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History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the Royal Academy of Arts tried to persuade us to look beyond the grisly tales of human sacrifice to a more nuanced portrait of a people steeped in gory rituals that we, soaked in the serial-killer television porn of the 21st century, might strangely understand.It didn’t work – how many vessels designed to receive still-beating human hearts do you need to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
4 am. Eternal. I'm at an all-night temple festival somewhere in north Kerala in southern India - not so much in the middle of nowhere as on the outskirts of nowhere. There's wild chenda drumming and a terrifying apparition of a man who has gone into a trance – the goddess Babrakali, they tell me, has possessed him. He's wearing an outrageous red costume 12ft high, and he is charging right at me. The fact that his outfit is on fire, that he's just bitten the head off a live cockerel and the remains of the unlucky fowl dangle from his mouth, doesn't reassure me.In fact, he stops just in front Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
They played their first concert in 1969, and 40 years later the TP Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, to give them their full name, had their UK debut last night at the Barbican as part of their first European tour. They are the latest expression of a growing cult of classic bands who hit their peak in 1970s Africa. The music of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti has never been more popular, strange jazz from 1970s Addis Ababa has been selling impressively on the Ethiopiques series of records, while Senegal’s Orchestre Baobab have reformed to great acclaim.Three cult albums, culled from a repertory of over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Werther is based on the young Goethe’s semi-autobiographical epistolary novel which tells of a young artist’s thwarted love for a simple country girl who is already engaged. First performed in Vienna in 1892, it is audibly a product of that time. You can hear the predominant influence of Wagner in piquant unresolved dissonances, suggestive of a fleeter-footed, gallic Tristan with added harps. The sheer depth and splendour of the music is what makes a potentially risible narrative work so gloriously: it is superbly paced and always entertaining. And Opera North’s first stab at it since 1982 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For my money, Andy Parsons is by some distance the best panellist on BBC2’s Mock the Week - not that you would know it from the editing, which appears to be in thrall to that shouty Scottish bloke. Parsons is quick, witty, clever and has a command of current affairs that only MTW host Dara O Briain can match. What a pleasure, then, to see him live, commanding the audience’s rapt and thoroughly entertained attention in a show that lasted more than two hours, but which just flew by.Parsons, with his shaven head and Estuary vowels, could be mistaken for a London cabbie but is in fact a Read more ...
anne.billson
The trailer for Farewell - released in Paris this week - was so dull I nearly didn't bother to go and see the film. The problem with selling Cold War thrillers to the masses is that realistic spy movies have little truck with trailer-friendly stunts, explosions and one-liners. But as any reader of Le Carré knows, the world of espionage is a world of smoke and mirrors, where no-one is who they appear to be, and where cynicism and expediency rub shoulders with slow-burning paranoia. In the right hands, these ingredients can have you on the edge of your seat, and fortunately for us, the hands of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“He’s a naughty lad, isn’t he?” said an elderly lady to her husband as they left Julian Clary’s show, Lord of the Mince, which had numerous references to gay sexual practices. The remark wasn’t made in anger, mind, but with a smile on both their faces - and that’s a clue as to why Clary gets away with some unbelievably smutty material. As with many a camp gay comic, from Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson to, more recently, Graham Norton and Paul O’Grady, the British public just love him.Clary’s fans fall, I imagine, into two distinct categories; those who know him as a comic, and those who Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dinosaur Jr never change. Formed in 1984, the trio added a heavy dose of rock classicism to the then-current sound of US hardcore, inadvertently inventing grunge in the process. Since then, members have come and gone around lead singer/guitarist J Mascis – eventually returning in 2005 to their original lineup featuring Lou Barlow (also leader of Sebadoh and Folk Implosion) on bass and “Murph” on drums – and the Mascis has calmly watched scenes come and go.Hardcore, grunge, nu-metal and emo all rose and fell, but Dinosaur Jr just kept on keeping on with their formula of Mascis's plaintively- Read more ...
james.woodall
Bertolt Brecht was probably made for them: Deborah Warner directing Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage and her Children is as desirable a coupling, surely, as the Warner-Shaw Richard II or Happy Days, both immensely satisfying showcases for the director's imaginative reach and the actress's fabled versatility. Brecht's saga of the Thirty Years' War demands a challenging cross between Shakespeare's rich historical dramaturgy and Beckett's relentless density; so the must-see urgency of the German-speaking world's best-known play at the Olivier by two such - well, is it rude to call them veterans? - Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The departure from the Oval Office of George W Bush was a catalyst for much street festivity over the water, for inappropriate hugging of strangers and random multi-ethnic high-fiving. Of course whole tranches of the all-American demographic were somehow able to contain their excitement at the coming of Obama – among them oil profiteers, health insurers, people whose recreation includes shooting other people in the head. But none mourn Dubya like American comedians. And no American comedian mourns him more than Rich Hall. There aren’t so many jokes in the audacity of hope.So where does a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A modern choreographer has arrived when he gets to run two companies in parallel, the institution that appoints him director, and - as a sort of personal couture line - his own group. Wayne McGregor does it with the Royal Ballet and his Random Dance, now it’s Rafael Bonachela who took on Sydney Dance Company at the end of last year, while retaining his own Bonachela Dance Company at the South Bank Centre. Going by last night, I don't think living a bi-hemispheric existence is aiding his powers to entertain.Bonachela's talent is slim - nice, but slim. A decade ago it was interesting to see him Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
David Mitchell’s smarty-pants TV panel show ubiquity – over-exposure even by Stephen Fry’s standards - may have started eroding the goodwill built up over five series of Peep Show, but all is forgiven once he’s safely re-garbed in the horribly plausible, drab office-wear of nerdish flatmate Mark. It’s difficult to imagine any other comic actor giving quite the same defeated peevishness to the line: “A new boiler... surely the least enjoyable way to spend a thousand pounds.”The gag belongs of course not to Mitchell but to Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the writers who have worked miracles to Read more ...