Arts

‘Schicksalslinien/Be-Ziehungen VIII’ (‘Lines of Fate’/’Re-lations VIII’), 1994, by Maria Lassnig

Cut it out

1 April 2017 9:00 am

How do you make a work of art? One method is to cut things up and stick them back together…

Ed’s diner

1 April 2017 9:00 am

In a world where politicians can turn into newspaper editors and former newspaper editors can seize the most coveted job…

Rued awakening

1 April 2017 9:00 am

It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it…

LA story

1 April 2017 9:00 am

BREAKING NEWS: ‘Enjoyable play found at Royal Court.’ Generally, the Court likes to send its customers home feeling depressed, guilty,…

Vincent Franklin (Mr Prendergast), Jack Whitehall (Paul Pennyfeather) and Douglas Hodge (Captain Grimes) in ‘Decline and Fall’

Oh! What a lovely Waugh

1 April 2017 9:00 am

Jack Whitehall could have been perfectly awful as Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall (BBC1, Fridays). He has spent most…

Death becomes her

1 April 2017 9:00 am

Opera is littered with the bodies of abandoned women. Step over Dido and Gilda, and you’ll still stumble into Donna…

Joint account: a scene from ‘The Great Wall’, China’s most expensive film to date

Hollywood goes East

1 April 2017 9:00 am

It’s kind of surreal being here.’ The general sentiment, no doubt, of most people on planet Earth right now, but…

Sergei Polunin in his spangled merkin performing Narcissus and Echo at Sadler’s Wells

Bravura bling

25 March 2017 9:00 am

There was a nasty sound of pens being sharpened last week as Royal Ballet runaway Sergei Polunin prepared to unveil…

‘Absent Friends’, 2000–1, by Howard Hodgkin

Internal affairs

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin…

Ginger Leigh Ryan in ‘All This Panic’

Hide and seek

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Two films for you this week, one of which is surprisingly good and one of which does not surprise in…

Jarvis Cocker: contrived or beguiling?

Going underground

25 March 2017 9:00 am

When Wireless Nights hit the Radio 4 airwaves in the spring of 2012, I was not at all sure about…

Adam Driver as Adam Sackler, the most unsparingly but sensitively drawn modern male to grace the small screen this decade

Let’s hear it for the boys

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Girls creator Lena Dunham has received criticism from all sides. Detractors on the right see her as an exhibitionist provocateur.…

Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope 'wearing the kind of hat not seen since the glory days of All Creatures Great and Small'

Beyond belief

25 March 2017 9:00 am

As we know from all those newspaper articles and actress interviews, there’s a scandalous lack of high-profile British TV dramas…

Time to retire: pianist Maurizio Pollini at the Royal Festival Hall in March 2016

All’s well that ends well

25 March 2017 9:00 am

There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late…

Slyly surreal: Christopher Alden’s Partenope at ENO

Denial has rarely looked so good

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the…

A nest of vipers forced into a skirt and cardigan: Imelda Staunton as Martha in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Royal prerogative

25 March 2017 9:00 am

No one should complain that My Country; a work in progress is a grim night out. It’s rare for a…

Michael Parekowhai The English Channel, 2015 stainless steel, 257 x 166 x 158 cm.

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Australians have a proprietorial interest in Captain James Cook but of course he belongs to the whole world. That is…

‘The Judgment of Solomon’, c.1506–9, by Sebastiano del Piombo. © National Trust Images/Derrick E. Witty

The odd couple

18 March 2017 9:00 am

Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete…

Got the message?

18 March 2017 9:00 am

To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to…

The mechanicals: the dancers in Wayne McGregor’s ‘Tree of Codes’ interlock but they never really interact and we are left humming the scenery.

Mirror, mirror

18 March 2017 9:00 am

The exit signs were switched off and the stalls were in utter darkness. One by one, 15 invisible dancers, their…

Basic instinct: Paul Verhoeven has long been fascinated by the idea of rape

His dark materials

18 March 2017 9:00 am

The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the…

Tail-end Terry

18 March 2017 9:00 am

It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he…

Ersatz erudition

18 March 2017 9:00 am

Harry Potter, who uses the stage name Daniel Radcliffe, is a producer’s delight. By now it’s becoming clear that the…

Fatal distraction

18 March 2017 9:00 am

I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal…

A matter of life and death

18 March 2017 9:00 am

It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political…