When Tony Harrison transposed his version of Molière’s The Misanthrope from the 17th century to the early 1970s, he managed with his characteristic and brilliant combination of savagery and wit to make the play feel totally contemporary. For Andrew Hilton’s new production at the Bristol Old Vic, Harrison has tweaked the play into the 21st century, with characters clutching iPhones and boasting of their connections with Sarkozy. Molière’s masterpiece is about human failings and the reason this classic makes us laugh today is because we recognise ourselves in the characters' parade of Read more ...

The business end of 1980s BBC sitcom, the Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister series delivered political body-blows while sporting a dapper suit – satire with a gracious smile. In today’s era of muscled political heavies like The Thick of It, the Jay/Lynn brand of PG humour seems as antiquated as a blunderbuss – particularly when translated to the stage – but with just a few tweaks proves to be surprisingly effective.Global warming, the financial crisis, terrorism, the decline of the BBC – in the years since Jim Hacker and his staff last paced the carpets of No 10, Britain has only sunk Read more ...

The pairing of Philip Glass and Franz Kafka is a natural one. A shared fascination with obsession, with developing a simple premise to its most densely worked-out, most logical conclusion is evident in both, and it is only perhaps surprising that it took until 2000 for Glass to produce In The Penal Colony. Exploiting the minimal surroundings of the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre to maximal effect, this UK premiere production forgoes inference and suggestion in favour of all-out confrontation, etching its message brutally into the audience.Adhering to the outlines of Kafka’s original Read more ...

Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work of the artist who painted her. Yet they - sitter and artist - are, finally, what matters: that one day, the (probable) Lisa Gherardini, wife of a silk-merchant, sat down in front of an artist, who began to paint her. Five hundred years later, another sitter, the art critic Martin Gayford, sits down in front of an artist, Lucian Freud, who likewise Read more ...

Here we go again. Art takes on capitalism, round 4,598,756. The blissful life of Harry Joy, ad exec extraordinaire, beloved father of two, is (surprise, surprise) not quite what it seems. His wife is having an affair, his daughter is fellating his son for drugs and his business clients are spreading cancer. He thinks he's in hell. But this ain't hell; it's the greedy, bourgeois reality of a capitalist West. Stalin would have been mighty proud of Australian Brett Dean's new opera, Bliss, which was receiving its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival. Having said that, Read more ...

The Presteigne Festival, which has just ended after a packed long weekend of events of various shapes and sizes, is a music fest with a profile very much its own. Presteigne is one of those enchanting pocket county towns that proliferate along the Welsh borders (Monmouth, Montgomery and Denbigh are others): towns whose municipal status seems to belong in some child’s picture book, and is in fact a thing of the distant past.Even Presteigne’s county – Radnorshire – is no more, long since swallowed up by the huge, Celtic-sounding, but geographically meaningless Powys, then regurgitated as one of Read more ...

Australia has many fine exports – wine, women, gap year anecdotes – but increasingly it is her orchestras that are setting the standard. With a magnificent Proms performance from the Australian Youth Orchestra still fresh in the ears (as well as a significantly reinvigorated Sydney Symphony courtesy of Ashkenazy), last night it was the turn of the smaller and still-deadlier Australian Chamber Orchestra to fly the national flag, in what may well prove to be the finest concert of the summer.Peteris Vasks is hardly the name on everyone’s lips, but the music of this contemporary Latvian composer Read more ...

Step aside Prince Charming – there’s a new fairy tale in town, and your only substantive contribution fits into a small plastic sample pot. At some point in the last few years the Shangri-La, the unattainable dream of romantic comedies, shifted from man to baby. Hollywood started asking itself what happened after Happily Ever After, and the answer – they started trying for a baby, went through several painful, unsuccessful courses of IVF before he cheated with a work colleague – wasn’t pretty. With Jennifer Lopez’s The Back-up Plan and lesbian artificial insemination drama The Kids are Read more ...

From Russian “avant-garde constructivism” to Estonian minimalism via a jazz-inspired French concerto and the defiant originality of Scriabin – last night’s Prom from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra had a lot of ground to cover. I can imagine few pieces more antithetical – in spirit as much as style – as the self-reflexive indulgence of Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy and Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No 4 with its meditative asceticism; it says much of Salonen’s persuasive energy that it was a dialogue rather than a squabble that ensued amongst this rag-bag of the 20th and 21st Read more ...

Meditative experiences are hard to come by in the Royal Albert Hall. The twitching, scratching, fidgeting ticks of over 5000 people conspire to break your focus, to draw attention from the musical middle-distance back to the here and now. Last night’s two Proms – whether through programming, performance or just a happy chance of circumstances – both glanced into this distant space, briefly achieving that sense of communion peculiar to Proms audiences. As a birthday tribute to composer-mystic Arvo Pärt, it was fitting indeed.As he has already proved at ENO, Ed Gardner is a master of Read more ...

The Green Man festival takes place this coming weekend at the Glanusk estate near Abergavenny in the rolling hills of the Brecon Beacons. What begun in 2003 as a glorified gig for the husband and wife duo It's Jo And Danny has become the very epitome of the 21st-century “boutique festival” - indeed is very possibly responsible for that concept itself.As well as reclaiming the rock festival from bovine crowds and sensory overload, the Green Man also provided a nexus for a rising scene of hirsute youngsters intent on mining musical source material outside the standard canons of rock and club Read more ...

One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate) genders milling about the place too.Listen to "Oscillations" and "Seagreen Serenades" by Silver Apples ( Read more ...