Features
Adam Sweeting
Nostalgists often hark back to a “golden age” of TV drama, referring to the likes of ITV’s Brideshead Revisited, or the BBC’s I Claudius or The Forsyte Saga. This week on the South Bank, the BFI launches a season which examines a lost age of a different kind, that of the radical TV dramatists who scorched across British screens from the mid-Sixties, through the Seventies and the Margaret Thatcher era, and finally into the ambiguous world of New Labour. The two-part season, United Kingdom!, stretches across November and December, and en route will take in such abrasive televisual Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A few years ago he was voted the greatest Briton in a national television poll. Among his many books is A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He went to Harrow, for goodness’ sake. And he is always played by English actors. Always. You name them: Robert Hardy, Simon Ward, Julian Fellowes, Albert Finney. So where, of all the unlikely places, did they look for an actor to follow in those footsteps for a new BBC/HBO drama depicting Churchill’s leadership in the Second World War? In the country, believe or not, where Churchill once threatened to send 300,000 troops to quell the natives. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a new biography of the Royal Ballet's great choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan by Jann Parry reveals, MacMillan's ballets are often about characters in shadowy explorations of inner states of mind. In part, his willingness to portray loneliness, sexual jealousy, greediness and violent assault in a medium usually associated with escapism and pretty fairy-tales accounts for both the attraction felt for his major ballets worldwide and also the hostility with which his efforts were greeted inside the Royal Opera House.MacMillan became an alcoholic and then dependent on prescription drugs as Read more ...
sue.steward
Romuald Hazoumé strolls into the October Gallery in London with the assurance of a man preceded by his reputation, and walks through a room lined with his large colour photographs, plastic masks, symbolic paintings on canvas, and a centrepiece installation featuring a group of four huge musical instruments constructed from cut-up petrol canisters. A strong, stocky 47-year-old wearing a comfortably loose boubou and wide trousers, he has every reason to be confident: this artist from Benin in West Africa, who carries round his neck a huge bunch of jangling, tinkling talismanic pendants which Read more ...
sheila.johnston
When an unknown Romanian director won the Palme D'Or in Cannes, you might say that it upset the applecart. Mungiu had made one small previous feature, and his winning film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, was written and shot in less than a year. His, truly, was a meteoric, overnight, astonishing success. But this was two years ago. What did Mungiu do next? Tales from the Golden Age provides an answer - of sorts.A collection of myths, some poignant, some comic, about life in the late Eighties under Nicolae Ceauşescu, the film is written and directed by various hands. Mungiu is the project's Read more ...
edward.seckerson
theartsdesk's podcasts with broadcaster Edward Seckerson continue with a look at the English National Opera's new production of two 20th-century masterpieces: Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Daniel Kramer takes on the mysterious Bluebeard, while Michael Keegan-Dolan and his Olivier Award-nominated dance company, Fabulous Beast, tackle the uncontrollable forces of Stravinsky's infamous Rite.Listen to the podcast here. The double bill opens at the ENO on 6 November. Book here
Check out what's on in the ENO season
josh.spero
Worries that London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad had fallen at the first hurdle – as it seemed when the proposed Olympic Friend-ship, carrying a cargo of British artists and philosophers around the world, was scrapped – can be assuaged. The organisers of the London Olympics have, in fact, turned their course around: instead of this monumental, nationalistic, elitist, pretentious idea, they have moved to the local, the inclusive, the relatable. Artists taking the lead, a co-production of Arts Council England and London 2012, has announced the 12 public art projects it is commissioning for a total Read more ...
anne.billson
I've been having rather a surreal autumn here in Paris. First, I was lucky enough to catch the last day of Une semaine de bonté at the Musée d'Orsay, where the original collages were on display in five colour-coded chambers. For those not in the know, Max Ernst's graphic novel avant le fait is a series of 182 collages made out of printed images cut from old books, and was first published in 1934, in a series of five pamphlets. The title means, "A Week of Kindness", but the contents are anything but kind.In fact, these images are downright sinister and disquieting. In one, a giant sphinx peers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Astonishingly tall and surmounted by a luxuriant clump of dramatic red hair, Brett Dennen couldn't be mistaken for any other singer-songwriter. It's possible to detect any number of musical echoes in his songs - Neil Young, Dylan, Paul Simon - but thanks to his huskily soulful voice and a gift for conveying complicated sentiments in a resonant phrase, he manages to stand apart from the crowd here too.As a songwriter, Dennen was a late developer, hardly getting started until he was 21 or 22. "I think it's one of those things where it was just brewing for a while," reflects the tunesmith from Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
"It's mostly very clipped and formal, but parts of it have been getting wonderfully wilder and wilder in the last few years." William Christie, whom I’ve met several times in the last decade, is describing his famous French garden in La Vendée, which has featured in many a glossy magazine. But he could also be describing himself.American-born Christie initially made an enviable reputation as a rather high-minded, even severe, director of Les Arts Florissants, one of the leading early music groups. They have been showered with international awards, particularly for their revivals of early Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Edward Seckerson talks to actor/singer Nigel Richards about his new album A Shining Truth - a handsome compendium of 14 hitherto unrecorded musical theatre songs by major talents as Howard Goodall, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, Conor Mitchell, Richard Taylor, and others no less significant. Musical Theatre aficionados will recall Nigel's unforgettable performance in the title role of Adam Guettel's masterpiece Floyd Collins at London's Bridewell Theatre and will know that few have done more to champion the cause of new writing than he has. This isn’t an album it’s a manifesto - and you Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Go on, admit it. You’ve done it too. Someone is talking in your vicinity and you’ve turned round to give them evils. It’s a manoeuvre I’ve been perfecting for years. The classic rebuke is in the speedy twist of the neck, a withering glance in the perpetrator’s general direction (but not, crucially, into their eyeballs: too confrontational) followed by the slow, affronted turn back to face the front. For one night only, the gesture says, you are singlehandedly ruining my life. I didn't pay more than I can afford to listen to you whisper through Beethoven/Shakespeare/”The Great Gig in the Sky Read more ...