The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Visitors to Chatsworth House this spring might wonder if they have stumbled through the looking-glass. The estate’s rolling parkland has been invaded by an army of vibrantly coloured, outsized garden tools, whose outlines seem to hover, mirage-like, over the landscape. These painted-steel 2D ‘sculptures of drawings’ are the brainchildren of the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin.
After a walk in Richmond Park beset by rush-hour traffic, the Heathrow flight path and a strange swarm of flying ants (strange because so early in the year), it was unsettling to come back in and switch on and listen to Kirsty Gunn’s spring walk for this week’s The Essay on Radio 3 (which I
I Can’t Sing! is a parody of The X Factor, which already parodies itself at every turn. Quite a tough call. The heroine is an oppressed no-hoper stuck in a tiny caravan under the Westway with her crippled dad who lives in an iron lung. She longs for a chance to win stardom and wealth
What’s in a definition? As far as theatre dance is concerned, quite a lot. Labelling — and often labelling for the mere sake of it — is integral to our dance culture. Take, for instance, the various A-level dance syllabuses, the curricula of most dance-studies departments and, most of all, those dance-history manuals that slavishly
I remain puzzled that, so far as I know, no daily or weekly paper carries reviews of the New York Met opera relays (I’m not a denizen of the blogosphere, where they may well swarm). To judge from the number of cinemas that show these live relays, and from how crowded most of them are,
I should warn you that if you go see The Double it is one of those films that will trouble you long after the event. It will trouble you at breakfast and it will trouble you at lunch and it will trouble you as you go about your business, whatever that might be. Yes, a
W.H.Auden once wrote: ‘Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue’ — which puts those who aspire to be artists in a bit of a quandary. Is it a measure of one’s success as a ‘real artist’ that one is not a nice person?
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before Same old story But still compelling Blossom reminding What blossom is for Question the trees But they’re not telling How they obey
The Archbishop of Canterbury has had himself photographed with Russell Crowe, after attending the screening of Noah in which Russell C has the title role. ‘A great visit…impressive,’ he tweeted of Crowe. Which was one way round saying that the film itself was tripe, though his spokesman said that he found it ‘interesting and thought-provoking’,
So Lebedev’s London Live has launched. And I don’t know about you but I’m hooked. I’d totally forgotten what really bad TV looked like. It’s as if the chief execs at Channel 5 got together with Alan Partridge for a 21st-century rebrand. London’s new TV channel did get one nice review from the, oh, Lebedev-owned
A revival of Anna Nicole will open the Royal Opera House new season, it was announced today. And students will be able to get in for £1, tweeted Kasper Holten proudly. A quid! So that’s an orchestra, an excellent cast of 17, a chorus, a production team of two or three dozen, two hours of words
Always try to get the worst seats for the opera. Upper circle. Foyer. Toilet. The nearest bus stop. The further back the better. You’ll regret it if you don’t. There really is nothing more off-putting than being able to see the singers. Opera up close, as Princess Margaret once said, is just two fat people shouting at
There’s a problem, as we all know, with female roles in the theatrical canon, and it reaches all the way back to the Bard. Shakespeare’s women lack the richness and variety of his male characters. Modern theatre practitioners have tried all kinds of ploys to correct this imbalance. Next month the RSC launches a season
Last week, three exhibitions celebrating the art of Germany; this week, a show commemorating the first world war fought against that great nation. In this centenary year of the beginning of WW1, there will be numerous events marking the start of hostilities. (Will there be as many celebrating the anniversary of their cessation, I wonder?)
Like most ambitious artists, Julian Cooper has been pulled this way and that by seemingly conflicting influences. The son and grandson of Lake District landscape painters — his mother was a sculptor — he fell among abstractionists at his London art college, Goldsmith’s, in the late 1960s. But when I first saw his work in
Move over Dick Whittington and his cat, the City of London has a new folklore hero. Yesterday Kermit the Frog was made Honorary Bridge Master of Tower Bridge. Mr S suspects this might be something to do with the fact that the latest Muppets film was shot extensively in the Square Mile. Sadly, rain stopped
When you’re next waiting for a train at King’s Cross, don’t waste time window shopping on the concourse. Instead, pop round the corner to the British Library to see Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight (until 26 May). It’s not an enticing name for an exhibition, I grant you. But the show is beguiling: small,
It’s amazing to think that it’s 20 years since the launch of Radio 5 Live. But it was bright and early on the morning of 28 March 1994 (long before Princess Diana’s death, 9/11, the Iraq war, the London bombs, the Asian tsunami, the ‘Arab spring’) that Jane Garvey announced, ‘Welcome to a new network.’
Louis XIV might have been a narcissistic and whimsical tyrant, but he did a lot for dance. An accomplished practitioner, he made ballet a noble art and turned it into a profession with the creation of the Académie Royale de Danse, the first institution of its kind, though not the first ballet school as some
Opera seems almost always to have been acutely concerned with its own future. These days this is most often manifested in occasionally desperate, sometimes patronising attempts to entice new audiences to the art form. A new three-way initiative between Aldeburgh Music, the Royal Opera and Opera North takes a different tack by enabling a new
Have you ever looked at backing singers and thought: what is their story? Do they or have they ever prayed for their time to come? As they are going ‘ooh ooh, ooh ooh’ behind Kylie are they thinking, ‘I want to kill Kylie’? Do they mind that no one knows their name? Do they ever
The world’s big national museums are deeply glamorous places. We keep quiet in their hallowed halls, we wander the galleries in reverence, we look at a caption here and there, but, sometimes, if we’re honest, deep in our hearts, we may be asking ourselves what we’re doing there. Art enjoys unparalleled prestige in the modern
Today’s top public schools are plush country clubs with superb facilities, lovely food, first-class teaching, no fagging, no beating and, one imagines, minimal sexual interference from the staff. Most even have things called girls. While excellent at turning out world-class actors, the public schools these days are far too nice and unbrutal to be of
It’s German Season in London, and revealingly the best of three new shows is the one dealing with the most modern period: the post-second world war era of East and West Germany and the potent art that came out of that split nation. In Room 90 is another immaculately presented British Museum show of prints
In 1914 Fernand Léger gave a lecture about modern art. By then recognised as a leading Cubist artist, he had the year before signed up with the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who already represented Picasso and Braque. ‘If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has necessitated it,’ Léger argued. ‘The existence of modern
I was in love for a whole week after Episode One: Your voice so tender, so knowledgeable, your slender hands and feet. In Episode Two, doubts crept in. Were you hogging the camera or was it just that the camera loved your profile, your man-of-the-people T shirts, your breeze-ruffled hair? Episode Three opens with you
It’s such a simple idea. Take a tape recorder. Hang around at the entrance to a railway station or in the departure lounge of an airport. Look for an intriguing face, an unusual couple, a dashing outfit. Rush up to them (having remembered to switch on the recorder) and ask, ‘Where are you going?’ As
One of the stranger things about Eton is its near-total lack of class snobbery. Yes, all right, you still get the occasional away match where their supporters will chant at the opposition ‘You’ll be working for our Dads’ but that’s just badinage, not animus. I doubt it was always thus. Probably there was a time
A Long Way Down is about four would-be suicides who meet for the first time on the top of a tall London building, intending to jump, but instead of jumping they decide to hang around and annoy the hell out of us for the next 90 minutes. Had I known what I know now, and