Arts
Kneecap are basic but thrilling
It was Irish week in London, with one group from the north and one from the south. Guinness was sold…
Lovingly designed, touching and immersive: Neva reviewed
Grade: A- There’s a very faint echo of Jeff VanderMeer’s unheimlich Southern Reach Series in the new indie side-scroller Neva.…
Tate’s finances are on the skids and I think I know why
Among the many destructive after-effects of the pandemic, the impact of two years of lockdowns has had serious consequences for…
Deeply impressive and beautiful: Akram Khan’s Gigenis reviewed
After taking a wrong turn culminating in the misbegotten Frankenstein, Akram Khan has wisely returned to his original inspiration in…
A keeper: ENO’s new The Elixir of Love reviewed
There was some light booing on the first night of English National Opera’s The Elixir of Love, but it was…
‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed
Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe.…
Such grandeur in the mind
There’s always something breathtaking about the prices great art can fetch but the sale of Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ at Christie’s…
Avoids the breathless hype of so many podcasts: Finding Mr Fox reviewed
We are all surely familiar with those stories of naive young Brits who travel abroad and are persuaded by a…
Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier
Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…
Stimulating little exhibition: Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites reviewed
Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another?…
A spectacular failure: Royal Ballet’s MaddAddam reviewed
Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The…
How did Wolf Hall escape the attentions of the BBC’s diversity commissars?
Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed…
What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is
Finally, a taste of the authentic Bob Dylan live experience. On the two previous occasions that I’ve seen Dylan, in…
Heart-warming but safe biographical drama: Going for Gold, at Park90, reviewed
Going for Gold is a biographical drama about a forgotten star of the 1970s. Frankie Lucas was a middleweight boxing…
Yes, Anora is as good as everyone says it is
Sean Baker’s Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is hotly tipped to win big at the Oscars and…
Why is Fauré not more celebrated?
It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and…
Striving of the individual soul
The Australian Ballet seems to have had a smash hit with Oscar. Not only did the ballet, choreographed by Christopher…
We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong
You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they…
I listened to a solid week of Woman’s Hour…
I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and…
A flop: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at Ambassadors Theatre, reviewed
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button carries a strap-line, ‘an unordinary musical’. Perhaps the word ‘extraordinary’ is simply too banal…
Fails to ignite: Royal Opera’s Tales of Hoffmann reviewed
I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t love Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Everything – everything – is stacked against this…
Top tosh: The Diplomat reviewed
The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of…
Is it meant to be a comedy? Gladiator II reviewed
It’s nearly 25 years since Ridley Scott’s Gladiator came out and you’ve probably been wondering what happened to the little…
Perfectly imperfect: Evan Dando, at Islington Assembly Hall, reviewed
‘Can I have a photo with you, please?’ It’s the most embarrassing question you can ask of someone you’re interviewing.…
Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows
Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…
