Interviews
David Nice
Now at the very top of his game and master of sundry great orchestras around the world, Paavo Järvi is the conductor students of the art like to follow for his perfect technique. Time was when he seemed like the cooler version of his peerless father Neeme; now, if he can still at times come across as more cerebral than his impetuous but also excellent younger brother Kristjan, he often seems touched by the kind of inspiration Neeme maintains in his 80th year.They work together under Utopian circumstances every summer with the superband Estonian Festival Orchestra and the promising trainees of Read more ...
Heather Neill
In a few days' time, Ellen McDougall will become artistic director of the dynamic little Gate Theatre in Notting Hill where she is already an associate artist. She's not taking it easy in the run-up to her new responsibilities though: her production of Othello in the Globe's bijou indoor theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, opens this week with Kurt Egyiawan in the title role, Natalie Klamar as Desdemona and a female Cassio, Joanna Horton.McDougall had considerable success with her playful production of Idomeneus at the Gate in 2014 and was associate director there for two years from 2012. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), in her new film she abandons light comedy to address the biggest and most decisive moment in Britain’s relationship with India.Viceroy’s House is set in 1947 at the moment Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi to oversee Read more ...
Ralph Moore
It’s a fairly big deal to be interviewing Stan Lee. Generations have been enthralled by his work, from the 1960s comics The Amazing Spider-Man and The Uncanny X-Men – which came to the UK first as US imports and later as black and white reprints via Marvel UK – to the more colourful world of Doctor Strange via The Incredible Hulk and Daredevil. Almost four decades on, the co-creator of Spider-Man (reclusive Spider-Man artist and co-creator Steve Ditko, 89, is alive and well too) and all those heroes and villains has now achieved a global level of fame and notoriety that he never quite Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
After 27 years away, band leader Kevin Rowland (b 1953) successfully relaunched Dexys as a recording unit in 2012. The album, One Day I’m Going to Soar, then became a theatrical show that was performed extensively, including nine nights at London’s Duke of York Theatre in 2013. Last summer a new album appeared, Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul, a collection of sprightly cover versions. All this activity adds up to a vibrant new chapter in the life of one of pop’s more maverick creative minds.Dexys Midnight Runners, as they were originally known, were the brainchild of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Some know him only as Lord Varys the scheming eunuch, spymaster to the king of the Seven Kingdoms. Game of Thrones fans may be less familiar with Conleth Hill's other career as a nimble. light-footed stage actor of staggering range and skill whose name, mystifyingly, is less celebrated than his talents deserve. That is about to change. Hill is George to Imelda Staunton’s Martha in a new West End production of Edward Albee's Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Staunton has sufficient clout at the box office that she was allowed to nominate her sparring partner. She chose wisely. Hill was a jobbing Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Television audiences love seeing familiar faces in different contexts – whether it’s actors exploring their ancestry in Who Do You Think You Are? or politicians awkwardly busting their moves on Strictly. But there’s always a risk that the camera will reveal more than you’d like. For a political journalist like Andrew Marr, famous for hard-hitting interviews on his Sunday show, allowing director Liz Allen to make a film about his quest to recover fully from the stroke that almost killed him in 2013, required careful consideration.Liz Allen (pictured below) is an award-winning observational Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two Neapolitans are wrestling for Italian cinema’s crown. Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone’s rivalry was for a time so personal that, though they were neighbours, they didn’t speak for years. Such foolishness was fleeting, and, while Garrone followed Gomorrah’s exposé of their gangster-ridden city with diverse and mesmerising fables such as Tale of Tales, Sorrentino has flourished on a more international scale. His 2014 Oscar for The Great Beauty helped attract Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda to Youth (2015), and Sky TV and Jude Law to his lavish new mini-series, The Young Pope Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Emily Watson made her remarkable debut in Breaking the Waves (1996). In Lars von Trier’s grim parable, Watson plays Bess, an ingénue from a remote religious Scottish community who, when her husband is paralysed on an oil rig, perpetuates their romantic life by seeking out liaisons with other men and telling him about it. Watson gave the kind of luminous, intense and highly cinematic performance that, along with Hilary and Jackie, found her twice nominated for an Academy Award in the 1990s.The camera has since swum happily in those big blue eyes in role after emotionally taxing high-profile Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In London and New York, Phoebe Fox (b. 1987) is known to theatregoers as Catherine, the niece over whom Mark Strong's Eddie Carbone went pazzo. Their physical intimacy, in Ivo van Hove’s sizzling Young Vic production of A View from the Bridge, made for an intensely uncomfortable viewing experience. For her return to the stage, Fox is in a frothier one-sided relationship. In the National Theatre’s Twelfth Night she plays Olivia, the grieving countess who falls in love with a boy she doesn’t know is a girl.Simon Godwin’s production has further fun with gender by giving the yellow cross garters Read more ...
David Nice
Only four flutes were on stage at the start of Jakub Hrůša’s latest concert with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the reins of which he took over from Jonathan Nott last September. Charles Ives would have been amazed to hear his “Voices of Druids” on the strings sounding, along with the solo trumpet, from the distance. I suddenly realised why Hrůša smiled enigmatically when I had asked him in interview the previous day whether he would segue straight from The Unanswered Question into Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude (impossible without strings on the platform, of course). The idea was, in fact Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Twelve months ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was the focus of an intense campaign on social media. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite protested the lack of recognition for black talent at the 2016 Oscars. This year the picture looks a little different, mainly because Barry Jenkins's quietly remarkable film Moonlight has deservedly scooped eight nominations.Among those nominees is Naomie Harris, who plays Paula, a crack addict in the Miami projects. But the main acting miracle of Moonlight is the trio of performances by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders (pictured below) and Trevante Read more ...