interviews
Jasper Rees
Eileen Atkins (b 1934) acquired long-overdue fame with her performance in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Her desiccated spinster was the indisputed star turn until death did us part. It’s taken a while. Aside from half a century’s commitment to the classics and new plays, unlike the other more celebrated DBEs she has had a parallel career as a writer. There have been two plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as a screenplay of Mrs Dalloway. With Jean Marsh she also created Upstairs, Downstairs which is returning to British television in an updated revival. This time round Read more ...
fisun.guner
For his new show at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger will be unveiling a first: a life-sized, three-dimensional "self-portrait". But it won't be a straightforward representation of the 50-year-old conceptual artist. It will, instead, be a representation of himself as the letter "I" in Times New Roman. His Vauxhall studio, in South London, is filled with pictures of "self-portraits" of the artist as a series of letters. It is also filled with the debris of current and recent projects: bits of string and deflating balloons; scrappy reproductions of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Within the space of a single year - 1979 - Barrie Keeffe wrote two scripts which together summed up the very essence of the East End on the eve of Thatcherism. The first, which barely needs introduction, was the now-classic The Long Good Friday. The other was Sus, an explosive play about a black man detained by two racist police officers on the night of the General Election. Sus has since been performed worldwide and a screen version receives its premiere at the East End Film Festival on Saturday, prior to release on 7 May - the day after a certain other election. Meanwhile, a new stage Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Before Shutter Island - long, long before - there was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. First released in 1920, Robert Wiene's hallucinogenic film descends, like that of Martin Scorsese who cites it as a major influence, into the creepy shadowlands between sanity and madness. This spring Caligari goes on national tour (details below) spruced up with a musical accompaniment by Minima, a four-strong rock group which specialises in supplying the sound for silents. The group consists of drums (Mick Frangou), bass (Andy Taylor), cello (Greg Hall) and guitar (Alex Hogg). Here, Hogg talks about Minima's Read more ...
edward.seckerson
English tenor Mark Padmore has enjoyed a career that has seen him grow from a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, through membership of The Sixteen and Hilliard ensembles, to becoming the international Evangelist of choice in performances of Bach’s Passions across the globe. He talks about the people who influenced him – William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe among them – and the prospect of Britten operas in waiting. Padmore is currently enjoying a year-long residency at the Wigmore Hall.Listen here
More information on Padmore's residency at Wigmore Hall
gerard.gilbert
Woody Allen has done a disservice to psychoanalysis, reckons Hagai Levy, the 45-year-old creator of HBO’s In Treatment, which starts tonight on Sky Arts 1. Levy had directed 270 episodes of a popular Israeli soap opera before he hit on the idea of a five-nights-per-week drama about therapy - the resulting show, Betipul , becoming an instant hit in his homeland. Retitled In Treatment, the drama was remade in America within a year of first screening in Israel.The HBO version, on which Levy acted as executive producer, stars Gabriel Byrne (Miller’s Crossing, The Usual Suspects) as Read more ...
sue.steward
Jillian Edelstein, the distinguished photographer, is joining theartsdesk. She grew up in Cape Town and in 1985 moved to London, where within a year she had won the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year award. It was to be the first of many such accolades. She has since established a reputation as one of the leading portrait photographers of the age, her work appearing widely in this country but also for American publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview.Between 1996 and 2002 she documented the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the most inscrutable. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan – you know where you are with them, and have done for years. But the unifying theme of Barnes’s work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it’s an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.The one time I met Auberon Waugh, founder of The Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years’ time. This would have been about 20 years ago Read more ...