) sought to rescue Dylan Thomas from the ‘forces of sanctity and hagiography that now hover over his shade’. Instead, we’d be reminded that he was ‘a hollering bohemian roustabout’ — which is presumably Griff’s longhand for ‘a drunk’. By that
When you see the latest corporate entertainment juggernaut hurtling at you, what are your options? When I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past (what?) hurtling at me, I thought: I can either jump aboard or I can swerve off-road. In this instance, I chose to swerve off-road — I’ve seen Godzilla; I’ve done my time
How do you write a play? Here’s one theory. Put a guy up a tree, throw rocks at him, get him down again. It’s a good working template. Nick Payne’s latest script, Incognito, uses a different scheme. You put 21 guys up a tree, set them jabbering for 90 minutes and then go home. This
In all its minute details, Der Rosenkavalier is rooted in a painstakingly stylised version of Rococo Vienna that, paradoxically, is further fixed in a web of cannily juxtaposed anachronisms. Upset their balance and you risk upsetting the balance of the whole piece. That’s no bad thing, of course, but Richard Jones’s bold new production for
George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and its fascinatingly elusive visual metaphors. Many recent stagings have failed to meet such criteria, but not the performance I saw last week. Things did not exactly start especially well, as the opening group of ladies
If I live as long as my father, I’ll be checking out on 9 December 2017. Since every man in my family drops dead of a heart attack at a ridiculously young age, it’s not inconceivable. I mean, obviously the chances of me dying on precisely that day are tiny, but it’s my ballpark figure.
Do you ever wonder, as your little darling balks at doing her violin or piano practice again, what all the pain is for? All those battles, and then when she escapes your clutches she’ll give it up. In later life the blanket of amnesia will fall over those childhood years and it might be as
Every now and then, you’ll come across an article which puts a case for something or other being taken seriously as an ‘art form’. Designing computer games, cake-making, upholstery, you name it, sooner or later it’ll be up there with painting the Sistine Chapel. And the more elaborate or intricate the process of production, the
The phrase ‘Constable Country’ summons up a quintessentially English landscape: river and meadows, open vistas bordered by trees, the greens and golds of cultivated acres, with the wide (and often blustery) skies of East Anglia over all. John Constable (1776–1837) is one of our greatest artists and certainly one of the most popular. His vision
In many respects the average art-lover remains a Victorian, and the Florentine Renaissance is one area in which that is decidedly so. Most of us, like Ruskin, love the works of 15th-century artists of that city — Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Ghiberti — and are much less enthusiastic about those of the 16th. But a superb
‘Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,/ daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,/ grass shimmers green…’ The characteristic undulations of the voice of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg greet the visitor on entering Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art at the National Museum Cardiff. Bearded and mellifluous, projected to mythic proportions
Before there was Hello!, OK! and Closer, there was Oggi. Oggi was the magazine my Italian mother used to flick through on the long dark English winter evenings. Its celebrity photo spreads were for her the armchair equivalent of the Italian national pastime, the ‘passeggiata’. The Years of La Dolce Vita, revisited in a new
I have to remind myself that Waiting for Godot is a confounding piece of theatre. It’s supposed to be. The famous repudiations Beckett made to its interpreters, the ignorance he professed of its characters, were more than just cryptic obfuscation. ‘The only thing I’m sure of,’ he is said to have said, ‘is that they’re
Living up to its fabled buzz, the Kop roared and rose even before kick-off. Down in the main stand I watched; John Barnes adjusting his captain’s band on the hallowed turf. Waves of red in rows and rows – a kid in that season’s kit, I swelled with a kind of borrowed pride, belonging without
In 1967, two Cologne-based gallerists came up with the Cologne Art Market — a trade fair where German galleries could set up temporary gallery-style spaces for a few days to showcase their stock. The following year, three dealers in Basel copied the idea but opened up their event to international galleries. For years these two
Soldier scribes are rare, soldier artists rarer still, and soldiers who can write and draw rarest of all. General Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) was one such polymath. He scribbled and doodled as he fought his way around Victoria’s empire. He was a decorated veteran of the Siege of Sebastapol, the Second Opium War, India and
A rustle of paper as the sleeve is removed. A clunk and click as the needle arm is swung across. The needle hits the vinyl, bringing it to life. At first there’s a lot of crackling in the ether. Then at last the music begins. A sultry saxophone. A few notes on the guitar, slow,
Which character are you in Game of Thrones? For me it’s got to be the imp, Tyrion Lannister. As Ed West suggested in his erudite Speccie article a few weeks ago, Tyrion is about the only character with a vaguely sympathetic 21st-century mindset as opposed to a ruthlessly pragmatic medieval one. Persecuted since childhood because
Godzilla is from the director Gareth Edwards, a Brit whose first film, Monsters, truly put him on the map, as it daringly played with the genre, and incorporated a plausible human love story, and the difference between that film and this may be summed up as follows: whereas Monsters was a clever and inventive film
The Silver Tassie is the major opening at the Lyttelton this spring. Sean O’Casey’s rarely staged play introduces us to a group of Dublin sportsmen, and their womenfolk, as they prepare to volunteer for service on the Western Front. They parade the ‘silver tassie’, a newly won football trophy, mistakenly believing it to presage victory
Purists might have winced at Opera North’s advertisement for its latest revival of La Bohème. ‘If you see one musical this year,’ it said, ‘see this opera.’ Such rhetoric might invite unhelpful discussion of the relative merits of each genre, but it also reflects the fact that this show is a refreshing, unfusty treat. Phyllida
Shigeru Ban is the celebrated architect who refuses to become a celebrity. Thus, at 57, his career has run opposite to the dominant trend in the profession. For a generation there has been a star system in architecture, as tacky and ludicrous and overblown as the Hollywood original. Ban, softly spoken but strictly principled, is
‘Strip him of his knighthood!’ Or life peerage, or CBE, OBE — or whatever. The cry goes up with a kind of automaticity these days, and with increasing shrillness. As I write, elements in Fleet Street are hyperventilating about Gary Barlow’s OBE. Barlow and two other members of the band Take That are reported to have
Filming of season three of Netflix’s House of Cards will begin in four weeks’ time in Maryland, creator Michael Dobbs revealed at Norman Tebbit’s book launch last night. Lord Dobbs, who was an advisor to Thatcher, said that he had to ‘tone things down a little bit’ to make the plot ‘credible’, although he’s clearly proud
Pop humpty-dumpty Michael Jackson has a new album out today. If that statement seems odd, you don’t know the half of it; five years after his death, Jackson is only on album number two. Compared to a trooper like Tupac – who still manages a couple of albums per year, despite having copped it in
I enjoyed Fraser’s preview of the Eurovision Song Contest; I had not known that he was such a fan. You work with someone for years, oblivious to their dark secrets, their strange peccadilloes. It was typically brave of him to come out, in public. I watched the thing, again. I thought the entry from The
I like Europe, even if this may not be the place to admit it, and I like this moment, when our brothers are forced to make fools of themselves in a language none bar the Irish can speak convincingly. Sauf les Français, obviously. ‘Ukraine will win. Europe has solidarity. You’ll see,’ says my European flatmate.