The Reagan administration produced as much video content as the previous five administrations combined. That’s the claim early on in The Reagan Show, an engaging but ultimately frustrating documentary compiled entirely from archive footage by co-directors Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez. So remorseless was the administration’s taping of carefully staged scenes or managed press conferences that it even got its own name – White House TV.And if JFK was the first US president to harness the power of television, then Reagan was the first to embark on a concerted attempt to manipulate the broader Read more ...

Richard Goode is one of the world’s great pianists, but you wouldn’t guess it from his humble and unpretentious stage manner. He wears thick glasses and squints into the music, and when he plays he sings along under his breath. When he is not playing, he often turns and gestures vaguely at the orchestra, not so much aping the conductor as moving with the flow of the music. He clearly lives every note, and everything he does is to the service of the score.Not virtuoso showmanship, then, and little bravado, though his playing is always lucid and engaging. That’s an ideal combination for Mozart’ Read more ...

Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history. Yet, as Turkey’s Nobel laureate told me during a Southbank Centre interview last month, he never set out to appropriate his home town as a sort of personal brand: it was simply the beloved backdrop of his childhood and youth. These days, he sometimes feels annoyed when critics harp on about the ineffable melancholy and nostalgia (hüzün is the Turkish word) that haunts his depictions of the picturesque old imperial capital that has Read more ...

Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved. The early Motörhead were bedevilled by false starts and upsets.The unpremeditated subsequent durability of the band has ensured Motörhead was never deleted. Read more ...

Three tall orders must be met in any successful transfer of an Ingmar Bergman text from screen to stage. First, take a company of actors as good as the various ones that the master himself assembled over the years, both in his films and in the theatre; Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep is one of the few in the world today up to the mark, working just as intensively. Second, make sure the look of it isn’t a pale copy of the films – this isn’t. Third, while staying true to the essence, find something new. By making After the Rehearsal and Persona two very different sides of the same coin, an Read more ...

Sometimes you go to the theatre and in the first 10 minutes are convinced that the production is going to smash it, only to find by half time that it’s not. Initial delight gives way to mild irritation, and as a member of the ticket-buying public you draw a line under it and hope for better luck next time. A critic, however, must identify what didn’t work and why. Sally Cookson’s stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s best-loved novel seems to have everything going for it: dynamism, narrative clarity and a willingness to strip the story to the beating heart beneath the corset-stays. It takes Read more ...

London orchestras do communicate with each other, sometimes at least, when it comes to programming. It can’t have been a coincidence that on Wednesday we had one Finnish chief conductor, Sakari Oramo launching his BBC Symphony Orchestra Sibelius cycle with a searing Fifth Symphony, followed last night by another, Esa-Pekka Salonen at the head of the Philharmonia, with the Sixth and Seventh, each prefaced by new(ish) Icelandic music in a programme which looked on paper even more enticing. Trouble is that while Oramo’s Sibelius really was that rare wonder where passion and precision become one Read more ...

“Isn’t it funny/How a bear likes honey?/Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!/I wonder why he does.” Those immortal words, said by the bear of very little brain in chapter one of Winnie-the-Pooh, don’t sound quite the same after watching a shell-shocked AA Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) react to bees buzzing when out for walk in the Hundred Acre Wood with his son (Will Tilston, making his debut, pictured below). Milne, known as Blue, is traumatised after serving in the battle of the Somme and various triggers – bees, champagne corks, bright lights, popping balloons – create flashbacks. “Bees are good, aren’t they?” Read more ...

It’s more than 40 years since Sparks appeared on Top of the Pops with “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”, one of a handful of hits from the brothers Mael, Ron and Russell, who grew up in 1950s and ‘60s LA detesting the “cerebral and sedate” folk boom and grooving to such British acts as the Who and the Kinks. They spent part of the Seventies in London, gaining an Island Records deal on the back of an Old Grey Whistle Test performance.They looked weird then and they still do, Russell Mael leaping about manically like an ageing pixie, brother Ron still sitting impassively behind his Read more ...

A charming assemblage of performers are left pretty much high and dry by Home Again, an LA-based romcom so determinedly glossy that each frame seems more squeaky-clean and unreal than the next. Intended as a star vehicle for Reese Witherspoon, this debut effort from filmmaker Hallie Meyers-Shyer proves only that the apple can fall reasonably far from the tree.Whereas her (now-divorced) parents, writer-directors Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, at least allowed shards of wit and emotion into such luscious property porn landmarks as It's Complicated and Something's Gotta Give, Home Again seems Read more ...

I can imagine Monica Mason, the artistic director who commissioned Christopher Wheeldon's 2011 Alice, feeling pretty pleased with herself as she looked around the Covent Garden auditorium last night at an audience buzzing with excitement for the first performance of the new season. At its 2011 premiere the piece was a big step into the unknown, the Royal Ballet's first full-length new work in 16 years. Now on its fifth run, Alice has proved to be the company's most successful new story ballet in a good deal longer than that.Alice paved the way for a run of new full-length ballets: three more Read more ...

It was on the strength of a single concert including a startling Sibelius Luonnotar and Third Symphony, thankfully reported here, that Sakari Oramo was appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. We had to wait a while for more major Sibelius from them, revelling in the meanwhile in the team’s superlative Nielsen cycle. But their Kullervo at the Proms was unsurpassable – even if I’ve just heard one as good, in a different way, from the young conductor who had his first break thanks to Oramo, Santtu-Matias Rouvali – and now, at last, come all seven numbered symphonies this side of Read more ...