Interviews
igor.toronyilalic
Joseph Strick (b. 1923) is one of America’s great Academy Award-winning independent directors. He began his maverick career with an unassuming short, Muscle Beach (1946), creating a small piece of perfection in his montage of the infamous muscle-pumpers of Los Angeles. He made the award-winning Savage Eye in 1960 and then directed a string of controversial literary adaptations: Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1963), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1970) and Joyce's Ulysses (1967), which contained the first use of the word “fuck“ on screen. He won an Academy Award in 1971 for his Read more ...
fisun.guner
The sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), RA, CBE, won the Turner Prize in 1990. His public works are characterised by their gigantic scale and ambition. In the UK he is probably best known for Marsyas (2002), the viscerally red “ear trumpet” that elegantly spanned the entire length of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern. He is also the artist behind the world’s most expensive public sculpture. Cloud Gate (picture below), completed in 2006, is a beguiling polished steel ellipsis located in Chicago’s AT&T Plaza. Costing $23 million and measuring 10 metres by 20 metres, its silver mirrored surface Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lesley Sharp could be thought of as an actor's actor: a talent equally at home in theatre, cinema and TV who has been impressing audiences and critics regularly for a quarter-century without quite becoming a star name. That looks set to change in theatre terms at least with Sharp's breakout West End double - first as the blowsy, ferocious Mari in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, the Jim Cartwright play currently in revival until 30 January 2010 at the Vaudeville Theatre, followed by Mrs Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts early next year at the Duchess, in a production to be directed by Sharp's Pastor Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Roy Williams is one of the most prolific, and most lauded, British playwrights. Born in Fulham, south-west London, in 1968, he had by his mid-30s already won a shelf-full of awards, to which he added an OBE in 2008. His debut, The No Boys Cricket Club, won the Writers’ Guild New Writer of the Year award in 1996. Two years later Starstruck won three major awards. In the early 2000s Lift Off and Clubland were also successes. In 2004 Williams won the first Arts Council Decibel Award, given to black or Asian artists in recognition of their contribution to the arts.His greatest hits include the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Electronic music is all the rage again as artists such as La Roux, Lady Gaga, Little Boots and Calvin Harris hark back to Eighties electro-pop and Nineties club classics. Meanwhile, there are also darker crannies where synthesized sounds have evolved into stranger forms, the sonic equivalent of those bizarre fish that lurk at the bottom of the ocean. The internet has allowed whole non-geographical scenes to bloom where club music, avant-garde noise and punk attitude collide. Tim Exile used to belong here, crashing the gnarliest drum & bass into abrasive sub-genres such as breakcore and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s Twickenham in the early Sixties, the age of austerity's not yet over, and they’re sitting in his Bristol outside her house at night. She tells him she sometimes thinks he’s the only person who’s done anything in “this whole stupid Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Hare (b. 1947) has had three distinct phases to his career as a playwright. In the 1970s he was a satirist of the agitprop movement whose plays (Slag, Knuckle) smacked of youthful belligerence. From Plenty (1978) onwards, he devoted two decades to writing ambitious, wide-ranging plays about the state of the nation, most notably with the trilogy comprising Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and Absence of War (1990-1993). Meanwhile, in Skylight (1995) and Amy’s View (1997) he pondered the nature of love (following marriage to his second wife, the designer Nicole Farhi). But when 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 ...
igor.toronyilalic
There is no more extraordinary musical journey than that of Britain's leading living composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (b.1934). In the 1960s, he was Britain's Stravinsky, at the heart and head of the modernist musical rebellion, provoking audience walkouts, outraging the musical powers that be and occasionally even hitting the news headlines. Today, as a Knight of the realm and a Master of the Queen’s Music, he finds himself in the very bosom of the British establishment.In his 75th anniversary year, on the eve of a celebration of his career at the South Bank, where a complete cycle of his Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Play titles can acquire a life of their own. Playwright Joe Orton, who met a violent end in August 1967, didn’t have the chance to write the play that was to be called Prick Up Your Ears, but the title has lived on. And on. It was used by critic John Lahr for his 1978 biography of Orton, and by Stephen Frears for his 1987 film, which starred Gary Oldman. Now a new black comedy, written by Simon Bent and currently at the Comedy Theatre in the West End, uses the same title, with its naughty anagram - just shuffle the letters of the last word and you’ll see what I mean.The play, which stars Read more ...
joe.muggs
Glasgow-born, south London resident Steve Goodman – better known to discerning lovers of modern music as Kode 9 – has a unique and privileged position in relation to the ever-shifting UK dance music underground. In the mid 90s he formed part of the slightly cultish Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) founded by Sadie Plant and Nick Land at the University of Warwick, where he gained a PhD in philosophy.The CCRU cooked up a rich gumbo of postmodern theory, situationism, science fiction and HP Lovecraft, occultism, rave music (particularly jungle / drum & bass) and high-tech Read more ...