Arts
Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Snob summer
Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a…
Welcome back to London City Ballet – but can they please change their name?
There’s sound thinking behind this summer’s resuscitation of London City Ballet – a medium-scale touring company popular in the 1980s…
Can video games be funny?
Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often.…
Fantastic – and genuinely indie: Personal Trainer, at the Shacklewell Arms, reviewed
Remember when we all knew what indie meant? Indie was what John Peel played. It was music that was recorded,…
This British surrealist is a revelation
When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of…
Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away.…
Edinburgh has turned into a therapy session
Therapy seems to be the defining theme of this year’s Edinburgh festival. Many performers are saddled with personal demons or…
Deranged and fantastic horrors
For a century King Lear has been thought of as the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies and the title role as…
Jack White’s new album will be of close interest to Led Zeppelin’s legal team
The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being…
Forget the Proms and Edinburgh – the Three Choirs Festival is where it’s at
The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set…
We’ve been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish
As everyone knows, Londoners don’t talk to strangers. And heaven forbid that anyone should make eye contact on the Tube.…
Reinforces the caricatures it sets out to diminish: Slave Play, at the Noël Coward Theatre, reviewed
Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers…
The tragic fate of Ukraine’s avant-garde
In a recent interview Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, said that he spends his time off…
Rescued from the Comanches
Isn’t it extraordinary how the new-style, super-arty balletic circus has transformed the old child-delighting world of Heffalumps and daring young…
Oblique and long but never boring: About Dry Grasses reviewed
About Dry Grasses is the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan and it had better – I thought…
Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies
Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it…
Shapeless and facile: The Hot Wing King, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed
Our subsidised theatres often import shows from the US without asking whether our theatrical tastes align with America’s. The latest…
How a market town in Hampshire shaped Peggy Guggenheim
On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a…
Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of…
Charismatic, powerful and raw: Patti Smith, at Somerset House, reviewed
There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll…
Impossible to doze through, sadly: Twisters reviewed
Twisters is an action-disaster film that follows ‘storm-chasers’ and is so relentless in its own pursuit of tornadoes that plot,…
