Arts
Dazzled by her gift
If you have never seen Bernadette Robinson give yourself a treat and see her current one man show, Divas. It’s…
A vanity exercise: Carlos at 50, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed
In 2015 Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from the Royal Ballet and the classical repertory. It seemed like the right…
A tragicomic lecture about Gold at Edinburgh Festival
A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked…
Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Is it all an elaborate practical joke? Mac DeMarco, at Hackney Empire, reviewed
It’s not just who our pop heroes are that marks the passing of the generations; it’s how those heroes present…
Lumpy, bulgy, human: Threads, at Arnolfini Bristol, reviewed
Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited…
Our great art institutions have reduced British history to a scrapheap of shame
Calvin Po laments the pious distortions of history at two of Britain’s best-known galleries
An air of baffled honesty
It’s an exciting prospect, Helen Morse in a play by the great Caryl Churchill. The artistic director of the Melbourne…
A welcome antidote to UK crime drama: Netflix’s Kohrra reviewed
It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…
Bizarre and outdated: Word-Play at the Royal Court reviewed
The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which…
The problem with pop-literary collaborations
‘We all secretly want to be rock stars,’ the 2022 Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka said recently. By ‘we’ he…
Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed
The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men…
As art it was terrible but the pre- and early-teen audience loved it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem reviewed
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) began as a joke in 1984, a parody of the superhero culture of the time.…
An absolute romp framed by dutiful tut-tutting: Semele at Glyndebourne reviewed
If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is…
‘She had no neutral gear’: Lindy Dufferin remembered
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The…
The joys of provincial repertory theatre
Robin Ashenden remembers the heyday of local repertory theatre – now sadly in terminal decline
Magniloquent horror
The experience of watching Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, his film with Cate Blanchett as the nun running an orphange…
The future of opera – I hope: WNO’s Candide reviewed
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…
A giddy delight: Regina Spektor, at the Royal Festival Hall reviewed
We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music…
Dense and spectacular – and not pink: Oppenheimer reviewed
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who…
Finally an entertaining play at the Royal Court: Cuckoo reviewed
The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge…
Move fast to snap up one of Elizabeth Blackadder’s sleek cats at the Scottish Gallery
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021…
University Challenge deserves Amol Rajan
I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…
The wonders of 18th-century automata
At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace…
The West has much to learn from Hungarian culture
Hungarian culture is living through a golden age, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and the West has much to learn from it
