Interviews
Liz Thomson
In our era of 24/7 news, downloadable from anywhere in the world at the touch of an app, it's hard to remember that not so very long ago the agenda was set by the BBC - the Home Service as Radio 4 was then called, and BBC TV, just the one channel, which broadcast news at a handful of fixed points during the evening. Outside broadcasts, "OBs", were slow, labour-intensive and expensive. Politicians were respected. So too journalists.That was the BBC that a new-minted history graduate named John Tusa joined in 1960, beginning his graduate traineeship at Bush House in what was then known as BBC Read more ...
Owen Richards
Clio Barnard has quietly been building a reputation as one of Britain’s most human storytellers. Her debut feature The Arbor was a mesmerising look at the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, blurring the line between documentary and performance. While filming, she befriended children on the estate who would steal metal for scrap – they would be the inspiration for her acclaimed sophomore release, The Selfish Giant.Her new film Dark River stars Ruth Wilson as Alice, who returns to claim rights to her family farm after the death of her abusive father. Her brother Joe, played by Mark Stanley, Read more ...
David Benedict
Fingers on buzzers… Question: What’s the connection between Days of Wine and Roses, Small Change, Making Noise Quietly and Versailles? Answer: They’re all past Donmar productions directed by Peter Gill.But it’s not just his directing skill – no one in British theatre has a finer ear for the rhythm, pitch and placement of dialogue – that makes Gill a primary figure in the Donmar’s past and present. Not only did he direct the sons-and-mothers struggle Small Change and the post-Edwardian drama of family secrets and lies Versailles, he also wrote them. Robert Hastie’s revival of his 2001 play The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 11 seasons of Frasier, John Mahoney played Marty Crane, a cussed blue-collar ex-cop who couldn’t quite understand how his loins came to produce two prissily cultured psychiatrists. His ally in straight-talking was his physiotherapist Daphne, whose fish-out-of-water flat-cap vowels were apparently the result of a gap in the scriptwriters’ field of knowledge. “When they wrote that Daphne is a working girl from Manchester," explained Mahoney, "they had no idea what that meant. The accent really threw them." It wasn't apparent from his Midwestern growl, but Mahoney was the one who was able to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t look like a 60-year-old retiree. He’s wearing a striped T-shirt under a dark blue shirt, light brown trousers which descend no further than mid-calf and boots laced high above the ankle he could easily have worn as a young actor in My Beautiful Laundrette. Ditto the earring. He remains as thin and sleek as a whippet. Only the silvery stubble of his hair betrays the march of time.Phantom Thread, he has announced, is to be his last film. After a screening at the Victoria and Albert Museum, he answered questions alongside director Paul Thomas Anderson and co-star Vicky Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Since releasing their first record, Bingo Masters Breakout, Mark E Smith (b 1957) has led The Fall through some of rock music’s most extreme and enthralling terrain, cutting a lyrical and musical swathe that few other artists can match. An outsider, self-confessed renegade, and microphone-destroying magus, Smith has seen dozens if not hundreds of musicians pass through the ranks of The Fall over the last 34 years. With their 28th studio album featuring a line-up that’s as stable as it gets in The Fall's rickety table of elements, they continue to make music like no other band, young or old. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni. Jeremy Irons – Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, an Oscar winner as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, not forgetting the lordly larynx of Scar in The Lion King – arrived at the theatre’s drama school in 1969 and in due course joined the company. The role that called him back was just about the biggest one going: James Tyrone in A Long Day’s Journey into Night.Eugene O’Neill’s monster play tells of a titanic family implosion in Read more ...
peter.quinn
The vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant first came to the attention of the jazz scene when she won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz competition in 2010. In 2013, her Mack Avenue Records debut WomanChild garnered a Grammy nomination. Two years later, she picked up her first Grammy Award when her follow-up release For One To Love won Best Jazz Vocal Album.Born in Miami to a French mother and Haitian father, McLorin Salvant started classical piano studies at five and began singing in the Miami Choral Society at eight. In 2007 she moved to Aix-en-Provence to study law as well Read more ...
David Nice
You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young. To witness his performance with players from the Royal Swedish Opera in the beautiful, neo-Renaissance Grünewald Halll of the art deco Stockholm Konserthuset last November was, I imagine, a stroke of luck akin to seeing Mahler or Richard Strauss conduct Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nick Mulvey (b.1984) is a singer-songwriter who draws from a refreshing and unexpected palette of global roots music, modernist classical and electronica. His second album, Wake Up Now, was released earlier this year, and showcases a man on a quest, an artist who regards music as a direct expression of spirit. Along its course, it contains some of 2017’s finest, most intriguing music.Mulvey grew up in Cambridge, studied music in Cuba, and became part of pop-jazz experimental group Portico Quartet while studying ethnomusicology at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies. He played the Read more ...
Ralph Moore
Like a lot of people, I came late to Peaky Blinders, bingeing on the first two brutal, but undeniably brilliant, series like the proverbial box-set sensation it quickly became. With its focus on the turmoil and fortunes of a particularly unruly Birmingham criminal family, its cast, led by Cillian Murphy, Paul Anderson and Helen McCrory, has explored the lives of the Shelby clan over three incendiary series so far – with the fourth starting on 15 November.It’s also a show that’s not afraid to pull out the big guns for the odd, even-more-evil, nemesis. "I don't want to die!" said Sam Neill when Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In 1976 American anger about the state of the nation was channelled into Network, in which cinema satirised its kid sibling television as vapid and opportunistic. Paddy Chayefsky’s script, directed by Sidney Lumet, starred Peter Finch as Howard Beale, a news anchor who has a nervous breakdown on screen in which he starts preaching and becomes the news. The failing network’s ratings soar, and an ambitious young executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) latches onto his potential to boost the network’s stock value. Only old-school Read more ...