Features
theartsdesk
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site in 2009. Her unfussy eye for colour and composition also influenced the early design of The Arts Desk and traces remain today.With her talent for friendship she naturally drew other new music explorers into her circle of enthusiasm, as well as the photographers whose work she wrote about and curated with lilting sympathy. She made friends wherever Read more ...
Phoebe Michaelides
After the gruelling five-hour coach journey to Powys, Wales, we strolled over a bridge into Glanusk Park, through two security guards, and into Green Man with only so much as a sing-song “Bore da”. Satisfied, we picked a spot and set up camp in the intense heat. Young Welsh scholars waved their A-level results in the air and cracked open that first bottle of cider, quaint middle-class families eagerly discussing the multitude of vegan opportunities.On Thursday nothing played on the main Mountain Stage, an impressively large set-up in the dead-centre of Green Man, and the camping fields were Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney is one of Britain’s most diverse and original creative talents. Having trained as a classical pianist, jazz musician and flamenco guitarist, as well as a tabla and sitar player, his highly distinctive pieces blend European and Indian classical music with soul, jazz, funk, hip hop, flamenco and dance music. As well as 11 albums, he has composed dozens of film, TV and video-game scores, been adapted for dance shows, worked prolifically as a DJ and an educator. He has collaborated with a glittering roster of stars, from Paul McCartney Read more ...
Tom Birchenough and Nick Hasted
It’s fitting that the first name on The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 film list for 2017 is that of Ken Loach. But though the director has a cinema career of more than half a century behind him – and had even officially retired before he came back to make I, Daniel Blake – his presence here is in no sense a Lifetime Achievement award. If you follow the adage, “You’re only as good as your last film”, this was Loach at his urgent best. Worldwide critical acclaim was matched, encouragingly, by box office success, not least in the UK where I, Daniel Blake touched a nerve in society.Loach certainly Read more ...
Christopher Shinn
Plays do not usually come into being in isolation. When I search my gmail archive I see that my first communication with Robert Icke about a commission came in April 2012. Rupert Goold and Rob were still at Headlong then. I was busy so asked that we keep the conversation going but not commit to anything.In October 2013 Rob wrote that he and Rupert were now at the Almeida and would still love for me to write something, he was coming to New York and could we meet up to discuss. What Rob didn’t know then was that 11 months before, in November, I had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Could we be inhabiting a new golden age of theatre? It sometimes seems that way, not least in the blurring of boundaries that increasingly is the norm. Few might have guessed, for instance, that the author of the hottest play in years – Jack Thorne, who wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – would be a by-product of the Royal Court. Or that the brilliant Sharon D Clarke, recognised by The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 Awards this year for her scorching star turns in Caroline, or Change at Chichester and The Life at Southwark Playhouse, would have done West End stints in We Will Rock You and Read more ...
Michael Volpe
On the morning of the Grenfell Tower disaster, as the news of the fire gathered pace and gravity, our phones were abuzz with concern for our front of house colleague, Debbie Lamprell, who we knew lived in the tower. We all called her number time and again, sought to reassure one another with optimistic scenarios whereby her telephone may have been left at home as she escaped. My telephone rang again. This time it was James Clutton, our Director of Opera, calling from the base of the tower itself; he’d rushed across London, frustrated at the lack of news of our colleague, and was searching Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in London, he was waylaid by the burgeoning fringe scene, and the rock god project took a back seat. His reputation from the New York underground for courting danger, taking risks, living on the edge etc went before him, and the savage immediacy of his plays found a natural home in the small space houses of the capital.Outside the inner circle of the Read more ...
Lisa Jewell
I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a controlling man who’d kept me more or less locked away from the world. I had no front door key, no phone, was not allowed to see my friends or my family. If I displeased him I was subjected to week-long silences and constant criticism. I finally broke away from the marriage early that same year and desperately wanted to purge the experience by writing about it. I was a few paragraphs into a fictionalised account of the events when I suddenly recoiled. I wasn’t ready. It was too personal. Too Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started out in 1984, Waterstone’s was new and exciting, forcing the innumerable independents that had long been the backbone of the trade to raise their game. At Foyles, Christina still presided over a store – just the one – that was modelled on an Albanian department store. Something called the Net Book Agreement fixed the price of books, which were not yet sold in supermarkets.When the NBA collapsed in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In his biography The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman recalls his first encounter with the Swedish island of Fårö, in 1960, when location scouting for his next film, Through A Glass Darkly. A last, desperate bid by the film’s producers to find a cheaper setting than Orkney turned out to be fortuitous in more ways than they could have imagined.“If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home,” Bergman recalls; “if one wished to be funny, one could talk about love at first sight.” He told his cameraman Sven Nykvist “that I wanted to live on the island for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Jodie is a remarkable young woman. She’s game. She’s a good actress, and she’s willing.” So said Peter O’Toole of the first female Doctor Who. Jodie Whittaker, born in 1982, is best known for Broadchurch on the small screen and Attack the Block on the big screen. But there’s a lot more to her than those two roles.At 23 and fresh out of drama school, she starred opposite O’Toole in Venus as a surly teenager from Yorkshire who captivates a withered old actor. The role, written by Hanif Kureishi, allowed her to paint with many colours. Her character Jessie is by turns sullen, unimpressed, Read more ...