Features
Katherine McLaughlin
August bank holiday weekend is like Christmas day for horror fans thanks to Frightfest who deliver a sackful of disturbing delights in their 15th year. An inspiring line-up sees Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens reinvent himself as a charming psychopath in opening night film The Guest. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (You're Next) amaze once again with a blend of Eighties-style action and horror.Meanwhile, horror classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street play alongside up-and-coming British fare such as Oliver Frampton’s bleak take on past trauma The Forgotten and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lauren Bacall, who has died at the age of 89, was an iconic figure on screen. She spoke one of the immortal lines in film history when all but exhaling the remark, “You just put your lips together and blow” in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not. But away from the screen and from such husbands as Humphrey Bogart and Jason Robards, Bacall shone just as brightly on stage, a medium that made plain a quality hinted at by her work in movies. She may not have been the greatest actress ever – far from it: you wouldn’t peruse her CV for reappraisals of Shakespeare and Chekhov. But in her element, she Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robin Williams, who has died at the age of 63, was a very American comedian. The flow of invention that erupted from inside him had an unstoppable, domineering, emetic brilliance. In chat shows, performing stand-up, and in his greatest role as a DJ entertaining the troops in Vietnam, he was a not quite human force of nature.Williams had his first starring role in the sitcom Mork and Mindy, as an alien learning the ways of earth. The role lingered over his career as a kind of definition. He never played regular guys: instead he was a shoo-in for shrinks, outcasts, weirdos, penguins and, most Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Laura Mvula, despite her exotic-sounding name, is a quintessentially British artist. Not just because of where she comes from – Birmingham – but also how she stays humble and understated while dripping with talent. Her story is equally endearing. Mvula was working as a receptionist when her debut, Sing to the Moon, was released. Overnight, her world was turned upside down and over the next year she was nominated for nearly every major award going, taking home two MOBOs and one Urban Music Award.Still, Mvula is not ostensibly an r’n’b or soul artist. Her voice may owe a debt to the gospel she Read more ...
David Nice
“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Kurt Vonnegut’s vow to repeat his Uncle Alex’s mantra when things were going “sweetly and peacefully” has been much on my mind during various idylls this war-torn summer. It certainly applied to hearing three boys and a girl in their early teens play a cloudless early Haydn string quartet in the beautifully restored small neoclassical theatre of a perfect Umbrian hill town. But as so often with troubles elsewhere always at the back of our minds, nothing was quite that simple.The young people were totally focused on the work in a performance of astonishing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you only ever listened to opera from recordings, you might overlook the fact that it's as much theatre as it is music. In the opera house on the night, it's all well and good for the orchestra to play the score and the singers to sing their parts, but on top of that you have to allow for costume changes, move the scenery, adjust the lighting and make sure you get all the right people on and off stage at the appropriate moments. It's what makes opera the living, breathing, sometimes splendidly chaotic spectacle it is.It was a strange sensation, then, to spend some time in the orchestra pit Read more ...
fisun.guner
Imagine an industrial disaster that manages to kill, maim or make homeless a significant percentage of the population of a densely populated city. Then imagine the effects of that disaster for years to come: the catastrophic physical and psychological effects on the city’s surviving inhabitants; the complete destruction of the region’s infrastructure; and the utterly devastating impact on its already struggling local economy. (If it helps, imagine this city is Bhopal, 1984, and the company is United Carbide.)Now imagine that this powerful multinational company – culpable through Read more ...
Peter Eyre
Some years ago I read a piece about a novel of Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard (1931-1989) was perhaps the most famous Austrian writer of his time, but unknown to me. In this article he was described as intense, manically obsessive, addicted to the unvarnished truth, and innovative in his constructions. I read the novel and was hooked. Bernhard’s novels have no paragraphs, and read like the monologues of a man possessed. You almost need to read them in one sitting. I read all his novels available in translation, and rushed to the bookshop every time I heard of a new Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s raining. Not spitting or drizzling, properly raining, with clouds so thick that you know they’re here to stay. Yet rather than take shelter in restaurants and bars, or simply stay at home on this soggy summer night, 7,000 people in a stylish array of plastic macs and souwesters have made their way to the harbourside of the small Austrian town of Bregenz. Why? An annual festival that takes opera to extremes.We’ve had opera in bunkers and canal barges, beaches and helicopters, pubs and warehouses, so what’s so special about opera on a lake? For one thing, Bregenz isn’t about opera close to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If, like me, your first reaction to the question “What does opera have to say to under-30s” is “What doesn’t opera have to say to them, or anyone, for that matter?” then you can stop reading now. Job done. Go out and spread the word. For everyone else – and that includes Tolstoy, Rousseau and Samuel Johnson, famous opera-detractors all – I have just one further question: what is your problem with opera?There’s a myth that’s passed around by arts administrators and organisations around the world that audiences for opera are, and will always be, old. Don’t worry if the audience is looking a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The doctoring of political images became something of a tradition in the last century, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao all airbrushing their enemies from photographs. The latest infrared technology has revealed that something similar may have happened during the English Civil War, with a portrait of Oliver Cromwell apparently having been painted over with an image of the Parliamentarian Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who fell out with Cromwell when he became Lord Protector in 1653. At first glance, the National Portrait Gallery’s Sir Arthur Hesilrige (pictured below right), inscribed with the Read more ...
mark.hudson
Remember when festivals were only about what they were ostensibly about? When, say, Reading offered nothing beyond hard rock bar disgusting toilets, overpriced hamburgers and the prospect of a punch-up. When literary festivals dealt only in, well, literature. Nowadays, the average music festival offers all the amenities of a small city, not just music, but shopping, comedy, ballet and every form of spiritual and bodily therapy. But even in these times of festival as free-form lifestyle experience Port Eliot is something else.Arriving at the festival site, in the grounds of a neo-gothic Read more ...