England
Gary Naylor
There’s a deal to be made when taking your seat for The Winter’s Tale. It’s one the title alone would have signalled to the groundlings as much as those invited to rattle their jewellery upstairs back in the 17th century – it’s a fairytale, a fantasy, a funny-peculiar play. Perhaps the only play outside pantomime in which a bear gets involved. The plot breaks into two halves and, whether you know that the sun will literally and metaphorically shine after the interval or not, the dark opening scenes can drag. Essentially we’re witness to what would, these days, be called a psychotic Read more ...
graham.rickson
Comedian Tony Hancock’s vertiginous rise and fall is neatly traced in the two films he completed in the early 1960s. The warning signs were already present when 1961’s The Rebel (★★★★) was released. Hancock’s BBC career had been enormously successful, his eponymous radio series featuring him sparring with a talented supporting cast. The brilliant scripts were supplied by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Despite the show's popular and critical success, Hancock's own insecurities were already taking root and led him to make the final season of the show's TV incarnation without regular partner Sid Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, ground-breaking and influential. His painting was first-class, but it was in the field of architectural stained glass, which he approached as a fine artist, and in a radically innovative manner, that he truly made a name for himself. I first met Brian, when I was making a series for BBC Two, “The Architecture of the Imagination” (1994). It was bravely commissioned by Clare Paterson and Alan Yentob, at a time when such off-piste arts explorations were Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
From the animatronic cat on the bar of the Garter Inn to the rowers’ crew who haul their craft across the stage and the military ranks of “Dig for Victory” cabbages arrayed in Ford’s garden, all the period flourishes that helped make Richard Jones’s Falstaff such an audience hit twice before at Glyndebourne look as spruce and smart as ever in this revival.However, the opera does not belong to any director, however imaginative, nor even to his ever-ingenious designer Ultz – but to Verdi, his inspirational librettist Boito, and the singers and players who truly possess the power to restore this Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End transfer. Its title taken from an Auden poem urging people to dance till they drop, it’s probably the most passionate show in that locale, and definitely the lewdest.It opens with the female equivalent of locker-room talk as the women of an extended family in what was once Notts and Derby pit country bicker and banter while preparing for the wedding of young Sylvia (Sinead Matthews). Topics of conversation range from the naughtiness of next door’s "sex pond”, ie hot tub, to the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. The 10-part Netflix series that Dunham and her English musician husband Luis Felber have created, Too Much, is just that: a welter of verbiage, weird characters and relentless squelchy sex – though the sex scenes are virtually the only occasions our heroine stops Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When in the 1990s, Jenny Saville’s peers shunned painting in favour of alternative media such as photography, video and installations, the artist stuck to her guns and, unapologetically, worked on canvases as large as seven feet tall. While still a student at Glasgow School of Art, she painted Propped, 1992, one of the most challenging and memorable female nudes in the history of art (pictured below right). This enormous painting confronts you on entry to her retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, and it is still a knock out. Perching awkwardly on a tiny pedestal is a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The red, white and blue bull’s-eye on the front curtain at Sadler’s Wells tells us we are in the familiar territory of Pete Townshend’s rock musical about teenage angst in 1960s Britain. What follows isn’t so easy to recognise.Quadrophenia started life in 1973 as a double album, and six years later became a film; now it’s a contemporary dance piece with an outstanding cast. Yet it seems to be a case of diminishing returns.The powerful vocals of its songs are silenced, with just a heavenly choir in the closing numbers representing a human presence. And the thrilling axeman chords Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of the character comedian Graham Fellows will possibly turn up for this British film starring the man who created the punk parody single “Jilted John” and Sheffield’s finest, the car-coated singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth. But they may leave disappointed.The action is set in one of the backwaters of rural Britain getting a lot of attention these days; on paper the plot is serviceable. Chicken empire heir Lee Matthews (Ramy Ben Fredj, pictured below, left with Ethaniel Davy) skids on black ice and wipes out a Nativity scene outside his local church but gets the blame pinned on his Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long. Yet Britbox’s Outrageous, a six-parter on the U+Drama channel, tells exactly this true extraordinary story, and tells it well. Even without the lavish budgets of other period projects, it looks the part, with spot-on interiors and costumes. It even gets to grip with the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 23 years since 28 Days Later and especially those since Danny Boyle’s soulful encapsulation of Britain’s best spirit at the 2012 Olympics have offered rich material for a franchise about deserted cities, rampaging viruses, hard quarantines and an insular, afraid country hacked adrift from Europe.28 Years Later takes this chance with punk chutzpah, right from a pumped-up prologue in which children watch Teletubbies to mask the sound of the adult world being eaten by Rage virus-infected zombies, only to be devoured too in a frenzy of close-up Anthony Dod Mantle camerawork, vintage digital Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...