Arts
Absorbing and beautifully designed: Jane Eyre reviewed
Blackeyed Theatre is another victim of the virus. Its production of Jane Eyrewas midway through a UK tour, and due…
Make Status Quo sound like Stockhausen: AC/DC's Power Up reviewed
Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but…
The beautiful, haunted symphonies of Franz Schmidt
The sounds that Franz Schmidt made while learning the trumpet were pretty much unbearable, or so the story goes. In…
The genius of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has just been voted the greatest radio comedy of all time by Radio Times,…
Watch Andrew Marr stare at places where stuff happened: New Elizabethans reviewed
Congratulations, everyone! It turns out we’re much better than those bigoted old Brits of the 1950s. After all, they were…
How we became a nation of choirs and carollers
Alexandra Coghlan on how we became a nation of choirs and carollers
The Queen’s Gambit
As the Covid virus recedes even from Victoria – and the South Australian scare proves less serious than it looked…
Eryn Jean Norvill
Normality is returning, bit by bit, to public entertainment.Apparently fifty thousand people can go to a football match, yelling themselves…
The grotesque unevenness of Mozart’s Requiem
It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…
I could have directed it better: Steve McQueen's Small Axe reviewed
Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling…
Inane, modish and safe: The White Pube podcast reviewed
The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The…
It’ll blow you away: Collective reviewed
When I recommend this documentary to people, telling them it follows the journalistic investigation into a fire that broke out…
Skilful and riveting: Poltergeist at the Southwark Playhouse reviewed
Sasha is angry. He’s a gay artist on his way to his niece’s birthday party and he keeps popping codeine…
Maggi Hambling's Wollstonecraft statue is hideous but fitting
Frankly, it is rather hideous — but also quite wonderful, shimmering against the weak blue of a late November sky.…
Meet the front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’
Michael Hann talks to Corey Taylor, front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’, about PTSD, Donald Trump and life after alcoholism
Here come the judge
1968 was a year of recurring turbulence for the United States, all of it witnessed in American living rooms, courtesy…
Billy Wilder
Slowly the world of the arts starts to take a timid step forward in plague-torn Australia. Just as alarming new…
Ernani at Teatro all Scala
The Opera is coming back! Unable to perform for nine months, the company has suffered great financial loss, forcing substantial…
A coherent evening of real opera: GSMD's Triple Bill reviewed
Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from…
Enjoyably bad-tempered: The Lock In with Jeremy Paxman reviewed
‘I used to be Mr Nasty! That was good! Mr Nasty was easy!’ Jeremy Paxman bellows at Michael Palin on…
Turn it up and feel the walls shake: John Wilson's Respighi reviewed
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Like a never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show: Hillbilly Elegy reviewed
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
Like much jazz, it might have benefited from being less solemn: BBC4's Ronnie's reviewed
Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…
As an essay in cheap comedy the show is a great success: Emilia reviewed
Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer,…
Meet the woman who designed Britain's revolutionary road signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
