Features
Nigel Short
Having just celebrated a birthday the wrong side of 50 years of age I confess to regularly pinching myself when I dare to look back and see the higgledy-piggledy route my life has taken to bring me to the present day, as we celebrate 15 years of Tenebrae. Not just the odd lucky break here and there but seemingly a lifelong sequence of odd twists and turns, of chance meetings and associations, every one of which has resulted in me landing at the current co-ordinates of life.And what a place it is! Fate, destiny, luck? Call it what you will, but I know only too well that none of these things Read more ...
Alistair Beaton
If you’d asked me five years ago whether I might one day write a comedy about fracking, I’d have wondered whether you were entirely in possession of your faculties. Not because fracking sounds dull and boring (although let’s be honest, it does), but because the business of fracking had never really caught my attention.That changed when I stumbled on some photographs of the effect of fracking on the landscapes of Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Dakota. From the air, some areas of those States resembled the surface of the moon. Astonishing then that dozens more states were giving the go-ahead to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is the fate of a certain type of well-spoken classically trained actor to wear the livery of the English Establishment. Tim Pigott-Smith, double-barrelled and tall with a high forehead, was one such. But the full arc of his career encompassed vast breadth: he was a gifted tragedian, and a nifty comedian. “In television I was first cast as a cavalry officer because of my name,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2015. He brought an air of entitlement to the PM in Johnny English, the Foreign Minister in Quantum of Solace, various higher-ups in various uniforms in The Chief, The Vice, Read more ...
Paul Tickell
Karen Blixen (1885-1962), the prolific Danish storyteller, is perhaps most immediately recognised for the portrayal of her and her works on the big screen, above all by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. But her own story, and her place in the literary canon, can often be overlooked. Over the past three years I’ve been working closely with Riotous Company on Out of Blixen, a production exploring the many sides to Blixen and the rich layers of her tales. It is directed by and stars Kathryn Hunter (pictured below in rehearsal, by Dan Fearon).Blixen’s life is ripe for theatrical interpretation. She Read more ...
theartsdesk
They are hardly the ideal conditions in which to create. Danger is a constant and lurking menace, and it comes in multiple guises. Industrial injury is the main threat, as is the constant risk of arrest. Other hazards include deafness, breathing polluted air and public discontent. The tools and materials used in this form of installation - power drill, tarmac and steamroller - are expensive. And the work cannot be sold. But despite these powerful deterrents, a clandestine group of vagabond practitioners will stop at nothing to get their work into the public sphere. You may not know them, but Read more ...
Alison Cole
I have heard countless speeches advocating the importance of arts education, and making bold cross-curricular claims – from England’s cultural ministers and arts leaders, to the Arts Council and the Creative Industries Federation – but I have never heard the case put more persuasively and simply than by Ronnie Cheng, the softly-spoken headmaster of the Diocesan Boys School in Kowloon, Hong Kong.Cheng, a Top 50 finalist in the Varkey Foundation’s phenomenal Global Teacher Prize competition (now in its fifth year), has literally devoted his life to the school: he studied there, became music Read more ...
Grayson Perry
I have always felt very lucky to have been working as an artist in London during the period when it transformed into the capital of the art world. It has been a beautiful, fascinating and profitable ride. When I started art school in 1978, contemporary art in Britain seemed like a cottage industry situated in some little backwater seldom visited by the public or the media. Art history happened elsewhere – in Paris, Vienna or New York. Twenty years later, London was cool once again, and its exploding art scene was a large part of that. This was the heyday of the Young British Artists, Charles Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.French Touch traces electronic music back from now to when the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo performed in Paris in 1914 – his home-country Italy had not received him warmly – and on through Maurice Martenot, Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey (pictured below right in 1997), Jean-Michel Read more ...
David Nice
Leif Ove Andsnes directing two great Mozart piano concertos from the keyboard may be the chief attraction when the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra comes to London's Cadogan Hall on Friday to celebrate its 40th birthday. It was certainly the bait which lured me to Oslo last week. But in talking to the Renaissance man who has led the ensemble since its foundation in 1977, Terje Tønnesen, I discovered that what I heard – including a Haydn symphony just as revelatory as the Mozart concertos – was just the tip of the creative iceberg. Londoners will get a greater slice of that individuality Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of last year’s third series of Line of Duty, we saw the back of the reprehensible Dot “The Caddy” Cottan, and with the much-abused Keeley Hawes consigned to the show’s morgue of deceased leading characters it felt as though important matters had come to a close. I was dubious about LoD when it began in 2012, but what has gradually become apparent is that its mastermind Jed Mercurio (pictured below) has been playing a long, labyrinthine game. Now the fourth series is upon us – promoted to BBC One from BBC Two – and judging by the first episode, it has the potential to be another Read more ...
Ryan Craig
The monster has come alive and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Thirteen actors playing three generations of a very explosive family arrive in full period costume. Towering Dexion shelving units, heaving with foam and cushions and fabrics and off-cuts, reach to the rafters and snake around the entirety of the stage. They form the looming, metallic skeleton of a hugely intricate replica of a three-storey rubber emporium in 1968. The lights, the music, the mingling polyphony of street life, traffic and heavy machinery, flood the theatre. The Kraken has awoken and there’s no way back.It’s Read more ...
Ramin Gray
I’m sitting in a rehearsal room in Manchester preparing an Actors Touring Company’s new version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women, listening to a group of young women raise their voices in praise of “untameable Artemis”. She’s the goddess of virginity among many other things. In this play she’s pitted against Aphrodite, the goddess of union, love and sex. The competing claims are complex: retaining one’s virginity implies choice, control, autonomy.But, as Benedick notes in Much Ado About Nothing, “the world must be peopled”, and when we understand that these women have travelled across the Read more ...