Interviews
Jasper Rees
La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years. Unless you have a heart of reinforced teak, its silk-and-honey songbook will seep into your consciousness and stay there, from the rapturous overture “Another Day of Sun” via Mia’s beautiful song “Audition” and the perky love duet “Lovely Night” all the way through to Mia and Sebastian’s bitter-sweet theme tune.The film is the college dream of director Damien Chazelle and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On screen, two hoodlums in macs and homburgs debate the best way to waste a victim. One of them, played by Peter Sellers, proffers a revolver. The other, who from under his hat has something of Herbert Lom about his profile, pulls on a cigarette and shakes his head. How about the acid in the bath routine? Another shake of the head. Case him in cement and drop him in the river? No. Sellers’ gangster is bemused. No gun, no acid, no cement: so how’s he going to do it? At this point the Lom lookalike removes his hat and reveals himself as the husband of the sister of the Queen. “Mind your own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was a good night for British thespians at the 2016 Golden Globes. The stars of The Night Manager – Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman – all visited the podium to collect awards. But of the most deserving winner of all was Claire Foy, whose performance in The Crown on Netflix continues a tradition started by Helen Mirren on film and onstage: portrayals of Queen Elizabeth II bring home the statuary. As she collected her Golden Globe, Foy thanked Her Majesty and suggested that the world could do with a few more women in charge.When I first interviewed the rising actress four years Read more ...
David Kettle
Hull has just become the UK’s 2017 City of Culture, with director Martin Green overseeing a mammoth 365 days of artworks and art events – both home-grown and drafted in – seemingly across every inch of the city. Green is the man behind the London 2012 Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, and it was he who launched London’s O2 in its transformation from the Millennium Dome. He talked to theartsdesk about Hull’s ambient godfathers and counter-cultural pioneers, as well as bopping to classic 1970s pop.DAVID KETTLE: Hull 2017 is clearly a vast project. How have you involved the people of Hull Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he was in his early 50s and so instantly successful that he was able to give up his career in the Department of the Environment to write full time. Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig, the floppy-eared freedom-fighting heroes of Watership Down, kept him in comfort for the rest of his life.The genesis of Watership Down is now almost as familiar a fable as the novel itself. In the late 1960s a career civil servant began entertaining two Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When Shakespeare visits the bearpit of the West End, it is usually in the company of a big name: Judi Dench, Sheridan Smith, Martin Freeman. This Christmas the bard enters the Theatre Royal, Haymarket without any such support. And there is a further hurdle to clear: Love’s Labour’s Lost is barely ever been seen outside the subsidised sector. It forms part of a pair which audiences might take a moment to get their head around: Much Ado About Nothing is presented as its Shakespearean twin called Love’s Labour’s Won.The double bill began at Stratford in 2014. The shows, set either Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of The Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election delivered a hung Parliament, the National Theatre commissioned a play. And yet the drama that emerged was not about deals struck in back rooms by the Cameron-Clegg government. Instead, This House spirits its audience back to 1974, the year Labour embarked on five years’ of horse-trading as it sought to govern the country with an overall majority of three.James Graham was born in 1982, the year of the Read more ...
David Nice
Has any living pianist had a richer or more charmed life than Idil Biret? As a child prodigy she studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Alfred Cortot, and both there and in Germany with Wilhelm Kempff. At the age of four she was reproducing Bach Preludes and Fugues on the family piano in Ankara simply from hearing them on the radio. When she was seven the Turkish Parliament passed "Idil's Law", enabling not her but also other gifted children to study abroad.From the testimonies of her great mentors, it's clear she was always a happy child (pictured below with Turkish President İsmet İnönü Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A couple of years ago I saw an extraordinary outdoor concert where a rapper called Muslim (great name if you want to be hard to find on Google) performed at the Timitar Festival in Agadir in the South of Morocco to 80,000 delirious fans. The song which everyone knew was “Al Rissala" (The Letter) which called out corruption and ignorance in high places. The Festival acts as a kind of safety valve for dissent.“It’s a good way of letting off steam,” Reda Allali, the lead singer of Moroccan rockers Hoba Hoba Spirit, told me backstage. The festival was “a step in the right direction anyway – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Yates is not the best-known film director in the world, but he has been at the helm of four of the most successful. All of them had “Harry Potter and the” in the title. After the last Potter movie he took a break among the computer-generated jungle foliage of The Legend of Tarzan, but he’s now back working in the service of JK Rowling’s imagination with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.His fantastic beasts, under the protection of magizoologist Newt Scaramander, can be found on the cinema from this weekend. Four more outings for Newt have been announced, so the world had better Read more ...
Heather Neill
David Troughton (b.1950), a familiar face on television and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, is a versatile actor. His most recent RSC appearance before Gloucester displayed his talent for comedy: he was a funny and energetic Simon Eyre in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday in his favourite theatre, the Swan at Stratford. Previous roles for the company have included Kent in an earlier Lear with John Wood as the king, Bolingbrooke in Richard II and the title roles in Richard III and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.Earlier this year, in the West End and on tour, he played the eccentric, reclusive Tom Read more ...
David Nice
What's a world-renowned mezzo-soprano in her middle years to do? Slimline of voice, tall and handsome in person with piercing and slightly intimidating blue eyes, Stockholm-born Anne Sofie von Otter isn't likely to sing what is known in the operatic world as "all those old bag parts", though she's a good enough actress to have carried off a few.Yet this is one of the widest-ranging and most recorded voices of the past 25 years (over 100 CDs to date). From Mozart's Idamante and Sesto in ground-breaking 1990 concert performances to a grande dame in meltdown as part of Thomas Adès's superb Read more ...