class system
Miss Julie, Royal Exchange, ManchesterTuesday, 17 April 2012
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits... Read more... |
One Night, BBC OneTuesday, 27 March 2012
“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the... Read more... |
Titanic, ITV1Monday, 26 March 2012
Imagine my surprise when we weren't much more than halfway through this first episode, and the flipping thing hit the iceberg. But of course writer Julian Fellowes was way ahead of me, and his four-part series about RMS Unsinkable is evidently going... Read more... |
After Miss Julie, Young VicThursday, 22 March 2012
In 1888, the extremely weird Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, the radical lefty son of a shipping merchant and a housemaid, wrote a play called Miss Julie about the conflict between the classes, between love and lust, between... Read more... |
Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, BBC TwoSaturday, 25 February 2012
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was... Read more... |
Big Society!, Leeds City VarietiesMonday, 23 January 2012
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall... Read more... |
Alfie, Octagon Theatre, BoltonSaturday, 21 January 2012
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “... Read more... |
Swallows and Amazons, Vaudeville TheatreThursday, 22 December 2011
Four children allowed to go off in a boat on the Lake District by their mother without a responsible adult or lifejackets? If this happened today Social Services would be down on mum like a ton of bricks. But this is 1929, long before the tyranny of... Read more... |
LS Lowry, Richard Green GalleryTuesday, 29 November 2011
How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Cosmo JarvisSunday, 13 November 2011
Cosmo Jarvis (b 1989) was born in New Jersey but grew up in Devon. He has produced two albums, Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch (2009) and Is The World Strange or Am I Strange? (2011), that combine incisive lyricism, goofy humour, rap, rock, terrace-chant... Read more... |
Downton Abbey, Series 2 Finale, ITV1Monday, 07 November 2011
And so the eventful second series surged to a close with a bumper 90-minute edition - or at least it was in a 90-minute slot, generously padded with the commercials battling to scramble aboard the great ship Downton - and we were still left dangling... Read more... |
The Pitmen Painters, Duchess TheatreWednesday, 12 October 2011
Is there something remarkable about a group of working-class men learning to paint? You may think there is, or you may think there isn’t. You may think that anyone with very little formal education learning to do any of the things associated with... Read more... |
