Arts and culture
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…
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…
‘Damned spot’ of blood keeps appearing
People have always fiddled with Shakespeare. Nahum Tate did not give King Lear a happy ending because he was a…
A masterful magnificence
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? culminates the great stretch of American drama that runs from Tennessee Williams’ The…
No hint of vanity
The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria…
A tribute to Ismail Kadare, a writer who really deserved a Nobel Prize
Apart from Bob Dylan and Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s a fair bet that most people’s reaction to the Nobel prizewinners for…
Greatness written all over him
It was fascinating to see Patti LuPone that immense Broadway musical star interviewed with such palpable reverence by the ABC’s…
‘Terrible but magnificent’: the life and times of playwright John Osborne
With the news the Almeida Theatre is to stage John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger this Autumn as…
This shimmering desert haze
There’s something inspiring about getting an example of the national talent locking horns with the glory of traditional high culture,…
Phantom of her own career
Sunset Boulevard is one of the weirdest entertainment phenomena in the history of the world because it starts as a…
An imperfectly articulated plot
It seemed, on the face of it, a bizarre idea: opera at the Margaret Court arena. And Opera Australia was…
This distorting mirror of cruelty
Every so often a bit of streamer television comes along and makes you grateful for what the form can achieve…
In defence of Jonathan Yeo
If the basic job of a work of art is to be interesting, as I think it is, then Jonathan…
The once-in-a-generation genius of Alice Munro
In the early 2000s, a young Canadian writer who shall remain nameless found herself in the backseat of a car…
Obscured by tattiness
A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her…
Dark and crooked byways
Isn’t it strange that the new television, the television of the streamers which has dominated our world since Covid, has…
The best and worst of the 2024 Met Gala
On Monday night, celebrities, designers and the highest edges of New York’s upper crust attended the biggest party of the…
Music as pasta
It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…
Is John Cleese right that the ‘literal minded’ have killed comedy?
John Cleese appeared in the West End this week. ‘I’ve got vertigo,’ he said as he walked on stage at…
Taylor Swift is a rotter
Taylor Swift has released another album spilling the beans on her private life. ‘I’d written so much tortured poetry in…
The barbarity of this man
It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of…
Shylock and the Nazis: the truth about Shakespeare’s most infamous character
None of William Shakespeare’s characters are more controversial than Shylock. The moneylender from The Merchant of Venice may be the…
The music of their eloquence
It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done…
Why one-man plays are all the rage
Well, it’s nice to feel on trend. The Today programme this morning carried an item on the popularity of one-man…
Somersaulting beauty of the songmaker
It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from…
