Arts
Flawed but often hilarious new play: Nine Night at the Dorfman Theatre reviewed
Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following…
Dudamel’s Amériques made The Rite of Spring sound like Einaudi
Apparently it’s called ‘expectation management’. Pollux, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, takes its name from…
Convoluted, woeful mishmash with no central story: How to Talk to Girls at Parties reviewed
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is set in the 1970s and has punk as the backdrop and an…
Girls at the Piano
We need to remind ourselves that there was once a time when there were no Keynesian socialist bureaucracies determining ‘cultural…
How Riccardo Chailly brought joy – and Italian opera – back to La Scala
As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has…
Is PewDiePie the new Harold Bloom?
The most subscribed to channel on YouTube — by far — belongs to a rather strange young Swede named Felix…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
From now on you can assume that every TV-drama cast is female-led
From time to time, a TV show comes along which is so thrillingly original, so wildly imaginative, that you can’t…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Lean on Pete is a beauty
Andrew Haigh makes inaction films. Weekend (2011) tells of two young homosexuals getting to know each other in Nottingham. In…
No one can beat Mary Cassatt at painting mothers and children
A lady licking an envelope. An intimate thing. It might be only the bill from the coal-man she’s paying, but…
A dated and remote two-hour polemic basking in #MeToo topicality: The Writer reviewed
Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic…
Marta Dusseldorp
Nora walks out and shuts the door behind her; shuts the door on her children, her husband, her life to…
How Rodin made a Parthenon above Paris
‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues…
Kylie’s latest album is truly appalling: Golden reviewed
Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na…
All the world’s a stage
How to stage Shakespeare on air and bring the text to life without the benefit of set, costumes, choreography and…
Bravura, assurance and generosity: Mark Simpson’s new Cello Concerto reviewed
The opening of Mark Simpson’s new Cello Concerto is pure Hollywood. A fanfare in the low brass, an upwards rush…
An unmitigated triumph: Salome at Opera North reviewed
Salome is my favourite opera by Richard Strauss, the only one where there is no danger, at any point, of…
The artist more fond of flowers and vegetables than people – and who can blame him
I have occasionally mused that there is plenty of scope for a Tate East Anglia — a pendant on the…
What’s the point of Philomena Cunk?
Because I’m a miserable old reactionary determined to see a sinister Guardianista plot in every BBC programme I watch, I…
Flop of the year? Royal Court’s Instructions for Correct Assembly reviewed
‘Hunt the Flop’, the Royal Court’s bizarre quest for dud plays, has found a candidate for this year’s overall prize.…
Not like any serial-killer thriller you’ve seen before: Beast reviewed
When I first read that Beast is a serial-killer thriller my heart sank like a stone — yet more women…
The Firebird – choreography by Liam Scarlett
Not every young Artistic Director writes a best-selling memoir that is made into a successful feature film. Mao’s Last Dancer…
This V&A show, about fashion’s fascination with the natural world, will seduce and appal
One of the prettiest pieces in the V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature is a man’s cream waistcoat, silk and linen,…
Closing the Queen Elizabeth Hall invigorated the new music scene. Why reopen it?
Imagine the National inviting RuPaul to play Hamlet. Or Tate giving Beryl Cook a retrospective. The London Sinfonietta offered a…
