Features
james.woodall
Theatre director Peter Brook is back in London. Brightly, eloquently, he's promoting his new show, in English (most of his work since the 1970s has been in French), currently running at the Barbican: entitled Eleven and Twelve, it's a dense chamber piece exploring a religious dispute in early 20th-century Mali. Quiet, sensitively investigative of an unknown strand of north African faith, it will enlighten some and bore others. Classic Brook?Well, certainly not redolent of the firebrand deconstructor of the 1960s, who imported an alarming thing called Theatre of Cruelty into mainstream British Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I took advantage of one of the last "extra" opening days the V&A is offering for its musical instruments gallery to check out the fuss. Having been sitting on the fence - sympathetic to the pleas for historic fashion displays, though drawn by my background as a violist and pianist to the music side - I came out fuming.Yes, musical instruments are about playing (an argument that some are using to closet them away in congenial stately homes like Hatchlands for occasional performing upon for select audiences) but the overwhelming effect of those instruments is that man will go to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I meet Corinne Bailey Rae upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho – she wanders into the room and a couple of record company types intercept her. I hear phrases like “consumer segmentation”, “demographics”, “functionality of streaming” floating across the room – it sounds like someone has a new type of iPhone app they want her to sign up to. She looks polite, if a bit bemused. But in a depressed record business, Corinne Bailey Rae is a really big deal.Her self-titled 2006 debut album sold nearly four million copies, went straight in to the top of the British pop charts, spent 71 weeks in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s a rare national culture festival that presupposes its audience will have no knowledge whatsoever of the culture concerned - or even be able to locate the country itself on a map. But that, we must assume from the “Azerbai-where?” promotional bus ads, was the starting point last November for organisers of the BUTA Festival of Azerbaijan Art, a series of very well-connected art and music events in London going on this month. Realistically, until petrol starts to be sold with a “produce of” notice, the country’s brand recognition looks set to stay on the low side.BUTA may have started as Read more ...
simon.tait
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we?The entire soap opera is eerily reminiscent of the events preceding Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. That too was all set to be an Read more ...
william.ward
The latest subject in the BBC Four series of composer portraits by Christopher Nupen is Ottorino Respighi. One of the most unfairly neglected major composers of the first half of the 20th century, his reputation has suffered less from not being considered at all, but for having been confined to his trilogy of tone poems that evoke respectively the Fountains, the Pines and the Traditional Festivals of Rome. Nupen's film, made in 1982, puts a welcome case for his more challenging but less well-known work.Composed over the course of 12 tumultuous years – from Italy’s disastrous participation in Read more ...
Joe Muggs
My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" over and over on a loop. It's a dreadful cliché to say knowingly of a bar "it Read more ...
tom.paulin
I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured Ireland after that. It has been produced several times since then, most recently at the Gate Theatre in London.The following year the Open University Arts and Civilisation course asked me to do a version of Prometheus Bound – it was broadcast that year and published by Faber as Seize the Fire. I didn’t do any version of a Greek play Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Since releasing her first solo album in 2006 while still a member of the acclaimed Northumbrian group Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - who also garnered three Folk Award nominations for themselves this year – Oates has developed a unique repertoire of English balladry to which her clear, richly emotive voice is so suited.That repertoire largely comes not from books or records but from years of taking part in folk sessions in pubs, clubs and homes around Devon, where she has lived since 2000. The tragic, dark-hearted ballads that stud her three solo albums come directly from a remarkable Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly successful plays, including Peter Schaffer's Equus, recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, and War Horse, still living up to its name in the West End after over two years (panto horses probably don't count). In cinema, the legacy is more mixed; but not for nothing is the Western, arguably the greatest of film genres, also known as the horse opera. Horses Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catching an impression of contemporary Russian drama may have become easier for British theatre goers over the last decade, but the work that has come through nevertheless looks like only parts of a wider picture. Four staged readings by the British-based Sputnik Theatre Company at the Soho Theatre at the beginning of February are the latest chance to take the sometimes chilly temperature of what’s been written there recently.Credit for beginning the dialogue goes squarely to the Royal Court’s international department, which back in 2001 pioneered a programme that brought four plays to London Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his forbidding dark suit and heavy-framed sunglasses, declaiming his artfully wrought texts to camera with the ominous certainty of a hanging judge, Jonathan Meades is one of TV’s most unmistakable presences. While it may be lamentable that we don’t see him more often, it’s miraculous, in the current climate, that we see him at all.His films are densely layered brain-twisters where history, architecture and folklore collide, ripe with allusion, metaphor and facts carefully selected for their provocative value. His best-known series include Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad with Jonathan Read more ...