Features
william.ward
The rapturous reception for Zaha Hadid’s groundbreaking, breathtaking new confection in Rome, Il Museo dell’Arte del XXIesimo Secolo - the 21st-Century Art Museum (MAXXI for short) - has reopened for the umpteenth time one of Italy’s favourite cultural debates. Why the hell does it take so long to build anything decent in our capital city, especially when we have one of the finest traditions - if not the finest - in architecture, civil engineering and construction, of anywhere in the whole world?Well, “Rome,” as the old expression counselling patience in all things has it, “wasn’t built in a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Channel 4 put six disabled people on a desert island for three months to see if they can fend for themselves. That’s the startling premise of Cast Offs - a new drama co-written by Alex Bulmer, Tony Roche and Jack Thorne. Does team writing really work? And can you get laughs out of such sensitive material. theartsdesk invited the three writers to interview one another.TONY ROCHE: OK, I’ll ask the questions because I’m lazy and that seems like it will be the least amount of work. Any objections?
ALEX BULMER: Yes.
JACK THORNE: Obviously.
TONY: Great. We’re agreed. So, first question. Jack, can Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Award-winning screenwriter and children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, whose credits include Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People, always knew he’d be a writer. “I imagined myself in a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, furiously typing away while someone shoved cigarettes in my mouth and I shouted, ‘Match me, Sydney!’ Or writing bits and pieces for The Paris Review." Cottrell Boyce and I are chatting in the distinctly unglamorous surroundings of a café on the concourse of Euston station. Cottrell Boyce is on his way back to Liverpool, where he has lived for most of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A delicious new treat is promised at The Royal Opera House for Christmas: a comic opera by Tchaikovsky that brings the wit and fun of a Russian magical folk tale to the stage in a staging of rare opulence. A story of turbulent love, magical rides through the sky with the Devil, and an impossible task - to get a peasant girl a pair of Catherine the Great's slippers - The Tsarina's Slippers has ballets and Cossack dancing as well as a host of singing characters.Director Francesca Zambello, costume designer Tatiana Noginova and choreographer Alastair Marriott here reveal their preparations, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“All an actor can do is say no or yes to something,” says Aidan McArdle, as we sit in a Soho café surrounded by whooshing espresso machines and bustling waitresses. He says no to a cream cake. “Every time you do a job it’s a bit of a leap of faith. I said yes to Puck at the Royal Shakespeare Company years ago, and for all I knew I could have been playing Puck naked in an S&M club. You just don’t know, you could be hanging from some sort of leather swing! But you don’t have any control over that. If you say yes to the part, you just have to do it and shut up.”So far, McArdle has been Read more ...
tom.higgins
Elgar’s flag-waving nautical song-cycle The Fringes of the Fleet was performed to packed houses up and down the country in 1917, then sank virtually without trace for the next 90 years. As the work receives its first professional orchestral recording since Elgar's own, Tom Higgins, the conductor of the recording, explains how the work came into being, and why Rudyard Kipling had it banned.
IF events in the First World War had meshed a little differently, Elgar’s The Fringes of the Fleet would have become one of his best-known works. When first heard at the London Coliseum on 11 June 1917 as Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Upon emerging from Sheffield railway station, one of the first things you clap eyes on is Andrew Motion’s 2007 poem What If? unfurling down the side of one of the university tower blocks and gleaming faintly in the last of the autumn sun. With its exhortation to “greet and understand what lies ahead... The lives which wait as yet unseen, unread,” it’s not a bad incidental epigram for a festival of documentary film-making whose trailer was inspired by the city’s cosmopolitan identity. Doc/Fest opened on Wednesday with Mat Whitecross’s Moving to Mars (pictured below), about a family of Burmese Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From seat 17 of Row 8, Block M35, Stair 14, Level 4, in a gathering of 75,000 spectators, almost all of them Welsh, it’s difficult to argue with the idea that Wales already has a national theatre. It’s called the Millennium Stadium (picture below). Just before kick-off yesterday afternoon, from my high-altitude perch, I looked across to the distant tunnel opposite. Its jaws belched fire and smoke and, in due course, a pumped-up team in red shirts. Their entry was greeted by a dozen gas-powered jet flames dotted around the touchline, spurting up towards the stadium roof. And then all those Read more ...
sue.steward
Wales doesn’t figure high on the UK charts of art awareness, but one of its leading contemporary artists, 43-year-old Tim Davies, represents a generation who are producing significant, original work without approbation from the Hoxton or Shoreditch taste-makers, and often, attention comes from abroad. In Wales, of course, it’s a different story: he was Gold Medal winner in the 2003 National Eisteddfod, and on the other hand the only British artist shortlisted for the prestigious international Artes Mundi prize in 2004. Davies’ major solo show at the Glynn Vivian Gallery in his hometown, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The most famous rock festival in history celebrated its 40th anniversary this summer in an orgy of nostalgia. Michael Wadleigh's Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary Woodstock was re-released, the media were flooded with reminiscences and analyses and leading film-makers felt moved to address themselves afresh to the subject. Woodstock Now & Then, a new documentary directed by the two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple, plays at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, while Taking Woodstock, an oblique fictional take on the event by her fellow Oscar laureate Ang Lee, is released in the UK on 13 Read more ...
edward.seckerson
With its powerfully emotive stagings of Bach's St John Passion and Verdi's Requiem English National Opera has built something of a reputation for bringing sacred masterworks to the secular stage. Award-winning director Deborah Warner, conductor and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings, and ENO's indefatigable chorus master Martin Merry tell Edward Seckerson about the challenges of making a credible stage spectacle of Handel's Messiah, which opens on Friday 27 November. "It's about us all," says Warner, when asked how inclusive this most popular of all sacred oratorios can be. And she promises Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Commissioning orchestral music is not for the faint-hearted. It is notoriously difficult to fund and satisfaction is by no means guaranteed. This however did not deter the leading British cellist Robert Cohen from asking the composer Sally Beamish to write a work to mark his fiftieth birthday, and on 12 November Cohen will give the world premiere of Beamish’s Cello Concerto No 2, The Song Gatherer, with the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä at Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, with a British premiere planned next year.“I’m sure most musicians are a little apprehensive when Read more ...